They're All Following the Same Playbook

Why does it seem like abusers and tyrants all use the same tactics?

Did they all read the same book to learn how to abuse and manipulate? This is a question many people have asked me over the years of working in narcissistic abuse recovery.

Many people have experienced eerily similar abuse dynamics in relationships around the world. They come from all countries, cultures, races, genders, ages and socio-economic status.

It really does seem like abusers all studied the same tactics but if you think about it, that's impossible. There isn't a book on this. And even if there were, there's no way that millions of people could have all read that same hypothetical book.

Of course every person and relationship is unique. Yet at the essence, we find the same patterns and archetypes of abuse. Somehow they all behave in eerily similar patterns and create very similar effects on their targets.

How is that possible?

They're all serving the same master.

It's the same evil energetic force behind it all.

Just as the human parasites feed off of the stolen life force energy of others, something else is feeding off of them. That's the energetic force they are serving, whether they're aware of it or not.

That's why it seems like they learned the same tactics somewhere. It’s the devil’s playbook.

Spiritual war is the battle between good and evil. While it seems very personal when abuse is happening, on another dimension of existence, it's less about the individual people involved and more about the forces moving through them.

Ephesians 6:11-12 | Biblehub.com

Abuse can't truly be understood or healed without a holistic lens. The same applies to the global situation of growing tyranny.

The effects of abuse and manipulation upon the human being have specific physical, psychological and spiritual implications.

The holistic perspective integrates body, mind and spirit.

Psychology is helpful to understand the mind and emotions, but it’s only one dimension of the human experience. It leaves many questions unanswered when we are observing the dynamics of abuse and tyranny.

The scientific models of psychiatry that were created to describe the various types of abusive characters are greatly lacking.

For example, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry (DSM) doesn't take into account the very real existence of covert narcissists and psychopaths. The descriptions of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD) are of the overt, more obvious types.

The covert form of perpetrator is the more sophisticated model, and, in my opinion, the most dangerous type.

It may or may not be a coincidence that the covert ones are left out of the diagnostic book. Just because the board of psychiatry leaves this type out, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

We could assume incompetence before malice, giving the benefit of the doubt that the people who decide what goes in the DSM simply don’t have the awareness or diagnostic tools to identify the covert kinds of abusers and manipulators. That’s possible.

Another possibility is that the people who wrote that book could be cut from the same cloth and wouldn’t want to be exposed, so it could be convenient to focus the lens on the obvious distraction of more overt types.

While there are wonderful psychologists and psychiatrists, I’ve also had clients over the years who previously went to a psychologist or psychiatrist for help after an abusive relationship, but instead got more abused. The worst of these types resuscitate the victim initially, then turn around and consume the victim’s soul until there’s nearly nothing left to take. Some of those clients described it as a Jesus Christ complex.

Abuse by health practitioners creates devastating wounds. The clients who told me these stories went to mental health professionals looking for help and ended up more abused than when they arrived. We are now witnessing a similar abuse of power by some public health officials who people trusted with their life.

The creeping tyranny around the world during the last two years is, for the most part, the covert form of abuse.

Initially, it doesn’t look like abuse at all. Whether in an interpersonal relationship or in society at large, the covert form of abuse is disguised as love, help, care, protection, support, security, public health and for the good of all.

The covert form of abuse causes people to lean in, looking for comfort and alleviation of their fears, anxiety, shame or unmet emotional, physical or financial needs. It looks like love, understanding and support.

But this is all about appearances.

Those who resist the covert tactics are looked at as crazy or even bad. The more covert that abusers are, the more skillful they are at managing their public perception and confusing others into seeing the exact opposite of reality.

The covert form of abuse becomes more overt over time, in interpersonal relationships and in society.

We are already seeing this shift into more overt abuse in the recent months around the world. Yet it’s still very difficult for many people to recognize the abuse because the targets’ tolerance is increasing as they’re being slowly desensitized to the abuse over time.

Facing the truth would also mean losing faith in their only refuge, the toxic hope engineered by the empty promises made by the abusers, so instead they remain irrationally loyal to the Official Narrative.

Whether the omission of the covert types in the DSM is intentional or not, there are other things that psychology and psychiatry cannot explain about the human experience because they are using a narrow lens, much like how the allopathic medical system is also limited by their pixellated perspective of the human being. When patients present with symptoms of chronic illness, how many doctors ask about abuse history and childhood trauma?

A holistic vision is necessary to see the Big Picture of human life and how it's all connected from the micro to the macro. We are each part of that.

Narcissistic abuse is a micro representation of the spiritual war.

Nowadays in the era of newnormalism, the spiritual war becomes much more visible as evil is openly dancing in the streets in plain daylight.

The evil is mostly still cloaked behind pretty words and smokescreens, while gaslighting the public perception by dangling false promises of personal safety and security in exchange for compliance and obedience.

We are living in times of the Great Deception. Evil is being disguised as good.

It's so well disguised, it's almost believable. Evil is being framed as virtue and for the public good. The coercive control is cloaked in doing the right thing for everyone else.

However, the force of evil hasn't fully revealed its nature yet. Eventually more people will see it as the truth continues to fester to the surface and things get increasingly more uncomfortable. We are living in times of exposure. People and things are being revealed for what they really are.

Evil is often disguised as just the opposite.

That’s actually the most dangerous form of evil, when it pretends to be good.

On a micro level of interpersonal relationships, this is the same pattern of the covert narcissist and psychopath.

Covert means under cover, hidden, cloaked, veiled.

The covert types pretend to be good. They often claim to be victims and heroes, even in the same breath. They're just trying to help you and want the best for you but you're so selfish and unappreciative. They have an incredible knack for turning things around to literally the exact opposite of reality and somehow making it sound plausible.

The spiritual war isn't new and neither is narcissistic abuse on the interpersonal or societal level. This has probably been happening for all of human history. It just seems to be exponentially intensifying now.

Many of us didn't have any idea what was going on until the recent years when topics like narcissistic abuse became more commonly known and a lot of people started joining the online conversation, sharing uncanny life experiences.

Some of us became willing to start looking at these creepy, scary phenomena in our personal lives and society.

Others still would rather pretend such things don't exist.

Not believing in something doesn't make us immune to it, it just makes us blind to what's really happening.

Ignorance usually results in unintended, unfavorable consequences brought about by poor decisions or lack of action when it’s most needed. We can see this currently happening in the world.

If a person has not been touched by this kind of evil in their personal life (or has but hasn’t realized it yet), it's hard for them to understand that such a thing could exist. I have heard people say things like, “If that’s true, then I don’t want to see it because I can’t exist in a world like that.”

Some are aware of the evil but they pretend it's not happening because it's ugly and the comfort of denial is hardcore tempting.

Sometimes people see it and self-censor instead of talking about it in order to avoid social rejection and the loss of friends, income or subscribers.

Some don't see it because they're so preoccupied with their social image and putting on displays of virtue that they participate in evil in order to get status and a sense of recognition that they’ve been craving.

Some people have been waiting their entire life to get a taste of power by playing the role of an authoritarian demanding compliance and controlling the behavior of others.

Others yet may have a blind innocence in which they believe that all people are inherently good and we just need to be kind to everyone... love and light, y'all. This kind of spiritual bypassing can lead people to turn away from the ugly truth, to connect with dangerous entities and even do their bidding.

We can now witness the emerging effects of the mass formation as Dr. Mattias Desmet describes it (or mass delusional psychosis as Dr. Mark McDonald calls it) in society, the power of collective belief to hypnotize individuals into group think and group behavior.

The submergence into the mass formation, similar to an initiation into a cult or belonging to an abusive family, requires replacing the individual identity with a group identity, and this is often done through trauma-based mind control.

By the time the contagion of the collective belief and emotion takes place, it’s very difficult for individuals to wake up from that trance because they’ve lost their sense of individuality. They become terrified due to the ongoing shock trauma while at the same time feel desperately dependent on the connection to the group for survival.

The perceived life threat causes people to feel frozen in a state of Autonomic Nervous System immobilization and collapse, which causes them to perceive that there’s no way out. This is what causes learned helplessness, debility dependency dread, states of apathy and self-destructive habits. In this state, a person’s immune response is decreased because their life force energy is trapped and frozen in the nervous system.

We are witnessing the slow unveiling of evil, layer by layer, and the effects it's having on people.

The abuse will become more overt. As it takes an increasingly drastic form, that will be an opportunity for more people to wake up to what's going on in this world, in families and in interpersonal relationships.

It may be hard to understand how people are still sleeping through all the noise, but it’s also important to know that some people aren’t going to wake up and that’s okay.

While the awakening process is ugly, this leads to new awareness, which is the first step to change.

It has been a long, lonely road for those of us who have had this awareness developing for years or decades through brutal life experiences. At the same time, there’s a sense of relief that at least we aren’t pretending things are normal any more. Let’s be real, “normal” was a word often used to describe things that we normalized in a world that was anything but normal before 2020.

As more of us become more aware of the invisible forces of evil, one would think that those evil forces would run away and hide.

But just like when you call out abusive people, instead of giving up the charade, they might retreat, but only temporarily to plot and plan. Yet inevitably they will double down on their efforts, twist it around, play the victim quite convincingly, and then blame you. That pattern keeps continuing and escalating along the way.

Trudeau’s temporary flight from the public last week is a great example. He returned now, continuing his rhetoric about the “unacceptable views” of the protestors in the trucker convoy, while praising the rest of Canada for “stepping up” for each other. It’s a classic divide and conquer tactic to create further disconnection among people. In the same breath, he justified his authoritarian stance, “mandates are the way to avoid further restrictions.” That’s an interesting mind-scrambler… restrictions on your liberties are the way to avoid more restrictions on your liberties.

Evil doesn't just slither away upon being discovered. It will strike and defend the territory it has so unrighteously claimed because it has nothing to lose at that point.

We are witnessing the devil gone wild, using all the tricks in his book, taking everything he can before his inevitable demise.

The spiritual war was such a hidden struggle for a long time. People were under spiritual attack from the dark forces but didn’t understand what was happening to them. They were ashamed to speak about it, lest they be called crazy.

The dark forces must be exposed with the light.

We are living in a time of unveiling. We don't need to fight like we did in the past. The more we fight and struggle to control what’s trying to control us, the deeper we sink into the quicksand of spiritual despair and existential exhaustion, the more people will turn on other people instead of seeing what’s really happening.

Evil is counting on us falling into this trap. They want to blame us for what happened.

We have the opportunity to win this spiritual war by standing courageously in the truth and withdrawing our participation from the Lie.

This may sound like an easy thing, but it's not. Taking a stand for the truth is one of the scariest things you'll ever do.

People who speak the truth about abuse are not socially rewarded in an abusive system. If you’ve ever spoken up about abuse in your family or workplace, you know exactly how this works.

Speaking the truth causes all the alarm bells to sound in the Matrix.

When you speak the truth about abuse in a family, workplace or other social system, people will immediately turn on you, even people you never expected to betray you. They'll attack you in order to defend the illusions that they're desperately clinging onto because they’re terrified they can’t survive without the abuser or the abusive system.

The light is truth, awareness, information, love.

The darkness is the absence of all of the above.

A spirit of deception has infected the world, drawing many people into its trance… perpetuating the lies, hiding the truth or turning away from it, spreading misinformation, confusion and hatred… all the while accusing the other side of doing those very things… those who call evil good and good evil.

The crazy thing is how the darkness is able to confuse the minds and hearts of the people. The longer the confusion goes on, the more seeds of doubt will sprout and propagate like unattended weeds in a garden. Perception becomes further distorted until the point when a person can lose touch with reality and instead become fully subscribed to the lies, while believing they are truths.

The battlefield of the war isn't just out in the world. It is also happening inside each of us.

The spiritual war is the internal struggle to stand for what is good and to turn away from what is evil.

Our individual choices become our collective, societal circumstances. We have all been participating in some degree of self-deception since long before 2020, and this is why we are living in a world where deception is able to rein as truth.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that we have no value and so we devalue ourselves.

Social media and advertising are full of messages of unworthiness in order to drive behavior. Evil forces have invaded into those spaces, triggering insecurities, worthlessness and powerlessness in people. This messaging causes people to chase after external things in a futile and endless attempt to fill the sense of emptiness. The tentacles of evil try to hold us down and keep us from living as free, sovereign beings.

The 2020 campaign for restrictions of liberty began by telling some people they are non-essential as a justification for stripping them of their right to work and feed their families.

Never has there been a more direct assault upon the soul of humanity.

You’re unworthy is evil’s favorite lie. Fear is one of their most powerful tools. The dark forces will use fear and doubt to confuse you. Yet the essence of this message is to make you believe that you’re not worthy. In that state of worthlessness, it is all too easy to lose faith in yourself, in God, in life. That’s when things become really dire.

It’s no coincidence that abusers in interpersonal relationships also use these same tactics of whittling down the target’s self-worth until they are collapsed, numb, frozen, shut down, debilitated and dependent on the abuser for survival.

The abuse doesn’t work if we know we are worthy.

Right now things appear quite extreme. The world is going down a very tumultuous path that perhaps one day will be described as the greatest deception in human history with catastrophic transgenerational consequences.

It will certainly be noted as another historical turning point, a death and rebirth cycle. The only question is which way do we go from here. That depends on the sum of our individual choices and actions.

Much like our difficult personal transformational cycles when we are put through the fire of purification in order to find greater purpose and meaning, eventually, something good will come of this too.

But first it will get uglier.

Over the years I’ve noticed that a small percentage of victims of narcissistic abuse end up taking on the personal responsibility to do the challenging work required of the self-healing process.

A lot of people discover information about the evil abusers and manipulators. That feels very relieving at first, so they learn all about the other.

But many people get stuck there, focusing on the external. They are unable, or unwilling, to cross the threshold of self-responsibility in order to step into their empowerment and transform their lives.

Likewise we will probably also see a small percentage of society thriving, or even surviving, this transformational cycle of the 2020s.

Currently, the psychopaths directing the world stage (and the evil forces moving them behind the scenes) are desperately trying to maintain control over the minds and hearts of the people.

They're hurried and desperate because they know they're losing and their time to rule is ending.

As you might know from experience, the hurrier you go, the behinder you get. A typing teacher taught me that in high school.

The psychopaths and the invisible forces of evil that they serve will continue to use more intimidation and fear tactics because they are terrified that we are waking up and turning away from the lies, illusions and deception.

They are panicked that we are withdrawing our participation and not reacting as they expected. They feel entitled to get away with it and their grandiosity has them convinced they will.

This desperate and prideful attempt to maintain dominance will eventually be their downfall.

We are still in the subtle phase of the abuse cycle in most parts of the world. We are experiencing the intermittent reinforcement of lockdowns and mandates, then loosening restrictions and restoring some freedoms… on repeat.

Many countries are now entering the perceived act of kindness phase again, providing false hope that restrictions are ending and we are moving back to normal. But the reprieve is only temporary until the cycle flips again and they take even more than the previous time.

This cycle will continue and escalate into more open assault on human rights, on our humanity, on the human spirit, on our individual sovereignty and our God-given right to exist in this world.

In some cities and countries this is already happening at a faster rate than others.

The evil forces will keep destroying the fabric of society, pillar by pillar, just as a psychopath does to the victim's life in an interpersonal relationship.

They will ride one narrative until the wheels fall off. Then before you can even find solid ground to stand on, they will launch a whole other narrative, worse than the one before.

Evil seduces first with false sweetness and promises of future salvation. It creates tempting yet deceptive invitations that require our participation. It gets worse over time but so does the effect of the intermittent reinforcement, causing people to work harder, to invest more, to become almost obsessive about complying in order to finally reach the promised reward.

The sooner we turn away from that, the better. The longer it goes on, the more difficult it is to get out.

Why does our Creator allow such evil to exist?

What if it’s all a calling back to God… to get our attention, to wake us up from our unconsciousness, so we can turn away from evil and toward that which is good?

Perhaps the existence of evil is like a spiritual alarm clock calling us to turn away from the toxic distractions, distortions, deceptions and emptiness, and instead to turn toward what is good and real.

After a lifetime of these abusive relationships, this is what I’ve come to understand as the higher purpose of encounters with evil. Now looking at these same abuse patterns in the world, I feel like this is a calling for humanity too.

We can choose to accept the invitation of evil or not.

This means we can choose to participate in evil or not. They want our voluntary consent, in fact, they need it (more on that in an upcoming article).

The spiritual war isn't just out in the world. It's taking place inside the hearts and minds of each of us.

In times when evil is ruling, we ought to learn to discern the evil surrounding us and also that which exists within the choices given to each of us in any moment.

This isn’t so easy. It’s getting harder to discern reality vs. propaganda, genuine grassroots movements vs. controlled opposition. In a climate where confusion and distortion prevail, we would be wise to not allow ourselves to be turned from our core values and principles.

Our personal core values are the most relevant filter and tool to know what to believe and what to do as individuals.

If you’ve been watching the events unfolding around the world and you’re feeling worried or afraid of where this is going, it’s important to clearly define for yourself where is your line in the sand. What will you defend with your life?

Not everyone has the same values. These are personal beliefs. Clearly identifying and knowing your values is a necessary step for protecting what matters to you with your boundaries. If you don’t know what’s important to you, you won’t know what to protect when it most matters.

The practice of setting boundaries to protect what’s important strengthens the self-worth, which is an important protection against the evil forces, whether human or supernatural.