Dr. Mattias Desmet, who brought up the important topic of mass formation, says,
"The real reason why people buy into the story, even if it is utterly absurd, is not because they believe in the narrative. It's because the narrative leads to the new social bond."
Social connection is one of the most important human experiences for health and wellbeing. We are pack creatures and we need to feel a sense of belonging.
Our human nervous system, particularly the mammalian brain, evolved to co-regulate with other mammals. I wrote a little about this in Why People Sacrifice the Truth for Social Belonging and I’ll be expanding more on this topic in an upcoming article on the pandemic of disconnection.
Graham Dunlop recently brought this up on the Grimerica podcast, “There is a percentage of people in the middle who see what's happening but they don't know what to do. And we don't even really know what to do other than preparing for different scenarios and trying to talk to people.”
He mentioned that Dr. Mattias Desmet says there's about 40% of people on the fence going along with the totalitarian system but knowing something is off, another 30% are completely subscribed to the narrative, and about 30% of us are aware that abuse and manipulation is taking place.
“So what do we do?” Graham Dunlop asked me. “And how does trauma and abusive relationships fit into the mass formation?”
The mass formation, AKA mass delusional psychosis, takes place in a system.
An interpersonal relationship is the micro example. Then beyond that scope, we see systems forming with groups of people as we move into the macro level.
Systems take on additional characteristics beyond the interpersonal relationship dynamics because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Let’s take, for example, the family, which is the basic structure of a social system.
Then let's say you wake up in a family and realize that abuse is taking place. You finally see the truth that abuse happened to you, so you try to talk to family members. Maybe you find a few allies in the family who say, "that happened to me too". Or maybe they saw it happen to you and they validate your reality.
But the vast majority of the family isn't going to see it. In fact, they'll attack you for speaking up about the abuse. They won’t call out the abusers. They might even increase their praise or eulogies of the family pedophiles for example. They'll smear you, shame you, abuse you or physically move their body away from you as you start talking about it.
Speaking the truth will quickly reveal who has your back and who does not. The truth is a powerful filter for finding healthy social connections.
In order to save your sanity, health, peace and wellbeing, you might find that you need to exit the family system.
Exiting the system and going No Contact is the boundary that protects an abuse survivor’s healing process.
There’s no healing while still in an abusive relationship or social system due to the constant exposure to the abuse as well as the gaslighting by those who defend the abusers and pretend the abuse didn’t happen.
The erasure of the abuse is actually the most devastating part for the survivor.
An abusive social system, whether a family, workplace, social group or society, is made up of abusers and enablers.
A key point to highlight here is the enablers. We often hear about the abusers and victims but the part that we don’t usually talk about is the role of the enablers.
We don’t talk about the people who allow it to happen, who do the bidding of the abusers and turn on each other. This is really important to talk about and that might be why it’s mostly left out of history, because that’s where the power is.
The abusive system doesn’t work if the abuser doesn’t have enablers. It’s the enablers who maintain the entire system.
It would seem like going No Contact with the abusers would be enough and that a person could stay in touch with the others in the family who aren't abusive.
However, what I have lived in my own life experience, as well as observed while working with hundreds of clients over the years, is that the interpersonal relationships between an individual and non-abusive members of the family takes a backseat to the system dynamics.
This is where we can start to notice how a system is greater than the sum of its parts. This is also where the mass formation becomes visible.
The role of enablers in a social system is one (or both) of two things: they either actively (whether consciously or not) do the bidding of the abusers, or they simply stay silent and continue to have a relationship with the abusers like nothing happened and everything is fine.
When we look the percentages of people that Dr. Mattias Desmet mentioned in a totalitarian system, we are talking about enablers too. The enablers are both the 30% of those who are fully subscribed to the narrative and actively doing the bidding of the totalitarians as well as those in the 40% on the fence who see that something is wrong but are still going along with it.
Maintaining contact with the enablers in the family becomes very complicated for multiple reasons:
They're often fully in the abuser's trance and subscribed to the narrative.
They could pull you back into the trance (mass formation) because it's so contagious, or at the very least, keep you stuck in the Cognitive Dissonance unable to resolve that inner conflict.
They don’t understand the level of danger they’re dealing with by maintaining contact with the abusers.
They could end up hurting you, either on purpose or without even realizing, often by relaying information to/from the abuser to/from you.
They are unwilling or unable to fully face the truth, even if they seem to get it when you're talking to them.
They won’t have your back when it really matters because their allegiance is to the abusers, first and foremost.
They are willing to sacrifice their own integrity and wellbeing in order to maintain a relationship with the abusers and feel a sense of belonging in the family system.
They could end up betraying you in ways that cut so deep it could take years to heal from, or worse yet lead to your life being in danger or even death.
Abusive families have abusers and enablers. Those who stay in contact with the abusers are the enablers, whether they realize it or not.
Eventually, there comes a point when a person realizes that they have to exit the family system in order to get healthy and sane, to have some peace away from the drama, toxicity and chaos.
This is a very difficult realization and turning point.
If a person is lucky in that process, they'll find some allies who also exit the abusive family system so they won't be entirely alone.
However, a lot of people end up mostly alone for a transitional period of time between leaving the old world and doing the inner healing work in order to resolve the trauma. That self-healing process initiates a new story and the possibility of connecting with people who are very different from the original abusers in the family.
The key to a successful transition between the two worlds, exiting an abusive system and creating new, healthier social connections, is doing the important inner work of self-healing.
Until a survivor of familial abuse works on processing the grief and resolving the pain, their own nervous system will continue to guide them to keep connecting with similar characters as the original abusers. It’s like a form of neurological betrayal.
This becomes the repetition compulsion on an individual level and history repeats itself on a collective level.
A lot of people who leave abusive family systems end up creating new family ties with friends who share a healthier connection with them than those who come from their own bloodline.
A family certainly has years and decades more influence in a person's life than co-workers in a workplace or members of social organizations. What’s interesting, however, is that similar patterns apply in abusive social groups in general, with specifics based on the culture of the local ecosystem and the relational dynamics that people have within that particular system.
We can even look to the larger social system like society and find similar patterns in the dynamics, even between people who don't know each other but have an interaction based on abuse taking place in that system. One example would be interactions through comments on social media with strangers.
And of course the greatest macro system that we participate in is the collective spiritual one where we are connected at the level of consciousness with All That Is. Abuse is actually a manifestation of the spiritual war. More on that in an upcoming article.
While we can’t predict exactly what will happen in any particular system, there are still common patterns and archetypes that they all share.
We can’t control what happens in an abusive system. There will be surprises and shocks along the way to its inevitable end in destruction.
Dr. Mattias Desmet says that totalitarian systems will eventually self-implode. I’ve seen the same thing in abusive families.
Some people try to get revenge and punish the abusers, but that’s a mistake that will get a person caught up in the destruction. It’s not worth it.
The abusers will inevitably bring their own demise. It may take time, years or decades even, but I’ve heard countless stories of abusive families in the final throws. Frequently those stories end in dementia, self-harm, physical and mental illnesses when people are forced to face reality and don’t want to accept the truth about the abuse or the role they played in enabling it.
On a side note, I hope there will be future studies done on the possible connection between dementia and abusive families. I’ve noticed that both the elderly abusers and their devout enablers can end up with dementia. What they both have in common is an inability to face reality. I’ve wondered over the years if one of the non-organic causes of dementia might include damage done to the brain caused by a person’s unwillingness or inability to face reality over years and decades. It seems to me that it would cause something like a traumatic brain injury over time.
I wonder if we will notice a similar trend of severe physical and mental health issues in society down the road when the global totalitarian system collapses and those who stuck to the narrative all those years simply can’t face reality.
The best way of dealing with an abusive system is to opt out, as much as possible.
Within a family system, opting out would mean going No Contact. That’s probably the most difficult decision a person can make in their lifetime because family was supposed to be the primary rooting of love and home in a person’s life. Yet it’s usually also what survivors of abusive families say was the best decision they ever made.
It’s not an uncommon experience for people from abusive families to know what it’s like to live in a totally different reality than nearly everyone else in the group. That’s not a healthy or real connection. It’s described as crazy-making for a reason. But it doesn’t just make the person feel like they’re going crazy. Over time, it actually contributes to causing chronic physical illness.
Social connections make the human (mammalian) nervous system feel safe and encourage homeostasis.
We were neurologically wired to be social creatures. However there are kinds of social connections that do just the opposite and have a very toxic, or even dangerous, effect upon not just a person’s nervous system and health, but their entire life.
It’s very confusing to the human mind when we have these biological drives to connect socially yet we also know that it’s not safe to connect with people who aren’t living in reality.
You might think that anyone who comes from an abusive family would recognize the totalitarianism happening in society now. That’s what I initially thought.
During the last two years, I’ve observed that people who are still in contact with their abusive family or those no longer in contact but still unhealed from the experiences of abuse in the family, mostly fell into the global narrative.
However, most of the survivors who know they were abused in their family and are actively working on healing their trauma, are the ones who can clearly see that we are being deceived in society.
Unresolved trauma is a huge precursor for being manipulated and abused. Integrated trauma, on the other hand, gives a person an almost superhuman immunity to such things.
It’s important to our holistic human health (body, mind, spirit) to be able to connect deeply with people who share a similar sense of reality because that’s how we can talk about, and connect on, a foundation of what’s real. We may not agree in terms of our opinions on everything but we can at least speak within terms of reality.
So here we are in society wondering what to do and how to exit the totalitarian system.
Graham Dunlop mentioned that it gets to a point when people don’t want to participate in that system any more, like going out to eat at a restaurant where people are wearing masks or playing along with the Green Pass. He mentioned not wanting to make small talk with people who are enabling the tyranny. A lot of people can probably relate to that.
It’s hard to leave the totalitarian system right now because there’s no alternative yet. However, as I mentioned about abusive families, workplaces and other social groups, the best way to exit the mass formation and abuse is to opt out as much as possible and create new social connections.
I think we will start to see forming parallel systems this year… media, banking, education, healthcare, and just about everything else.
Those who no longer want to participate in the totalitarian system, or those who are getting kicked out and cancelled are going to look for a new home.
For example, doctors, nurses and pharmacists speaking against the narrative are being threatened with losing their licenses. America’s Frontline Doctors are now setting up new clinics and looking for medical professionals who are interested in medical freedom to join them. You can click here then scroll down on their page where you can enter your contact information as a doctor, nurse or pharmacist.
I think the gap between where we are now and these new parallel systems forming is people fully accepting reality.
Even those of us who are awake to the abuse and manipulation are still facing the Cognitive Dissonance.
We are seeing more truth coming out and so naturally we are thinking that the lies are going to collapse now and this charade is going to end. Yet what we are seeing in most places is just the opposite in terms of increasingly restrictive public policies (ie: more areas going into lockdowns or requiring vax apps, internment camps, etc.) as if the truth didn’t happen.
I think we are all still a bit in the Cognitive Dissonance, hoping things will kind of go back to normal so maybe we don’t have to invest our energy in creating the new systems.
We are the ones who will be responsible for creating the bridge between the old and new.
I think it’s probably wise that we work on fully accepting that the totalitarian system isn’t going to suddenly accept the truth and change policies accordingly, no matter how much evidence comes out.
Abusers never admit to the con. When they’re called out, they just double down, flip it around, and play the victim (ie: Fauci’s recent performance in front of Congress).
The ultimate trajectory of the totalitarian system is collapse. We can either go down with that ship, hoping someone else will take responsibility and resolve the problems for us. Or, we can learn from the seagull. When the ship is sinking, the seagull flies away because it’s not his boat.
Clip from Grimerica Podcast episode 529 with Darren Grimes, Graham Dunlop and guest Meredith Miller.
Exiting the Mass Formation & Abusive System
@Meredith Miller, this is an excellent essay! I will share it far and wide.
Part of what we see in the growth of Substack is also the growth of commenting; people joining in community or in a place to go away from the totalitarian abuse. Many people complain it is just another echo chamber, but I think maybe it is a kind of therapy, a searching.
I also think we are seeing the hopefulness of many who think the totalitarianism is winding down. Like you said, they believe it is going to stop soon. But, it won't, and in a sad sort of way, I think that may be best. We can't get to alternate or parallel structures without the continued pressure and abuse.
"I think we will start to see forming parallel systems this year… media, banking, education, healthcare, and just about everything else." I pray you are right.
Anyway, thanks, I thoroughly enjoyed this essay and I'm glad I found you.
Wow Mere, very good! Is very good read your text that is very enlightening!