As previously submitted, manipulators, are garbage human beings who seek meaningful gain, without meaningful sacrifice, they are cheats, liars and thieves attempting to rig the universe, or at least their own little part of it, to produce a prefered outcome, and everyone else be damned to pay the bill in their place.
None is more so manipulative against nature and humanity, than the oedipal mother, and no single trait betrays one so clearly for me, than the codependent mother. My exwife's mother, Angie, is one of the more manipulative and codependent personalities I have ever encountered. If I had been smarter, wiser or paying more attention at the time of meeting her, I might have been more hesentent in marrying her daughter, my now exwife Kristen, or more proactive in addressing the baggage that was dumped upon me when I did marry her.
In a codependent relationship, one or both parties, has become in part, or in whole, fully reliant upon the other for any and everything from validation, to moral guidance and even for decision making, but it is not limited to this, not by a long shot.
The most common dynamic that I personally have observed however, is more along the lines of one person becoming dependent upon the other for filling a role better suited for themselves, or another all together, thus relegating the other person to the role of something akin to an emotional tampon, or even host brain, or any other number of destructive and harmful things.
Born of an apparent failure to self-regulate, the dependent person becomes manipulative, exampling abusive tendencies, seeking to isolate the other person from others, reinforcing desired behavior with possibly inauthentic praise, with the derision of others within the targets life, relying very much on the stick and carrot method, many times leaning hard into one or the other, manifesting in undue and lavish rewards on the one end, and rampant unearned punishment on the other.
In the case of my exwife, she was and/or is closely connected to two other women, who example both ends of this behaviour, and it chills me from teeth to toes to realize that she has embraced both fully as normal and healthy, while rejecting my more authentic and less damaging efforts to the contrary, wholly under the pretext of abuse by way of an unreasonable and unsustainable if not impossible expectations as set forth by the two previously mentioned women, and their negatively charged opinions on men.
All of this, from the vapid example of her mother, to the well cloaked manipulation and isolation of her new so called "best friend" warped her perceptions (in equal measure with the SSRI's she gladly became addicted too) to the point that any and all aspects of my behaviour was now repulsive to her, and laid the groundwork for her choice of pretext for legal action, against myself and our marriage.
All ignoring the fact that my expectations for the marriage and the behaviour therein, never really changed all that much in tone, and effort if not in quality and time.
On the one side, her mother, childish, idealistic and naive selfish narcissist that she is, favored the stick, for any and all slights both real and imagined, and even for the slights and wrongs of other people. Ranting, berating, guilt trips, flippantly changing her commitments, going back on her word, and consistently outrageous yet repeatedly proven hollow threats abounded throughout my exwifes childhood and formative years, if even half of what Kristen told me is remotely true, and given my own personal interactions and observations of Angie, her mother, they are damned well more than half accurate.
The casual disregard for the impact one has on the world around them, to the point even of shock when such is blatantly pointed out to you, is one of the biggest and most obvious red flags for narcissism that I have personally come across. Another is the inability to see any wrong in your choices and actions to the point of blaming others for their reactions to you. And my exwifes mother displayed these behaviours almost constantly, to the point of having her in tears, crying her eyes out in the fetal position, and/or questioning why she was so despised by her own mother, on more than one occasion. And yet dearest mothers reactions to such, when she bothered to even register them, was damn near psychopathic, if only lacking any violence but not any passive-aggressive manifestations.
Needless to say, at one point, about half way through our marriage, I had more than a belly full of that, and finally confronted Angie over it. The result was a begrudging compliance with her previously promised commitment, which was then just as quickly rescinded in a flash of egotistical outrage at a simple misunderstood comment, not even meant for her.
The damage done by that event, was I think, one of a few pointedly catastrophic moments of utter betrayal that, in hindsight, likely did permanent damage to my exwifes frail psyche yet, and provoked one of the strongest emotive reactions I've ever had.
After that, I pushed to cut all ties with the woman, and, if I am honest, the family as a whole, to the point I even put a referendum on all contact between the two, barring any dialogue where I was not listening in or openly a part of the exchange for a long season.
I only wish I had done more to hold fast to such for longer, because that might have saved my marriage, or at least delayed the ending of it.
On the other side, "Libby" or Erinn as her given name was later found to be, all carrot, no stick, sweet honeyed words, gentle but robust encouragement, a pretty dusting of glitter over a spoon full of sugar laden poison.
"Progressive" one might say. Regressive, disdainful and selfish I say.
Any woman who would openly mock or degrade or undercut her partner, and more so if her partner is a man, will have zero qualms about talking all kinds of mad shit, true or not, about another woman's partner, all while disguising it as "just my opinion" or worse yet, "the fact of the matter is" fill in the blank, with whatever form or fashion of heavy handed anti-testosterone, post-modern feminist garbage and filth you could dare to conjure up or recall.
Either in long form, or short, be it gentle and subtle like a feather duster, or point blank brutal like a shotgun blast, the man, is the enemy, the oppressor, the abuser, the destroyer, the darkness, chaos and evil. Even if he is not, even if struggles and wars within himself day after day not to be, even if he risks his reputation his life, spends his time, gives up his vices, his wants and dreams for the betterment of others.
"Libby" was like a cancer in our marriage, benign at first, but soon, malignant, and then rampant, consuming and hording Kristen's attention away from me, leveraging circumstances and half baked ideas and pseudo intellectual drivel and hollow feel good pinterest posts and facebook wisdom against me.
Maybe she really does care, but is blind to her own selfish motivations, maybe it was all a game to her, a test of her skills and cunning, maybe it was an attempt to live vicariously through another, to see someone else get what you cannot. Maybe it was all of the above, or even something else.
A woman with a terrible relationship with her own mother, who holds her father or brothers or husband in disdain, who bemoans the loss of her freedom because she can't keep her dammn legs closed and now has crotch trophies that suck the youth and life from her, who despises or fears any sort of example of authentic masculinity, in all of its imperfections and necessity, is no one to put trust in.
How much less so when she is codependent, needing validation from another, who is maybe no better off than her.
What I find most ironic of all, is how starkly similar, Angie and Erinn are, and I don't just mean the darkly funny way they literally look and sound so much alike, but in the words they use, the passive-aggressive personalities, and the vile manipulations they use to get what they want, which is of course, at its core, what ALL females want, attention, and the fact that they are more than willing to tolerate BAD attention, as well as to give it, with little apparent care to the wider possible impact they have on others.
It goes back to selfishness, and the statistically higher levels of neuroticism females suffer from, and how that clashes within themselves with the overriding need for validation, and the genetic drive to take from others and produce something themselves.
But that is another thread of thought that requires a segway I don't actually have right now.
And more to the point, it is a premature transition away from this subject.
But the conclusion, follows after.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment