Suzanne, how dare you add to her nightmares.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/prevention-now/201805/victims-sexual-abuse-face-lifetime-costly-problems
Healing from Trauma
Asking Victims THIS:
Asking questions which help someone think is usually better than telling them what they should do. Are you asking enough questions?
Never be AFRAID to GET HELP – here’s why:
https://themighty.com/u/danpierce/content/5cd720520c144c00e91c48ea/
When it comes to getting the help you need, what is your biggest challenge?
- The will to seek for help
- fear of ridicule
- telling the truth
- Accepting the help
- Admitting that my constant fluctuations of emotions was not normal or healthy. Admittance was my biggest hurdle
- Feeling like I deserve to even ask
- Connecting with the therapist, if I feel like someone is judging or I’m not comfortable I will not open up, surprisingly I got lucky. I just started seeing one and they paired me up with someone who I feel comfortable with
- Knowing when exactly to ask for help and how to do it. I only asked for help once when I already couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t too late but I suffered for a long time because I didn’t know how to ask
It’s ok to have Healthy Boundaries and tell someone, “You are not in danger. Let me encourage you to seek professional help.”
“That’s a horrible story. Unfortunately, we know that your story might need to be clarified a bit. Right now, our organization would like to offer you a list of therapists that can help with post abused situations like yours.”
“I understand that you really want us to believe your story is truthful. We’ve also pulled public record and realize that you might need some professional help to remind you of the legal ramifications of filing a false report and making a hoax claim against a religious organization. For that reason, we’d like to offer you the names of three highly skilled therapists here locally that can help your specific scenario. Would you like us to go ahead and help you schedule your first appointment?”
Always recognize that the individual has a deep, Deep, DEEP need for attention. And, once you realize that the person’s claim isn’t quite adding up, you’ve got to position yourself in a way that protects your organization, your organizations integrity while also helping the individual as well.
You do not want to be in the position of toxic enabling or ‘giving a drunk a drink’. Simultaneously though, you do want to get the person the CORRECT help that they are wanting.
When you’ve got someone who is consistently pulling in fears from social media, someone who is consistently pulling in fears from an advocacy group, consistently pulling in fears from their peer group….. You do NOT want to enable that.
That person needs proper help.
Painting every person’s situation with a broad stroke of a paintbrush never works.
Every person’s situation is 100% unique to them. Never become complacent to think that one person’s story does not have an element of fear, fraud, shame, or hesitation to get the help that they need.
Remember that it’s YOUR job to help that specific person in their specific situation get the right help that they need.
An Abusive Mindset & A Broken Arm: What’s the Difference?
What would happen if you treated an abused mind in the same manner as you would a broken arm?
A substantial number of social issues, mental health issues, cognitive deficiencies, and poorly portrayed false victim scenarios could very well be avoided if we just simply take into account that:
Things that are in the mind need to be resolved with very similar methods as we would do with things that are visually seen
Mental Health issues would never be ignored if all our brains were out in the open. If there was not a race, a social status, or a gender assigned to a behavior, and it was simply seen for what-it-is, how would we handle it differently?
A social cause is good, but what would happen if we took the minds, words, and actions of the accuser and put it out where everyone could very clearly visually see things clearer?
If you see someone with a broken arm would you:
- Enable them to continually walk around with the broken arm or would you encourage them to go to the hospital and get help?
- See if their race is similar before encouraging them to get help?
- Determine if their bone was broken by someone of the “similar gender which you may not like”?
- Find a person to blame for the broken arm first, then offer to give them a ride to the hospital?
- Would you dismiss their broken arm as a fake claim or encourage them to go to a hospital to get an X-Ray to validate that their arm is -indeed- broken?
When an abused person’s mind is thoughtfully considered and mirrored to an example like a broken arm, things become a bit clearer (even though it is an example).
After a person has been through abuse, let’s make one thing very clear: Someone has indeed broken something in that person’s mind. In the very soul of a person who has been through abuse, someone else has taken an innocent loving blank slate of a mind, and re-written that person’s acceptance of a loving and functional mind and broken it.
So why is it that too many times, people will take a broken soul and handle it inappropriately?
Stay with the analogy for a second here…..
Why would a person, church, group or organization say, “Hold up your broken arm for all the world to see. No don’t worry about getting help, that would mean that we don’t have any more ‘broken arm’ claims to tout.” That wouldn’t make much sense. Yet we see it happen all the time:
Keep being a victim. Claim that you’re a courageous survivor by stating your victim status louder. Please let us use your broken soul as a status symbol so we can attract others.
That’s not how to help someone with a (metaphorical) broken arm. Yet for some reason, we have social tweeder book tube posts and ’cause’ type-of movements that enable a ‘broken soul’ to quickly and easily find enablers that will empower them to continue walking around with the broken arm.
That’s not good.
Instead of saying to a person who has been through abuse, “We need to get you to a hospital, get your X-Ray done to verify & validate the extent of your ‘broken arm’.” We see, all too often, that anyone can simply claim, “My arm is broken” and then suddenly people will rush in, forget about getting that person to an actual hospital where actually trained professionals can help, validation tests (like an X-Ray for example) could be done, the broken arm reset to healthy parameters, a cast put on the broken arm to hold it as it heals, and proper follow up can be done with the broken arm.
Replacing all of that seems to be this vigilante style of social claims, and baseless statements followed by anyone with a hero complex or an enabler modality who will come in and forsake all common sense to help the person heal.
Instead, thinking something like: Let’s see what we can do to file a false police report. Let’s see if we can run to the local church and think of some rhetoric like how horribly ripped from the tendons your arm is & how it was mauled by a bear, then a vicious dog, and your broken arm was then ran through a cheese grater and run over by a pack of angry wolf sledding dogs (all male of course) & that your arm was then taken and stolen by the evil lords of the patriarch and then (hold on lemme check my tweeder book chat texts to see what else we can claim for you) then the broken arm was vaporized by the flat earth people and ……………..
Hold on.
This person has a broken arm. Why not take them to the hospital, encourage them to get examined by a medical professional, get an X-Ray from someone who has knowledge on how to correctly administer and run the X-Ray machine, remind them to have the bone set correctly by a trained medical person, get the cast on it, and ask them if they have follow the doctor’s advice and discharge orders.
Why does it seem that it sometimes becomes an issue of
- So-and-so broke this person’s arm. Therefore anyone resembling so-and-so, must be an arm breaker!
- This person had their arm broken by someone decades ago. Let’s pretend that someone else additional broke their arm. Let’s pretend that someone additional broke their arm again. Oh hey look, there’s another person, let’s say that they broke the person’s arm as well.
And, it becomes this vicious cycle of people using other people to enable some cause-based dialogue. People then develop a learned behavior of “ok, I can garner attention if I learn what to say that’ll make folks think my arm is broken as well”
That’s not how you would heal a broken arm, so why should it be how we heal a broken and abused soul?
Stop Getting Your Button Stimulated
You don’t stop the lie. You stop the enabling.
Reinforcing a pattern of lies is like a two way street.
You don’t have a problem on a one way street where someone tells a lie.
Your goal is to stop the reinforcement of the lie.
You have to be the more mature individual in the relationship and say, “I will not reinforce or shore up your claim. It is a lie. There is a pattern of lies. Through various avenues those lies have been recorded, documented, videod, screenshotted, verified to be lies, and I will not enable that type of behavior. I will not give you any type of dopamine releasing satisfaction of enabling that lie. Feel free to lie, but you are not allowed to do that to me.”
You see when you stop the positive reinforcement of the lie, then that puts the other person in the position of really finding out if they are going to continue the lie or actually stop the behavior in-and-of-themself.
When a pigeon is given a blue dot to peck and they receive tasty treats, the bird will continually peck the blue dot to receive that reward over and over and over again.
Can you stop the bird from pecking the blue dot? The ‘bird’ in this scenario being a victimhood claimant who repetitiously claims a lie which is not true.
The bird yelling The sky is falling the sky is falling is NOT your concern.
Your concern should be releasing those tasty treats of enabling to the person. You control you, remember?
Watch the cause / effect relationship here:
What happens when you stop releasing those tasty treats to the bird each time they peck the blue button?
You’re not stopping the bird from the blue-button-pecking-behavior. You’re stopping the ENABLING of the reward for the inappropriate behavior.
When you stop feeding the bad behavior, then the bird/person has to come to a choice:
Do I keep pecking this same blue button to find some tasty rewards?
Does the bird/person then go on to find another ‘blue button’ somewhere so that they can peck on that to see if tasty rewards are the effect?
Does the person simply realize that ‘pecking a blue button’ (or the bad behavior) will no longer result in receiving the ‘tasty treats’ (the enabling of the victim hood status).
Those three are all scenarios that are dependent on the “other” person.
Whatever they should choose to do is their choice.
They can go on to find another avenue to claim and holler that the sky is falling the sky is falling- until the person finds someone else who will listen to them.
They can simply stop the undesired and inappropriate behavior of claiming things that are not true.
But those choice will only come when you stop enticing, enabling, and reinforcing the wrong behavior.
Since people love to play the victim role, it’s not up to them to stop. It becomes a habitual addiction that they sometimes can NOT keep within their own control. Put bluntly – they can not STOP themselves.
It is up to you to stop ENABLING.
You tell the other person that you will not be the one who enables a false claim. You will not be the person who calls the police, lies to the police, then collects other ‘birds’ to reinforce the bad behavior in a whining protest when the “tasty treats” don’t appear. You will not be part of a church where the pastor has surrounded himself with those willing to ‘peck blue lights’ until they find a satsifactory reward for themselves and for the church. You will not participate in any spreading of lies to find others by saying, “Hey everyone: The trick is to find a blue light and peck on it until you get a pleasureable reward. Everyone, leave now – go quickly – find all the blue lights you can and just keep pecking away until magic rewards show up.”
That’s not good. It’s not smart. It doesn’t work. And, lest we forget, making false claims is not only illegal, but highly damaging to real victims, and taking away from the integrtiy of the person and any organizations, churches, non-profits, and community causes which blindly enable.
When you validate before you escalate (healthy boundaries) you then protect the individual / church / organization / whomever… from several things:
They themselves / church .org whomever / will not be at risk of losing their own integrity. + the individual or group of individuals then realizes that they can not receive blind enabling (which contradicts all factual reality) by simply pushing your buttons.
The Trap of Reinforcing A Lie
Be it for a paranoid delusional condition or someone simply wanting to start drama, the second you reinforce a lie, you have just subjected yourself to a trap.
The only way out of that trap is then to tell the truth.
Pretty simple concept right?
What happens when someone makes a claim, and that claim turns out to be false?
You can then identify that person’s claim as a lie.
Now, what happens if you reinforce that lie?
Instead of having healthy boundaries or taking any corrective actions on your part or on behalf of your organization, church or community – you simply do nothing with that person’s lie.
Knowingly!
You’re now stuck in a trap.
In order to undo that lie, you now have a choice: Either you tell the truth or you add another lie on top of it.
Take the case of the pastor who enables a lie from a ‘damsel in distress’. Once she has lied once, the smartest thing to do is to take corrective action and set some type of boundaries for that individual.
So what happens when the pastor simply buries his head in the sand and does nothing in regards to this person?
The next time she comes back to him, she’s now labelled herself an ‘advocate’. However, the pastor didn’t do anything the first time she lied.
Now, he’s got to bury his head in the sand even deeper and tolerate the liar.
The pastor has given the individual a learned behavior that it’s ok to lie.
The liars lie is now tolerated.
The effect of being able to discern the truth is now starting to wear off on the pastor.
Now the person comes to the pastor again bolstering that the sky is falling.
At some point here, the pastor has been told over and over and over again that the individual is lying, the pastor has seen screenshots of the person lying in chats and texts, and the pastor’s staff has even seen the individual lying to police.
But, the pastor has now established a pattern.
Knowingly or inadvertently, the pastor has now established that he will blindly and purposefully reinforce the person’s lie.
What happens if this behavioral pattern continues for months and months then those months turn into years and years?
The person who lied isn’t necessarily the one responsible although that is a problem.
It’s the one who enables the lie who now becomes responsible.
The person who has enabled the lie has now reinforced the person’s capacity to lie some more – and the cycle continues & continues & continues.
So what does the pastor do now?
At this point he’s now in a trap of his own doing.
The only way out is to tell the truth.
However, telling the truth now presents a really big problem.
It’s the same problematic cycle that plagues any organization, non-profit, or church.
The second you decide to stop enabling the liar, you’ve now exposed that person’s integrity for all their prior claims. And it becomes harder and harder and harder to know how to react and have those boundaries or exercise any type of corrective action.
That moment that the lies become too much to handle, what does one do?
It’s a bit like feeding the neighborhood cat over and over and over again only to find that the neighborhood cat has fleas & has now infected your dog, your kids bedding, the house’s carpet, your own cat, and now the fleas are all over your own house.
Once Pastor Rick finds out that he has surrounded himself with people willing to liie to him, what is he going to do?
Here’s Katy Reames (a member of Pathway’s safety squad lying to police)
Here’s Adrianne lying to our local Burleson Police Department
Here’s Cleburne Administrative Lieutenant Shane NinjaCop Wickson Pathway Church’s Safety Squad leader appointed by Rick Owens lying to police
How many other times has this happened?
How many years has Shane NinjaCop Wickson been the head of Pathway’s Safety Squad?
So how many other times has Shane NinjaCop Wickson been put in charge of covering up for someone else’s lie?
Why is Pathway’s Pastor Rick Owens blessing certain people’s actions which are a blatant lie?
What other acts is Pathway Church willing to hide?
Why is there a pattern of dismissing blatant things that happen and replacing them with one person after another person who enables a lie?
How many years has the Reames family been manipulating reality into lies to cover for other members of the church?
Since Pastor Rick decided to appoint exactly and specifically whomever he wants to Pathway’s Safety Squad, why did he choose such specific people?
How many more times is this pattern going to happen?
It’s a bit too late to say, No I didn’t do it
There’s too much evidence that is literally time & date stamped showing that repeating and covering up others lies has already been done.
It’s too late for the church to say, No that’s not what happened. Here let us think up another lie to cover the first one. Quick, get the squad together and let’s get one of them to lie again.
It’s too late for that to happen. Rick has already lied. Shane (Pathway Church’s Head of “security”) has already lied. Katy has already lied.
Those are not backwards fillable lies that anyone can deny. Those are real facts, with real people recording reality, police records, dispatch calls, and more.
It’s not possible for Pathway Church to go backwards. Well, it is possible for them to add another lie to cover another lie to cover for a liar to cover for another liar.
But it’s not possible for them to go backwards and say, “Nope. We didn’t validate Ms. Conaway’s violation of the Judge’s Court Served Restraining Order.”
Nor is it possible for Pathway to say, “No. We would never knowingly & blatantly carefully and selectively choose to have known liars on our Safety Team. That would never happen.” It’s too late for that type of response.
It’s already done.
The fleas have already infected the house.
A few tips on reading people
Level of self awareness
Notice when you’re forming an opinion. At that point in your perception, stop for a second. Think for a second about your own level of self awareness.
Are you holding your own level of cognitive bias in check. Are you keeping what-happened to you before in control.
Are you projecting something that happened to you onto that other person because they have a similar characteristic. Maybe that person is a similar gender. Perhaps that person talks with a smile all the time. Maybe that person is wearing a low cut blouse or a suit.
Don’t ever project or associate one characteristic of a person with another.
Let’s do an example:
Bernie Madoff wore a suit. Are all people wearing a suit financial criminal masterminds? No.
My great uncle wore a uniform and a badge and has worked some of the most incredible security missions for international countries. Are all people in uniform good? No.
Most cops make great situations in every environment that they are in. Some cops get too caught up in the moment and let adrenaline alter their perspective and decisions.
When you’re listening to a person, always keep a level head, stay objective, and keep your self awareness in check.
Mentally stop yourself from forming a perspective and framing that person in a false narrative.
Do not ever project something positive or negative from one person onto someone else.
Every person should be judged, held accountable, and seen for who they actually are.
No one person can acquire the characteristics of someone else which you might not like simply because it’s more convenient for your mind to form an easy opinion.
There is not one specific gender which can be responsible for everyone else of that gender. (For the #YesAllMen crowd, this one is for you) There’s not one man who should ever allow your mind to form an opinion on all men.
Guys: Likewise there is not one or two ladies who should let your mind form an opinion of all women. No, not ‘all women lie’. Some ladies tell the truth.
It is your job to make sure that you control your own mind.
You need to stay in control of your own thoughts.
You need to keep your own cognitive bias in check.
You are in charge of your own perception.
Don’t ever let your perception of one person develop blinders because of someone else.
That’s letting an external source control your ability to read that person.
You wouldn’t want someone walking up to you and forcing you to wear green tinted glasses that makes everything you see look a shade or tint of green, right?
Well, that is exactly what happens when you let your perception and clarity become clouded.
You are letting some other event dictate your perception of this event.
You are letting some other person decide your ability to read this person.
Pay special attention to yourself, and your mind’s thoughts.
As soon as you begin forming an opinion of that person, reel it back in and keep your objectivity and perception absolutely crystal clear so that you can read that person clearly.
Image Management is Key for some
Really interesting article I found while Google-ing about “How to assess a rumor vs threat”
Most of this article really reminded me of Pathway Church, but looking at other news articles, see other church cover ups, thinking about some of the older pastors, and even some of the past events at Pathway Church, it’s really interesting to see, read and fully understand that the appearance of Image Management really does exist in almost each and every one of these scenarios – the key similarities in all of these scenarios are really interesting.
Here’s some interesting notable lines from the article:
When our image or reputation is threatened, we are driven to alleviate the problem.
image repair strategies are: denial, evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification. Denial strategy involves denying the offense took place or denying that he or she performed the offensive action. The evading responsibility strategy involves four variants: scapegoat by claiming provocation, defeasibility by pleading lack of information, by claiming the offense as an accident, and by claiming the offense may be justifiable. Reducing offensiveness strategy tries to reduce the level of negative feelings experienced by the audience by bolstering, minimizing the offense, and by placing the offense in a different context. Corrective action strategy promises to correct the problem that may have caused the offense. Mortification strategy involves an outright apology, admitted responsibility, and a request for forgiveness
Image is usually determined by the stakeholders’ and publics’ perceptions of the organization or brand as a result of words or actions of that organization or brand. An organization’s reputation is normally damaged or threatened when the organization is held 5 accountable for an undesirable event.
The study lists Benoit’s five image repair strategies as denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification. A communicator can use denial as simple denial by claiming it did not perform the act, or just shift blame saying another party is responsible (Holtzhausen & Roberts, 2009). One can use evasion to argue that the critical action was provoked, argue defeasibility due to lack of information or ability, claim it was an accident or claim good intentions. Communicators can reduce offensiveness by bolstering and stressing its good traits, minimization, differentiation by pointing out similar issues by another organization that may be more offensive, transcendence, attacking the accuser or compensating the victim. Corrective action offers a plan to solve or prevent a problem. Finally, mortification is basically being apologetic. The study also touches on contingency theory as it relates to strategic intent and complexity.
According to the inoculation theory, stealing thunder offers organizations the opportunity to warn stakeholders about an upcoming attack, and inoculate them with a weaker version of the attack. The change of meaning hypothesis on the other hand proposes that when organizations reveal negative information, stakeholders will attempt to reconcile the apparent paradox by changing the meaning of the disclosure in order to make it consistent with their existing beliefs about the organization. Other possible explanations that have received attention are the framing hypothesis, according to which an ex-ante crisis timing strategy works because it allows organizations to frame the crisis in their own terms and downplay its severity, and the commodity theory, according to which an external attack loses its value after an organization has self-disclosed the same information first.”
HOLY CRAPPERS, I HAD NO CLUE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ACTUALLY EXISTED 😉 Jeeze, this reminds me of Ms. Conaway’s daily life, and looking back over all the actions from Rick to Katy to Shane to Kevin bugging my sister & brother-in-law at the softball fields….. this all seems to fall into place.
Who the hell ever knew there were manuals on managing bullsh!t like this. Apparently this was this dudes Graduate Thesis?
Wow.
Vegas doesn’t have MIRRORS
Watching a documentary on why Vegas doesn’t have mirrors.
It reminds people of the reality of who they actually are and not the illusion of who they want to be.
Visually people can see, “Oh I’m fat. I’m outta shape. My hair doesn’t look right. My boobs aren’t perky enough…..”
Mirrors HUMANIZE our perception.
And that’s not what the casinos want. That’s never what the casinos want!
2 to 3 billion dollars in wages EACH YEAR are processed through slot machines alone!
Having mirrors reminds people of their humanity. Their own face looking at their ….own face, is what casinos do not want.
So, what does that have to do with the experience at Pathway Church?
What does Vegas casinos have to do with churches, pastors, and perception?
Sometimes, it’s not really desirable for Rick Owens, or your own pastor, the pastor at your friend’s church, nor anyone else at a church to have a mirror shown to them.
It’s the same casino style psychology.
Once the human nature is exposed, sometimes the desire is to double down. The nature is to go “all in” on the illusion.
Is holding up a “mirror” to Pathway Church’s safety team really what they want?
Probably not.
Is looking in a “mirror” what church leadership really wants to look at once they’ve been “caught”?
Well, sometimes the answer is NO.