586. Jerks With Halos

586.  Jerks With Halos

In entry 381 I described Diego Rivera as a jerk with a halo.   He is just one specimen of many, and it is a pattern of very detrimental and unfavorable dynamics.

I consider people (usually men) as jerks with a halo, when they are accomplished or outstanding in some area, as artists, writers, scientists, actors, politicians or even as benefactors for many people, while they also inflict a lot of suffering upon persons close to them.   

Jerks are jerks, and the suffering of their victims is real and no halo seen by any third party does reduce this suffering, it only hides it in an unjustifiable way.
  
Accomplishments need to be evaluated by themselves, without any impact upon the subjective recognition of the magnitude of personal transgressions.   The harm done to the unfortunate victims is an unacceptable moral failure, this is independent of any coexisting achievements.   

Accomplishments do not exempt people from being responsible for what they do to others.  

But this is unfortunately not reality.   Instead, there is a general tendency to condone unacceptable, immoral and cruel behaviors in proportional accordance with the transgressor's fame due to his accomplishments.  By this fallacy of accepted compensation, someone can buy by his accomplishments the right to harm without consequences.

This fallacy is enhanced and perpetuated by any combination of several factors, which all lead to the underestimation of the harm done to the victims: 

1.   Women's apparent and alleged compliance when continuing to expose themselves to their plight.   
1.1.  Women are dependent upon the material support by the man, especially by raising children.   They would leave the jerk, if the could.  
1.2.  Women in asymmetrical relationships have got onesidedly emotionally attached to the jerk, who in return has an entitlement delusion.  His fallacy is his belief, that women exist for his convenience, his accomplishments justifying their commodification.  I described this in entry 268 (The Jerk Attachment Syndrome).

2.  The generalization of suggestive influences of religion, especially christianity, upon both the jerks and the victims.  The jerks with halos subjectively consider their accomplishment as their currency to buy the right to harm women. 

In religion, sin is believed to be compensatable by penitence, so that after having paid for the previous sin, there is no cognitive obstacle to prevent the next sin.  Replacing penitence by accomplishments is a fallacy, which is not very far fetched, considering the weirdness of the religious beliefs in themselves.
Thus jerks are not only haloed by others, but they also halo themselves by believing, that their accomplishments entitle them to privileges, even when the privileges harm others.  

Women allow men to harm them for the purpose of buying the reward after death with the currency of their forgiving the unforgivable and by their prolonged suffering .  

3.  Sometimes people feel a vague, fuzzy and unspecified need to improve themselves, but are uncertain, how to proceed.  When they discover persons, whom they do not know personally, but only by the presentation in their work and in the media, such persons are chosen as role models.   The nearer the role models appear to be perfect, the stronger the appeal to imitate them.  The successful imitation boosts the self-esteem and causes good feelings.  This motivates to maintain the idealization of the role model, even when it is not at all justified in the case of haloed jerks.   As a consequence, the idealization of such a role model is protected by the denial of unpleasant and dark sides.    The focus is restricted to the perception of the halo, while the jerk underneath is willfully overlooked.   

Seen from this perspective, many admired and famous men are in reality only jerks with halos.  

301. Literature: The Prototype of the Jerk - 1

Literature: The Prototype of the Jerk - 1
Often, while things are bad enough in real life, literature tops it with even worse examples.    I lately watched Shakespeare's play 'The Taming Of The Shrew'.    Years ago I have seen in a theater, and all I remember is the anger, that I felt.
Now I happened to find two versions of it, both obviously using the original text, but the adaptation and acting was quite different, so was the selection of the text used.   

1.  There is a very well made animated version made by the BBC, it is a cartoon appearing as if played by puppets.   
It is the sad story of a woman, Kathrina, who gets so much under a psychopath's ruthless power, that she not only is helpless under his domination, but her entire personality gets so much crippled, that she not only submits externally to her inferior role, but finally accepts it as appropriate for her.    
This is even worse than the Stockholm Syndrome and the Jerk Attachment Syndrome in entry 268.    In both syndromes, the victims gets in a paradox way attached to a jerk or a captor, but their sanity is at least as far preserved, that they are still aware, that they are the victims of an outrage.    Poor Kathrina in the play is in the end so brainwashed and mentally deformed, that she believes herself, that what had been done to her was to her own best.   She has not only been broken, but made believe to have been improved.    She is not herself any more.

The play was written more than 400 years ago, and set in a social situation, where the unlucky Kathrina had no chance to have any independent existence.    Not only her happiness and her subjective wellbeing, but her survival depended first on her father and then on the mercy of a husband.    Her father is a cruel brute, who merciless marries her off without even considering her consent.   His cruel decision to forbid the marriage of his younger daughter before Kathrina having been married has also divided and estranged the sisters.   Her sister wants her sacrifice for selfish reasons.    Kathrina is alone and has nobody to trust and to support her.   

The father marries her to a psychopath, who only wants the father's money and is not interested in Kathrina as a person.   She is a body for Petruccio, a commodity, an object to be used and abused at his convenience.  He values her not more than he values a dog or a horse, whose will he considers needs to broken.    Kathrina is not more than a piece of degraded and devalued merchandise traded between her father and Petruccio.   

Insensitive people think that this play is a comedy.   But even though it is superficially funny, in reality it is the tragedy of a broken destroyed life of a woman, who looses her dignity and ends as a  paradoxically happy doormat.    Maybe that was her only way of surviving the trauma of being married against her will to a psychopath.   She was married for life, in catholic Italy in those days, there was no way out for a woman from her plight, except maybe to escape to a convent.   

2.   Then I saw the movie from 1967 with Elizabeth Taylor.   That movie is unfortunately rather inconsistent.   In the beginning, Kathrina is presented as a weird and uncontrolled fury, who would even today be brought into therapy for anger management or even some more severe diagnosis.  
From the moment of the marriage on, she has become the unhappy intelligent woman with an independent spirit under the brutal domination of a jerk, similar to the other version.   Petruccio is presented a bit less cruel but still a dire fate for Kathrina, who seems to try to play the role of the pseudo-docile wife, as she is at the mercy of this psychopath and avoids anything, that would provoke more atrocities upon her.  
But the end does not fit, because the brainwashing into a deliberate doormat comes too abrupt and too sudden, and it is not clear, what caused it.   


No matter the divergent interpretations of the two versions, the play is psychologically dangerous, because emotional morons, jerks and other immature men are encouraged to become abusive.    The gist of the play is the message, that abuse succeeds.
The play feeds their dangerous delusion, that it is not only possible and acceptable to cruelly abuse a woman until she is broken and does not resist anymore to the life of a commodity, but even worse, that the woman in the end would be happy as a doormat.    If they get wrong ideas, that abuse is justified by the final acceptance of the victims, this encourages them to become abusers to real women.

Also interestingly enough, Kathrina is presented as if nobody would want to marry her.   The question, if maybe her father had caused an early death to his wife by his cruel treatment, and that Kathrina was justified in preferring not to marry to avoid the sad fate of her mother.   The play implicitly insinuates, that it is always beneficial for a woman to be married, even to a psychopath or a cruel jerk.   

After having written this far, I googled and found out, that there are quite a lot of other people also calling Petruccio a psychopath and an abuser and also explaining Kathrina's incomprehensible downfall as the Stockholm Syndrome.  As far as I have understood, these interpretations were based upon the text by Shakespeare, not upon any enacted interpretations.   Once again, I had my own ideas about the play, but they were too obvious to be original, others had them before me.      

294. The Effect of Bullying upon Love

The Effect of Bullying upon Love

When a man wants a woman to do something for him, no matter what it is, he has the choice between two principally different strategies.

1. He bullies her to do it using pressure, threat, anger, extortion or intimidation.
2. He treats her so well, that she cares and loves him enough to do it by her own good will.

The starting point for both strategies is the relationship deal, in which they have agreed to fulfill each other's needs.   

When the man's focus is selfish, then he chooses the first strategy.  His priority is to ascertain, that he gets his needs met by applying whatever power he has, be it physical strength, situational or financial advantage.   As far as he does give something back to the woman, he restricts it to just as little as he believes is enough to make her function.  

When the man's focus is based upon trust and appreciation, then he chooses the second strategy.   He makes efforts to earn the woman's love and care, he gives first, because he trusts her, that the more he gives, the more he will get in return.    With this strategy, love, attachment, bonding grows stronger over time.


Of course, no woman would consciously decide to become a selfish man's commodity, if she would notice, that this is his goal, before it is too late.   But there are reasons, why a woman can temporarily be in a relationship, where she is bullied.   

1. The man fulfills the woman's needs in one aspect, like sharing activities of traveling and attending cultural events.  His bullying does not drive her away immediately, because she attempts to put up with it, as long as her resilience lasts.
2. The man starts like a nice man as described in entry 285 about the abuse-hoovering cycle.   He only converts into the bullying guy after she had already fallen in love with the apparently kind and caring man.
3. She has become afflicted with the jerk attachment syndrome as describe in entry 268.

So there is the situation, that a woman by mistake loves an unworthy man, who bullies her.   She can rationally come to the conclusion, that he is unworthy, she could even take the decision to end the relationship in spite of her fatal love.  But she cannot just decide to stop loving him as a consequence of her insight, that he does not deserve her love.   

Fortunately for her, he himself helps her to get out of the trap, and he is often oblivious of this.   Every time, when he hurts her, and it is not accidentally but by his choice of selfish behavior, the pain she feels decreases her love.    Being bullied to be a commodity is a powerful love killer and when she is cured of her misplaced love, she is free to end the relationship and feel relief.   

A woman can go through this experience either with a jerk and psychopath or with an emotional moron.    But there is one huge difference.  
The jerk knows, that he can bully a woman to serve as a commodity only for a limited time.    After that time, he has to move on and find another victim and he has no conscience to stop him.   The jerk is not bothered, what the woman thinks or feels, as long as he gets, what he wants.   
The emotional moron has no clue, what is going on.   As long as the woman does, what he wants, everything seems ok for him.    He is oblivious of the difference between a woman acting by her own benevolent choice or by intimidation, and he has no clue, that his bullying is a love killer.      His own behavior could even shock him, were he able to get aware of the woman's real agony.  
The emotional moron is misguided by a logical error.   He believes that when the woman yields to his bullying and does or allows without resistance, what he wants, she has automatically changed her mind to agree with his entitlement delusion. He believes, that he is able to coerce her to think, what he wants her to think.   He does not consider his behavior as bullying, but as doing her a favor against her resistance.  He believes to improve her cognition and to teach her her appropriate role in his life.   He has not perception, that she feels hurt by being bullied and dominated.    

285. The Abuse-Hoovering-Cycle

The Abuse-Hoovering-Cycle

There are many web pages full with heartbreaking stories of women, who have been devastated by going several times through the Abuse-Hoovering Cycle.   The men may be narcissistic psychopaths or narcissistic emotional morons or any other kind of jerks.   
But there is a general pattern.   These men appear all to have two distinct personalities like Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.   In the experience of the victims, they switch unexpectedly from one mode into another.   

The woman meets nice Dr. Jekyll, gets involved with him and after a while, he converts into the abusive Mr. Hyde.   When the victim's tether is reached, she is either able to end her agony herself, or the abuser dumps her in search of other prey.   Some time later, the abuser comes back as nice Dr. Jekyll and hoovers her in to restart the relationship.    Then comes another round of abuse, another end, another hoovering and this goes on much too long for the victim.

The victims are usually very puzzled, how the same man can be so different.    The explanation suggested most often considers the abuser as the genuine person, and the nice Dr. Jekyll as a perfect act of role playing to manipulate the victim.   

I think, there is another possible explanation.   For a narcissistic person, anybody else, including a partner, is a commodity serving to supply him with adding value to himself in his own experience and perception.   
This can be reached by two methods.   He can either devalue others to feel superior, or he can feel lifted up by the contact with someone, whom he idealized, glorifies and admires.    When an abuser oscillates between being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he oscillates between applying one or the other of the two methods, always choosing the one, which gives him the most narcissistic supply out of the woman at any moment.  
 

The tragedy starts, when nice Dr. Jekyll meets a woman, whom he secretly considers as out of his league, as too good to be true, as a trophy, whom to show off and feel uplifted in his self-esteem.    He courts her, idealizes her, cherishes her, worships the ground she walks on.   But after they get involved and he gets to know her better, things change drastically.   He discovers, that she is a person with her own needs and not there to serve his only, and in his eyes, that is a huge flaw and ends his idealization of her.   Even worse, she gives him feedback about things, that others would accept as a part of the normal process of adapting to each other.   In his perception, her criticizing devalues her.    He pushes her from the throne. 

She is not above him anymore, no more good enough as the trophy to be proud of.   At that point, he converts into nasty Mr. Hyde.    He starts to abuse her and treat her as his doormat, until she breaks down and becomes dysfunctional.   Once he perceives her as dysfunctional, he is able to regard her as inferior and subjectively gain value for himself by comparison with her.   But being abused, he women stops to give him any more narcissistic supply, she does not admire or adulate her abuser.   It she stays with him, it is because she is afflicted with the Jerk-Attachment-Syndrome (entry 268).   In this case, he leaves in pursuit of a source for better narcissistic supply.    Else she leaves, when she has enough.   
But after some time, if both are lonely, the cycle restarts.    He has attempted to get narcissistic supply from other women, but did not succeed, and in his memory, he reidealizes and reglorifies her.   Thus he reconverts himself back into the nice Dr. Jekyll and starts to hoover her.   If her Jerk-Attachment-Syndrome is bad enough, she gets sucked in for another round of the Abuse-Hoovering-Cycle.        

It is such a tragedy for the women, and it happens so often, and the question is, why.   But that will be the topic of another entry.  

268. The Jerk Attachment Syndrome

The Jerk Attachment Syndrome
In entry 255., I was attempting an answer to the question, why decent women stay too long with jerks.    I was mainly explaining the cognitive dissonance of a woman between her dignity and the fact, that she herself was mislead to assume being a partner in mutually intrinsic commitment and as a consequence has allowed a man to use her body.

In entry 155, I already explained the concept of the love bank.

After some more thinking, I have come to the conclusion, that things are probably more complex than what I had written in entries 155 and 255.       

A decent women in a relationship with a jerk or an emotional moron sometimes develops something similar to the Stockholm Syndrome.    

"In psychology, Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

I will call it the Jerk Attachment Syndrome.    (This expression was my own idea, but once again, I am not original, some woman already had used it on her blog.    But as she has not defined it, I continue to use it with my own psychological definition.)

Of course, there is one big difference.  A hostage has been forced into the situation, while a woman has entered the relationship by her own decision.  She has become a hostage only of her love and her need to have a relationship as a home, a safe haven.    But a woman's attachment to an abusive man can be as irrational as that of a hostage to the captor.   

The love bank concept balances the input of caring behavior with the withdrawal by hurting behavior.    A relationship is at a balance of 20 units towards doom, when the man applies 100 units of hurting and only invests 80 units of caring.    This works as a rational evaluation of the relationship, but only, if the woman is fully rationally capable to base her decision upon this evaluation.   When the woman stays, in spite of the man having a huge debt at the love bank, then she is probably a case of the Jerk Attachment Syndrome.   
 
Emotionally the two sides of the account are often kept apart, because they are in inconvertible currencies.    While the hurting, the transgressions, the despair and depletion piles up, attachment during the few good moments of respite continues to grow also, even though it seems a paradox.    This leads a person into the inner struggle of being torn apart in the classical situation of someone being at the same time too bad to stay with and yet appearing too good to leave.   

When a person experiences something pleasant, especially something eliciting strong emotions of wellbeing, for example listening to the favorite music or enjoying a specially beautiful place, often the brain associates the good feelings with any person, who is present.   This even happens, when the man, with whom she attends a concert, is hurting a woman frequently.   As a result, she gets attached to someone unworthy of her.    

She may well experience the man as a kind of double personality, like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide.    When he hurts her, she is still aware, that there are sometimes good moments, and she has the illusionary dream, that she could have good moments only at some time in the future, if only she has the patience and endurance.    During the good moments, she cannot relax and feel at ease, because she is fully aware, that from one moment to the next, out of the blue, he could do something hurtful again.     She experiences both personalities as never fully separated, when one is in the foreground, she is prepared for the other to appear at any moment.    

People taking hostages are in a similar way often double personalities, especially when they are using the cruel and criminal method of taking hostages for legitimate political reasons and good causes.    They have a goal, which often they want to reach without doing harm to the victims, who are instruments and not their personal enemies.   Sometimes the captors attempt to minimize the victims' suffering by kind acts.   

This is, why I think, that the paradoxical reactions of the Stockholm Syndrome and of the Jerk Attachment Syndrome are very similar.