Why White Evangelicals Are Freaking Out Lately

Hi and welcome back! Of late, the news has been filled with stories of the most shocking and heartbreaking kinds regarding middle-aged white conservatives freaking completely out with over-the-top racist antics. Our entire culture feels like it’s teetering on the very ledge of some great and momentous (and necessary) changes. In reaction to it all, white evangelicals are completely, epically, totally, and absolutely losing their goddamned minds. Today, let me show you why.

(H/t to Issendai, who wrote an incredible series about dealing with narcissists called “Down the Rabbit Hole.” Officially, it’s about estrangement from toxic parents, but I’ve found it useful in understanding narcissists generally. I think the idea of ‘the chain of pain’ originates with her. Also, if you find a lot of this post hitting close to home, I recommend you check out the Reddit support group r/raisedbynarcissists.)

(In this post, I’m not talking about anything supernatural. No religion’s believers have ever actually credibly supported a single supernatural claim they have ever made, leading me to conclude that the word “supernatural” simply means “imaginary.” So my analysis today focuses only on the real-world behavior of toxic people. All tigers and giants and elves (oh my!) mentioned herein are purely metaphorical. This language refers in metaphorical fashion only to generically-real people doing generally-real things in the real world, and that is all.)

Past Pain Predicts Future Pain-Giving.

An Asshole is someone whose fixation on their own wounds outweighs their contributions to their community. This is the only definition of the term that matters.
— Something Awful, amazingly enough

In studying the chain of pain, we learn that children learn some bitter and long-lasting lessons from narcissistic parents.

First and foremost, they learn to protect themselves. They learn to survive in an environment that is not at all geared toward nurturing and loving them.

I can’t call it thriving really. At the very least, though, the victims of these parents muddle their way through that sludge of an upbringing.

When they reach maturity, they have two options:

1. Fix the damage done to them so they don’t repeat their selfish, dominance-obsessed parents’ errors and wrongdoing or spend their lives endlessly and ineffectively trying to soothe the pain those parents inflicted on them

2. Spend their lives endlessly and ineffectively soothing the pain they suffered as children, while at the same time repeating their parents’ errors and wrongdoing in how they behave toward anyone landing under their control

Such children seem always like they’re either in recovery or in repetition — whether knowingly and deliberately or not.

Recovery from this upbringing depends mightily on victims’ support networks, individual abilities, skills, and available resources, and those victims’ own worldview.

Rejecting the lessons these parents teach can be a years-long task with a lot of hiccups along the way. There’s just so much in that upbringing that festers in the mind and possesses the thoughts.

Every person who breaks free of narcissistic parenting has won a triumph well worth celebrating.

Full Article: [patheos.com]