This thread has occupied my thoughts off and on during the past few days, and my conclusion is that I didn't go far enough with it. I know this is going out on a limb, but what reminded me of some other things was the final line in my last post: "The only people who benefit from this paradox are therapists, because they get to keep their clients around longer that way -- all while looking like heroes."
That is inaccurate.
Far more people benefit from the paradox. Therapists are just one of the larger groups of minority players in the overall scam.
The Progressives have been benefiting by this dynamic ever since they began putting it into effect -- very purposefully putting it into effect -- in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They even created a whole new university degree field whose primary purpose is to promote a new way of looking at the world: the Social Work degree, which was originally designed by the American Socialist Party.
Believe me, I know what follows is an oversimplification, but I assert it is an accurate reflection of a pattern of purposeful strategies promoted by the Progressives:
Their goal was to increase the number of mentally ill people in America and other Western countries. Why would they do such a thing?: for the same reason that all Wolf organizations masquerading in Sheep clothing manipulate whole cultures: for power and money. The Progressives do not sincerely believe in most of the superficial philosophies they espouse. For them, the ends always justifies the means. [Check out Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky, if you doubt that.] In distant history, the Roman Church demonized almost every aspect of sexuality, with the threat of eternal damnation, to drive laity into the church pews, scaring them into coughing up their last pennies. This is a continuation of what I wrote earlier, because the Progressives promote a very particular mental illness: victimhood. Victimhood is a mental illness perfectly designed for a culture that is predominantly comfortable, because those who are diagnosed with it are, by definition, incapable of accessing the full range of human success -- and they need saviors, which come in the form of the mental health field that has become predominantly populated by psychologists, social workers, counselors and psychotherapists who ground their practices in helping people recognize and then cope with (but not transcend) their victimhood. This victimhood has been sold through social programs (since the early 1900s), college classrooms (since the 1950s), compulsory K-12 public education (since its inception but most notably since the advent in the 1960s of the modern teacher unions), university student affairs programs (since the 1980s), among American blacks (and, by extension, since the mid-1960s through the Democrat Party; don't forget that the Democrat Party created the Ku Klux Klan, used the Klan as its military wing, was involved in the vast majority of public lynchings, and fought tooth and nail against the 1964 Civil Rights Act in opposition to their party's president and the Republican Party; then, they successfully revised history to convince blacks that they were victims of supposedly racist Republicans). Part of the mental illness is becoming crazy enough to even blame the wrong perpetrators.
At this point, if a majority of our population doesn't already consider itself part of the victimhood class, it's certainly something close to a majority. This is what is sold to college freshmen everywhere; it's reinforced daily in major media, in social media (don't forget that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in the beginning that he created his highly-successful internet presence for the purpose of giving his fellow human beings the opportunity to make themselves look like fools), and in most TV sitcoms and Hollywood movies. Instead of truly educating young folks about how they are enriched and protected by the patriarchy of men who step up to the plate at home, at work, as firemen, as policemen and as members of the military, they are being brainwashed with the idea that they are all supposedly victims of a vast white male patriarchal conspiracy to rob them of various birthrights.
So it is no accident that we're witnessing national politics playing out with more polarization than this country has seen since the War Between the States. One side of the polarization is predominantly comprised of (a) people who now qualify as mentally ill because they define themselves as permanently-damaged ("traumatized") victims and (b) the people who purposefully manipulate those mentally ill people. The people who do the manipulation do so, first by encouraging the mental illness, and second by persuading the mentally ill to blame their illness on others who have absolutely nothing to do with their circumstances.
Awareness of this is what consistently inspires me to risk seeming rude by challenging those who ignorantly (this is not a synonym for 'stupidly'; 'ignorantly' simply implies that one is unaware of actual facts or truth when coming to a conclusion) use terms like 'trauma' and 'triggering' and 'perpetrator' and 'PTSD' and 'victim shaming.' I do so out of (1) opposition to the effort to encourage mental illness, and (2) love for my fellow human beings. Actually, that includes love for myself, because I regularly recognize that I've unconsciously fallen prey to describing reality in the terms of a crazy person. It's far too easy to do so, given that our culture is now awash in the perverted use of language to encourage the state of victimhood. What we need to do, though, is stand up every chance we get. Refuse to take the easy-way-out of defining ourselves as unable to perform in one way or another because of some past 'trauma.' Our Father didn't create us for that kind of half-assed participation in life. He clearly designed life to be rough -- but not for the purpose of turning us into victims; the purpose is for more likely to be to teach us, and to shape us for the eons to come.
We are not victims. We are blessed and loved children of God. We also can't step forward until we first stand up. And we can't stand up to the challenges of life as long as we're voluntarily wearing the cloak of insanity.
