During the last several years, the system dynamics of narcissistic abuse in relationships, families, workplaces, and society have become more clear. The same patterns apply from the micro to the macro levels, similar to the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. What is happening on one plane of reality is reflected on others. This also includes spiritual warfare.
Sometimes it’s easier for people to see the relational dynamics of abuse in intimate partnerships and friendships or families, while for others it’s easier to see it at the global level and more challenging to see similar patterns closer to home.
How we respond to the collective traumas happening in society is very similar to how we are dealing (or not dealing) with our personal unresolved trauma.
It has to do with the survival mechanisms of denial and defense (fight, flight, freeze and fawn). What kept us safe in childhood is what usually ends up becoming maladaptive in adulthood. We can get stuck in repetitive loops of behavior that feels normal because it’s all we’ve ever known.
Each of the trauma responses serves its purpose of keeping us alive and safe during key moments. There was innate intelligence in these responses. However when these get stuck as our default programs, that blocks the self-awareness, transformation and growth path. It causes us to self-sabotage and miss out on what we really want in life.
Denial—People who are still in denial about childhood trauma are more likely to be in denial about the global trauma. They might think they had a great childhood or that everything is fine in the world.
Fight—Online and all around us, it’s easy to see a lot of people fighting. “Freedom fighters” and preppers are often people who learned to fight in childhood to survive. Fighting is necessary sometimes, but if you’re stuck in fight mode in adulthood, you probably notice a lot of conflict in your relationships and life. If you hear someone say something and jump to big conclusions or aggressions, usually from a black-and-white reactionary perspective, you’re probably in fight mode. Fight can be direct or passively aggressive. Little things lead to big things. If you’re constantly criticizing and correcting other people, competing and one-upping them, wanting to assert your dominance of strength, knowledge, skills, status, etc. to overpower others, that is exhausting and annoying for other people. Fighting disrupts connection and could kill the other person’s desire to connect with you.
Flight—Flight mechanisms escalated a lot since 2020. Many of us who could no longer rely on escapisms like traveling, ended up transferring the flight escape to food, alcohol, drugs, porn, TV, social media, fantasy, online dating, workaholism (busyness and an inability to be still) or whatever else filled the existential void. When we are fleeing, we are avoiding our issues, which keeps us stuck and unable to face and resolve them. It also keeps us disconnected from others and not present, even when we are near one another or doing those activities together.
Freeze—The freeze response is one of the most common survival mechanisms for severe childhood trauma where it felt like there was no escape. This is the immobilization state where the Autonomic Nervous System shuts down like feigning death. It’s meant to be a last-ditch, short-lived defense mechanism that gets triggered by the mammalian ANS in the case of a mouse who gets caught by a cat. In a state of collapse, the ANS shuts down vital systems like respiration, heart rate, digestion, etc. If the mouse is really lucky, a hawk will swoop by and scare the cat to drop it, then the mouse’s ANS will mobilize into the flight mode to run away.
(Functional Freeze)—As humans, we often get into long-term seemingly inescapable life situations and relationships, like the years of COVID tyranny. Since we can’t stay in the shutdown state for too long because we would literally die ('“vagal death”), the human nervous system adapts into a state of dissociation, which is a form of flight. So we slip into a “functional freeze” state where we aren’t entirely immobilized yet also checked out. Metabolism and immunity are suppressed and the body suffers, but we can get by barely functioning enough to get through the day until we can flee into dissociative activities like food, substances, TV, social media, scrolling, etc. This state leads to apathy, depression, and dysfunction that stops us from creating the relationships and life we really want to live. In the post-COVID world, most of society is in a functional freeze state, going through the motions but not engaged or passionate about life any more.
Fawn—Fawning is another very common survival mechanism that we can learn in childhood in order to survive traumas such as abuse. A child often learns that it’s easier to please the abuser/s in order to temporarily avoid the abuse. But compliance never ends the abuse. It’s a way of sacrificing long-term peace for perceived peace in the moment. Fawning causes a person to self-sacrifice. It leads to a loss of identity, self-esteem, self-worth, self-trust, self-respect and self-love. The vast majority of society complied to some degree with the COVID measures to the detriment of their health, sanity and wellbeing. The fawning response can lead to big resentments and regrets that weigh on our soul until we clear them. When we get stuck in the fawning response, we are highly likely to fall for more abuse campaigns, whether on the personal or societal level.
We all tend to use certain defense mechanisms more than others depending on what kept us safe in childhood. We can also toggle between these states.
What was the dysfunction in your family and how did you stay safe?
How did you respond to the global events of the 2020s?
Notice the similarities and use that awareness to help yourself grow.
The traumas that have happened in our world have been an opportunity to self-examine, to learn more about ourselves and how we respond to life, to identify our unresolved past, so we can grow through these challenges and self-actualize at new levels.
These experiences have pierced us deeply, awakening and connecting us with parts of ourselves that we didn’t know and wouldn’t have met otherwise, in order to discover more about who we are, why we are here, and how we want to contribute to the world.
We have each had our own individual trauma, and we also come into this world with ancestral trauma. When the two cells meet—one from the mother and one from father—in that instant of conception, it’s like a zip file download of information from both lineages merged into one. We inherit all the unresolved trauma of our ancestors, and also their resilience.
The more we heal ourselves, the more we activate ourselves and evolve, and the more light codes we can share with others including our ancestors who are connected to us through the morphogenic field of the DNA. As you heal and transmute the darkness into light, you’re offering liberation, peace and other virtues to your ancestors as well. It’s up to them if they choose to tune in or not.
Healing is a non-linear process. It happens layer by layer over time as we do the inner work.
Spiritual bypassing is an avoidance of the healing process. We hear a lot of that nowadays with the talk of 3D to 5D and “it’s all one so just unite with everyone,” and “there’s no such thing as evil.” While at a higher level of non-duality, yes it’s true we are all connected and part of All That Is, yet we are also here in the third plane as human beings living in this world where we are also separate and need to have healthy boundaries, without denying our human form.
We have an ego/identity that helps us navigate this world. Without an ego, we slip into schizophrenia. We ought to discipline the ego and shape it in healthy ways but not kill it off through spiritual bypassing trends, which are sometimes spread by well-intending people and other times promoted by those who want to take advantage of others.
In this world, without an understanding of evil as well as the discernment to recognize it and turn away, we will end up being prey to the parasites and perpetrators.
Many people in the spiritual community fall into evil this way. They will often meet entities pretending to be ascended masters like Kuan Yin, who prey upon the blindspots in their ego such as pride and self-importance (through messages like “you’re special” or “you’re the chosen one to get access to special information”). With the sobriety of discernment, we can see through the illusion of an entity masquerading as “Kuan Yin,” recognizing that’s just a demon in tattered purple robes.
A denial of the evil in our world is usually a sign of naiveté, denial of personal (ego) issues or unresolved trauma. This stance will cause us to fall for the bait, whether in the spiritual world, in the global world, or in our personal lives. We have been getting a masterclass on recognizing evil in the recent years, now that evil is dancing openly in the streets.
Everything that happened since 2020, and even now as the multi-layered crises are stacking upon each other (war, economy, natural and mafia-made disasters, self-replicating “vaccines” and threats of new plandemics) is also a calling. While things are escalating during this convergence point in history, the evolutionary pressure is also an invitation to us as individuals and a species.
It’s similar to what happens in an abusive relationship. The intensity of the trauma is an evolutionary calling, pushing us to evolve.
Before 2020, many of us were drifting along with the societal programming, going to work, watching TV, scrolling online, consuming and repeating this cycle of boredom, stagnation and mediocrity day after day. A lot more people are awakening now, not just to the external reality of what’s happening in our world, but also connecting—for perhaps the first time—with deeper parts of self and with the Creator of All That Is. This is an opportunity to step into a new level of purpose that we couldn’t even imagine before we were cut so deeply. As Rumi said, “The wound is where the light gets in.”
We’ve been doing the repetition compulsion at the individual level and the history repeats itself thing at the collective level for so long. This metacrisis is an invitation to choose something new.
There’s no such thing as healing the world or saving the country. It starts with the individual. As each of us takes responsibility for ourselves, cleaning up and growing up, healing the unresolved trauma and integrating the past, we can create a healing world and a new future instead of the same old repetition patterns.
Right now, we are holding this big bag of stuff that will become the burden of future generations. The question is, what are we going to do with it?
What is in that bag? It’s a lot of unresolved trauma, which causes disconnection, separation and fragmentation. It’s what I call the Pandemic of Disconnection. After all the isolation and fear bombardment, we are more disconnected and more conditioned to go into the defense mechanisms of fight, flight, freeze and fawn. That’s what I call the State of Captivity. This causes more disconnection, creating a negative and self-destructive cycle.
When we are in a State of Captivity, we can’t connect (even when we are together) because we are triggering each other’s defenses and our nervous systems read this as danger and threat. We’ve also been groomed through social engineering and our technological devices to have the perception of connection online while we are more disconnected than ever. The Divide and Conquer tactic of abusers on the micro and macro levels continues to divide us more on every issue.
I’m hearing a strong calling to focus on the connection aspect. Yet in order to connect and co-regulate, we need to be able to self-regulate our own nervous systems. When we can truly connect, that is a powerful force! This is why everything is set up in an abusive system to drive people apart and keep us triggering each other into states of defense.
If you don’t know where to start or what to do next in your own healing process, start with your triggers. Notice what upsets you and knocks you off center. Those clues are breadcrumbs that can help you discover areas of your unresolved past. You can access free tools that I created to help you with this process of self-regulation here: Rescue Yourself: How to Self-Regulate Your Triggers in Stressful Times.
The above clip is from a two-hour interview I did with Jared Mello (The Wizard of Radical Self-Respect). It’s such a pleasure conversing with Jared because he’s awake and constantly learning, he does the inner work, he’s self-responsible and he’s able to hold the nuance, which is an incredibly rare and valuable quality.
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