Once Abused, Always Abused

“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

There is an eternal and a crucial problem for the abused, recognized since antiquity. The problem is that anyone who has once been abused is from then on peculiarly vulnerable to falling under the control of another abuser. They have been preconditioned to it.

But what is the solution?

The common assumption is that you can prevent this by “going to a professional.”

But there is no reason why this should be so. In principle, professionals are just as likely to be abusers. This or another degree does not change that. In fact, abusive personalities tend to rise on the social totem pole, and so are probably more common in the professions.

A narcissist is going to be primarily interested in power and prestige. Being especially interested in these things, and bending all his or her efforts to achieve them, he is naturally more likely to get them. If you set out with a ticket for Milan, you are more likely to get to Milan, than if you set out for Rome.

Worse, the profession of psychiatrist or psychologist specifically has natural attractions for a narcissist. It gives you a constant fresh supply of vulnerable victims. So, more likely, going to a professional involves a greater risk of getting abused than going to the average anonymous Joe on Yonge Street, or to a self-help group. Or staying at home in bed.

Don’t believe me? Consider this: no other profession has stiffer protections in place to ensure the moral uprightness of its practitioners, or closer supervision by superiors, than the Catholic priesthood. Has this guaranteed against abuse?

Within self-help groups, there is also still a problem. The problem is that the symptoms of narcissism, which is to say, the typical abusive personality, are often similar to the symptoms of abuse. Both can appear as “depression” or “anxiety” as per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of North American psychiatrists. Current psychiatry cannot tell the difference, leading to disastrous mistreatments. Like giving anti-depressants to narcissists, with the effect of dulling the voice of conscience.

This is a problem for self-help groups as well: in any self-help group advertised as “for the depressed,” some participants are likely to be the abused, and some abusers. It is mixing the foxes with the hens.

Adult Children of Alcoholics, for example, ends up with two different “laundry lists” of matters needed to be attended to in one’s personality, and the two lists are reverse images of one another.

Big problem. A self-help or encounter group can thus easily become a bloody cockpit for bullying and abuse.

Here’s a proposed solution: narcissists fear the life of the mind. It could mean confronting their conscience. The abused crave the life of the mind: it is an escape from an abusive environment.

Accordingly, such encounter groups should concentrate on literary readings. They will be opaque, and seem irrelevant, to narcissists. They will likely get bored and leave. They will be entrancing, and meaningful, to true melancholics.

Improbable? Notice that it is exactly the strategy Jesus Christ used. That, he explains, is why he spoke in parables.