Mind Over Mania

Note: This is an opinion piece and is not meant to be taken as official mental health advice.

There are a lot more traumatized people in society than we can account for. Ask any therapist or social worker, and they’d be more than likely to agree with that statement, likely due to the lack of resources society puts towards helping their fellow humans. Due to stigma and misunderstandings, it’s easy to miss how it relates to our day-to-day interactions with difficult people.

For the longest time, despite growing up around organizations like churches and charities claiming to help the greater good, I’d still witness plenty of people in those areas actively refusing to be kind, be selective in their treatment of others, and literally behave the opposite of what they preach in their spare time. Even worse still, I consistently see leadership, both in professional and nonprofessional settings, spending more energy and effort into maintaining status and power than applying it towards problem solving, connecting or even self-awareness. Efforts to improve situations or seek repair after harm has been done get deflected and ignored. It’s patterns in society like this that have caused me to frequently self-isolate, quit jobs, and leave relationships.

This led me to ask: why the hell do so many people get away with their bullshit?

It stumped me for a long time. I always hear people talk about actions having consequences, but clearly, life doesn’t seem to work like that at all. No, in fact, there are plenty of societal examples of people who do great harm getting rewarded in spite of their behaviors. So when someone such as myself who comes in to challenge those behaviors for whatever reason, people like this don’t only dislike you – they despise you.

I began to notice patterns in these kinds of frustrating individuals.

Here are my thoughts on why people can lack accountability and why some people are physically incapable of it.

1. They can’t “hear” you.

As someone with PTSD, I completely relate to the experience of not being capable of processing others’ emotions and reality when presented with them. When you are emotionally and physically overwhelmed past the point of regular functionality, it is very difficult to see outside a lens of trauma. It took me years of healing to calm my nervous system down enough for me to be able to process thoughts better and observe how I was behaving in certain ways. I believe that in individuals who lack accountibility, most were more than likely harmed in such a way that fundamentally impacts how they relate to and trust others. It doesn’t matter what you say if that person can’t receive your message. I’ve used this analogy in my tarot readings before: if I say apple and they hear orange, communication alone isn’t the only problem at large to getting them to understand you.

2. They are connected through trauma and pain – not authenticity.

This is something I want to scream from the rooftops. So many relationships are driven by people’s traumas rather than the relationship itself. To someone who was raised by individuals who did not validate their pain, or worse, used harmful methods to get what they wanted, receiving authentic love and kindness feels like drinking gasoline. To them, I believe their nervous system only feels safe during familiar dynamics of abuse cycles. That’s why they crash out whenever you don’t “play their games.” They genuinely can’t recognize any alternative way to be and all the supressed emotions blow up on them. Until that person learns to recognize a healthier relationship with their body, they honestly can’t tell the difference between experiencing the trauma they faced with a person from their past and a neutral external party. Another thing is people often feel like the trauma needs to be something extreme like physical assualt to cause a person to react this way. In actuality, emotional abuse and neglect can be equally as damaging or even worse in the results it can have on an individual, especially when it’s consistently overlooked, undervalued, and no social repair occurs.

I don’t have the link to support the study behind that claim, but I undoubtably will make a post in the future to reference as I believe there are huge gaps in discussion everywhere about this important point in relational health and trauma.

3. Systems re-enacting and enabling their traumas and poor behavior.

We can discuss trauma healing and therapy all we want. The reality is, there are enough traumatized people out there not doing the work that thrive on unhealthy power dynamics, sabotage, and exploitation. So when well meaning people attempt to create change, once again, their traumas become reactivated. Get a group of people together with the same type of power and control related traumas and boom. You get a bunch of assholes who have no one to tell them no or mirror back their behavior. I’ve observed that a lot of people who lack accountibility have a cynical view of the world and genuinely believe there’s large masses of people out there lying to each other and scrambling to survive. It’s easier for them to believe than realizing they and their friends are the ones causing the pain of others and keeping themselves stuck. What typically breaks people free is often related to not getting their way or a deep personal loss leading to transformation. That’s why direct consequences are crucial for setting boundaries and enforcing with them. That’s also why I think some of them can appear like they’re different people at different times. It all depends on the kind of trauma that gets activated and how frequently.

4. Having authority feels safer than the alternative.

People love power. Let’s face it. Being in charge feels good and has a lot of benefits. That said, the higher you go up the social ladder, the more people seem to worship you and listen to you, even regardless of what you actually do. To a person who is traumatized, lacking a sense of self, and is wounded, this social dynamic is incredibly enticing for self-soothing. As the old saying goes, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We want to feel successful and be liked by others. It’s part of being human. For traumatized people, it can be hard to recreate that feeling with others naturally. But get on a pedastal and wow a crowd or enforce a moral code that supports their warped ideals without objection? Piece of cake. As we said previously, traumatized people attract each other, so facing the unknown of socializing with others is a lot harder to sustain, especially when their behaviors as a result of trauma are frequently rejected. Rejection in a person can lead to feelings similar to their life being threatened. When people see the results of other abusing their power and it mirrors their own insecurities, it reinforces the idea that they need to be in charge in order to protect something of potential loss to them. That’s why peaceful resolution looks so scary to them. Not every human out there will comply and so it’s easier to remain closed off to connection all together.

5. They are unaware that what they fear the most is a piece of themselves.

Ultimately, this is what happens when a person never learns to recognize accountability in the first place. As children, we’re supposed to be taught that harming other people is bad and you will be punished if you do so to prevent further harm. When someone experiences punishments that go beyond justification, inconsistent reward/punishment dynamics, and lack of protection from abusive authority figures, people stop listening to what others say they should do and go with whatever their survival brain tells them is “real”. However, if that survival brain goes too far in it’s actions and there isn’t a healthy reconciliation process, that piece of their brain gets pushed further and further away from the rest of their psyche. (I’m basing my opinion based off what I know of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy model). They become unaware of their subconscious behavior as connecting to it reveals the pain associated with their experiences. That’s also where the lack of awareness comes in. If you aren’t even consciously aware of a subconsious part of you doing bad things, it’s easy to not feel bad about what you’re doing because you are already in a disconnected state. (If you want to see a great example of this, watch season 4 of Netflix’s series You.) As a result, the fear and trauma remains, but the connection to their own self creates a distortion that only gets challenged by consequences forcing awareness. That feeling of paranoia can often reflect unresolved trauma that takes self-awarness to identify. Again, if a person already doesn’t have a stable sense of self, it’s easy to identify their behaviors as neccesary and justifiable than register they are the ones responsible for the outcome of their actions.

Needless to say, the more we talk about mental health and its important role in toxic behavior, the more we can detach ourselves from situations and step into our own power when we can’t convince others to change. Our minds can be powerful palaces as much as prisons. The more we use them, we can see beyond problems and reach better resolutions.