Systemic Personal Boundary Violations

Institutionalized Invasions of Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Energetic Space

Introduction

In part one, we explored the basic concepts of personal boundaries, and violations or impingements of these:

Personal Boundaries and Their Violations

The following quote is from the summary of part one.

“We have seen that early life experiences determine whether we have healthy, compromised, or non-existent personal boundaries as adults. Healthy personal boundaries need to be taught or role-modelled during childhood, but can still be built and constructed in later life, through healing trauma. Environmental failures in childhood, such as abuse, neglect, or inappropriate parenting or education systems, set us up to more likely be both victims of abuse, and abusers of others, as adults, and also dramatically increases our risk of eventually manifesting symptoms of chronic illnesses.”

In this follow up, we now apply what we have learned to the societal and cultural levels. In other words, we consider how all this scales up to the institutional levels.

The proposition I will attempt to lay out is that we are currently caught in a nasty feedback cycle, in which the way our institutions (governments, schools, universities, media, corporations, healthcare, and so forth) are behaving, is not only creating a cohort of people with compromised, or non-existent, personal boundaries, but that the institutions themselves have become self-selecting of the worst features in adults without intact boundaries, created by childhood abuses*, who are then in turn corrupting further the institutions they work in, creating evermore abusive systems, dysregulating further the development of the next generations of kids, producing people with ever more compromised personal boundaries.

*Note: as, in part one, herein and throughout the term “abuse” has a very general meaning, covering neglect, abandonment, physical or emotional distancing by caregivers, to more direct physical, verbal, emotional, sexual or spiritual abuse, and forms of energy vampirism.

Self-Esteem Vs Other-Esteem, and Superiority Complex

To begin, we need to understand how folks who’s personal boundaries were damaged during development, manifest in the world as adults. We turn once again to Pia Mellody’s short article “Co-dependence: The 5 Core Symptoms”, from which the quotes below are taken.

First, we consider how people with healthy, and intact personal boundaries present in the world.

“Healthy self-esteem is created within an individual who knows that he has inherent worth that is equal to others. It cannot be altered by his failings or strengths, which I call a person’s humanity. Parents who are able to affirm, nurture and set limits for their children without disempowering or falsely empowering them create children who can functionally esteem themselves. When negative events occur, a person with healthy self-esteem does not question his or her own worth or value. Children reared in a loving, nurturing environment learn to esteem themselves by being functionally esteemed by their parents/caregivers.”

Next, we consider one of the possible outcomes for an adult person who has non-existent or compromised personal boundaries due to failings in the developmental environment.

“[This] individual relies on others to determine their worth or gets it from comparing themself to others, so their self-esteem fluctuates between feeling worthless and better than… it is not [really] self-esteem. It is better defined as ‘other-esteem’. It is based on external things – how they look, who they know, how large their salary is, how well their children perform, the degrees they have earned or how well they perform activities. The difficulty with other-esteem is that its source is outside of the person [beyond their control] and thus vulnerable to [manipulation].”

Let us call this type of manifestation as “low self-esteem”. At the other extreme is a person who develops a “superiority complex”.

“The other extreme is arrogance and grandiosity. The person believes that he or she is above or better than other people. In some family systems, children are taught to see others' mistakes and to find fault with others. They tend to believe that they are superior to others. They may also be excessively shamed by their caregivers but learn that feeling superior to others helps them to feel better about themselves. A type of dysfunctional family that significantly affects self-esteem teaches children that they are superior to other people, giving them a false sense of power. In these families, the children are treated as if they can do no wrong.”

This also all correlates well with the Developmental Trauma literature, especially Dr Laurence Heller’s “Survival Styles”. In particular, the “Autonomy Style” [i.e. without autonomy] corresponds closely with Pia Mellody’s folks with “low-self esteem”, and the “Trust Style” [i.e. without trust] with folks with a superiority complex.

In adult relationships, those with superiority complex and those with low self-esteem, tend to seek each other out. The resulting relationships are controlling, abusive, toxic, operate on gas-lighting and highly damaging to both.

Furthermore, Mary C. Lamia writes extensively about a “White Knight Syndrome”, where folks with damaged boundaries seek out others who they can “save”:

“a compulsive need to be the rescuer in an intimate relationship originating from early life experiences that left the white knight feeling damaged, guilty, shamed, or afraid!”

The Creation of a Low-Self Esteem Cohort

With the knowledge I have gleaned about developmental issues, I am quite scathing and upset about the general state of the education system, and some parenting methods, as being, possibly intentionally, highly disruptive to the development of healthy personal boundaries of children.

In the last few years, it seems to me that this situation has apparently gone from bad to worse. This includes the rise of helicopter, or over-protective, over-indulgent parenting, as explored in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”. However, the state school education and the medical systems now seem to be purposefully designed to strip any vestige of kids’ personal boundaries away, leaving them with low self-esteem, and open for abuse, control and victimization in later life.

In particular, I personally feel very strongly about the current trends and fashions in some of our educational, medical and parenting systems, which:

• tell some kids, based on immutable characteristics, that they are victims, that enemies are everywhere, and they can not be safe in the world;

• tell other kids, with others immutable characteristics, that they are irredeemably toxic, and bear the guilt and the blame for the sins of their forefathers;

• sexualize kids, putting them in contact with sexually explicit material, and normalize paedophilia;

• pharmaceutically and surgically medicalize kids, and increasingly pathologize normal childhood behaviours;

• affirm the feelings that they are not safe in their own bodies, and tells them that there is indeed something wrong with their body [recall from part one that “not feeling safe in ones own body” is a cardinal sign of a damaged personal boundary];

• intentionally cause fear in the children, and then normalize and affirm the unprecedented anxiety and depression caused by the apocalyptic narratives they are bombarded with;

• project and transfer the negative emotions of adults on to the children;

• collect biometric data, and keep digital records of “good” and “bad” behaviour, which may follow them through life, through the rise of “EdTech” systems;

• prioritize ideological niceties over safe-guarding concerns;

• gaslight children and parents by pretending that all this is not happening.

In my view, these all meet the definitions from part one of gross violations of the physical, mental, emotional, and energetic personal spaces and boundaries of our children, and hence are objectively highly unethical and immoral, and therefore do indeed objectively constitute abuse. Since it is children this is being done to, these not only constitute violations of their personal space, but also disrupt and forestall the development of their healthy boundaries in the first place.

This will have consequences for the rest of their life, as this is not only setting them up to become both victims and abusers in the future, but also make them more prone to chronic illnesses in adulthood (see part one).

In so far as this is being deliberately done, and is devoid of love, I would describe this as evildoing.

This type of demoralizing “education” often continues at the college and university level.

Creating the Superiority Complex Cohort

I propose that our “higher” institutions, whether governments, non-governmental organizations like the World Economic Forum, unelected bureaucracies like the EU, or C-suites of large corporations, have become self-selecting of folks whose childhood experiences corrupted their healthy personal boundaries, in such a way that it left them as superiority complex types, i.e. those that term and think of themselves as the “elites”:

My Thoughts on the World Economic Forum

These folks tend to have to gone through a different educational route to the low-self esteem cohort, via private schools, and institutions like Eton, and then on to Oxbridge or Ivy League universities, which serve to re-enforce their superiority complex, or else they have managed to fake or claw their way up from more humble beginnings, enabled by the psychopathic tendencies their childhood experiences left them with.

This includes the “White Knight Syndrome” types, who have taken upon themselves to “save the world”. This is starkly exemplified by John Kerry’s speech at the recent Davos WEF meeting:

“When you start to think about it, it's pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. I mean, it's so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet.’”

The feelings of superiority, which recall manifests as arrogance and grandiosity, are on clear display in the contempt, disdain, and despite for the “ordinary” people, especially for the low-self esteem cohort, such as the explicit use of terms like “basket of deplorables”, “the unwashed masses”, “useless eaters”, or the name calling of any one who dares to disagree or disobey, using epithets like “conspiracy theorist”, “fascist”, “racist” and “misogynist”, etc.

The contempt also manifests in the increasingly brazen institutionalization of policies and norms, which the rest of society were not consulted about, and did not want, and indeed which harms their interests while benefiting those of the elites.

The Unhealthy Relationship

Just like at the individual level, where folks with low self-esteem and superiority complex have a tendency to seek each other out as intimate relationship partners, and negatively feed off each other via these highly toxic, damaging, controlling relationships, I see that the low self-esteem cohort and the superiority complex “elites” also negatively feed off of each other at the group level. In a way, they co-create, and need each other. The low self-esteem cohort’s need arises from learned helplessness and the dependence on the state that the “education” system left with, and the superiority complex elites need the low self-esteem folks for people to blame, control and feel superior about.

Controlling Behaviours

There are plenty of articles on the signs of controlling behaviour in adult relationships, which readily carry over to the relationships between the “elites” in the institutions and the down-trodden people. Indeed, controlling behaviours are now fully institutionalized in governmental “nudge” units, and psychological operations military units:

Secretive government units spied on British citizen’s speech.

Examples of controlling behaviours in toxic relationships from the psychology literature, which readily carry over to the social or culture levels of the relationship of the superiority complex and low self-esteem cohorts, include:

• isolating from family and friends [the powers that be, through the media, are constantly trying to sow division at every level of community];

• chronic criticism and evaluation;

• veiled or overt threats [fines and penalty notices, violence from police];

• making acceptance/caring conditional;

• keeping a scorecard [credit scores, medical records, criminal records, and the move towards social credit scores];

• using guilt as a tool;

• creating a debt or controlling the finances [the proposed Central Bank Digital Coupons are the ultimate expression of this at the institutional level];

• spying, snooping, and constant surveillance [!];

• presumption of a guilt until proven innocent;

• making feel small for beliefs [e.g. the attack on Christian values and beliefs];

• unwillingness to hear point of view [the rising tide of censorship, silencing, and labelling everything which doesn’t fit the narrative as as “dis/mis/mal-information”, “conspiracy theory”, “far right”, “racist”, etc.]

• pushing towards unhealthy behaviours/addictions [hooking people on pharmaceuticals, junk food, porn, gambling, social media];

• requiring permission or license to do something [in the UK, we need a license to just watch TV or to go fishing!].

The Well Adjusted Cohort

So what can we do? There are no easy answers, especially when society is already stuck in such ingrained feedback loops of negatively. I think, as usual, the first step is awareness and education. We want to:

• raise awareness of what healthy personal boundaries, and what violations or invasions of these, look like;

• inform folks who are being abused that boundary violations do indeed constitute abuse, and help others to understand when they are being abused or victimized;

• call out abuse and abusers for what they are, especially systemic abuse arising at the institutional level;

• show how these are objectively unethical and immoral, and hence broken, systems.

My hope is that this series of posts is somewhat helpful in this regard of raising awareness.

We then need to somehow grow the “squeezed middle” of folks with healthy personal boundaries, those with intact self-esteem, either through encouraging or advocating for parenting and education styles which prioritize the development of intact personal boundaries, or via appropriate trauma healing tools with which adults can [re]build healthy personal boundaries later in life, and to provide encouragement and support to do the inner work required.

Those already with healthy personal boundaries and self-esteem could role model what this looks like more. This is especially the case in terms of saying “no”, setting limits, and not giving consent to the institutions, engaging in, and leading, civil disobedience and push-back, opting out, living life without requiring permission or license of the institutions, and holding to account, calling out, and making the superiority complex cohort answerable and responsible for their abuses.