Haters II: How to Spot A Hate Campaign

[Note: This is a long one, but I won’t be posting next week, so I thought I might as well post something now that will last through my absence. Enjoy!]

This week, I’ve picked up my very own hater! (Please see the comments to this post if you’ve missed the excitement.)

It seems kind of ridiculous – who am I, that anyone would even bother doing the hater bit with me? But someone has! So this seems like a good time to revisit the subject of haters, and how to spot them online on the occasions when they’re a little less obvious than the one here on my blog.

The internet is a brave new world for haters. It used to be that haters were limited by being identifiable. In order to spread their poison, they had to communicate it directly, by telephone or in-person conversations – and the risk always existed that what they said would be traced back to them. Their words could be directly connected with their face and their name, and they might end up being held accountable for anything they said.

With the advent of the internet, however, all of that has changed. People can hide behind screen names, announce their identities or not, claim to be someone they are not, present themselves as several different people – the possibilities for deception are virtually endless.

Further, the anonymity of the internet has made accountability pretty much a moot point. On occasion, a hater’s poison can be traced directly to them, but it’s rare. When Kelly (Secret Shadows) admitted, in a momentary fit of conscience, to posting three viciously hateful comments about her adjunct therapist under three different names on a public website, that tied those comments directly to her – but most haters do not have those kinds of moments. They thrive on the fact that, even if people know who they are, it can’t be proven, and they are careful not to provide that concrete proof. As a result, they are free to say whatever scurrilous nonsense they choose, secure in the knowledge that there is not likely to be any accountability for it whatsoever.

This being the case, it is necessary for each of us have our own common-sense defense in place as we surf the web – and part of that defense is knowing how to recognize a hate campaign when we see one. Here are some tips on what to look for.

1. Haters run in packs.
Any time you see a flock of people “coincidentally” descending on the same place at the same time, all repeating the same negative message, odds are that they are haters.

Haters never stick their necks out all alone. Individual people with personal gripes post single comments, as their individual spirit moves them. With haters, what you see is post after post after post written by what appears to be a veritable crowd of different people. They will claim they don’t know each other, or that they knew each other “way back when” but they haven’t spoken for years – and yet, by the magic of fate, with no coordination whatsoever, they all just decided to come to the same place at the same time to write the same nasty message about the same subject.

Well – I’m sure we can all see what bullshit that is.

Of course the haters know each other. They have their own places where they congregate, bonding in their negativity and coordinating their more public hate campaigns, and when they head out to the public arena, they do it in concert.

Haters also tend to enlist backup singers – people who aren’t actually part of the hate campaign but who don’t know any better than to support it. The backup singers don’t usually understand the real issue with the target – likely they’ve been fed the same lies that the haters are about to make public. But they don’t have to know the truth, because the only purpose of the backup singers is to sing the praises of the haters – their honesty, their victim status, what an all-around wonderful person they are, and how we should believe every terrible thing the haters say about their target because haters are just that trustworthy.

Normal people venting about real issues do not have backup singers. But haters almost always do.

The backup singers will also claim to have just happened to find the hate campaign. Like the haters themselves, they never admit to being part of a coordinated effort – but really, how many people can be involved in something before the “it’s all coincidence” story loses its last shred of credibility? I top the limit at four – because four people can’t even manage to meet at a restaurant for dinner without some serious coordination and planning – so the idea that all these haters and their backup singers just happened to get together is just plain ridiculous.

The pack is never as large as it appears, though – it is usually a relatively small group of people posting multiple times under different names in an attempt to appear substantially more numerous than they are.

The goal is to accomplish through numbers what they can’t accomplish through logic or evidence – that is, if ten people repeat the same gossip or tell the same lie, then maybe people will be impressed by the volume and forget about the fact that there is no concrete proof to back up whatever they’re saying. Concrete proof is never part of a hater’s arsenal, because the things they’re saying are never true.

2. Haters are self-referencing.
Haters generally run their hate campaigns in places that have no direct connection to them. For example, Secret Shadows and the others involved in that hate campaign didn’t post their comments in her blog, which everyone knew was hers and where accountability might be an issue – instead, they all went to post at the same random review site under anonymous names (further decreasing the likelihood that any of it happened by happenstance).

But in lieu of actual proof to back up what they’re saying, haters might offer a reference to another group or blog or site, constructed by themselves, where the intrepid surfer can view more examples of the same message being espoused. Of course, this is still not concrete proof – but it is another site broadcasting the same message, and sometimes readers fail to realize that it’s just the same people saying the same things.

What the haters don’t offer (because they can’t offer it) is anything concrete that readers could check out themselves for independent verification. Haters can’t use facts, because facts will never support what they’re saying – so instead, they try to create such a volume of crap that it overwhelms the facts. They want people to assume that, because the same message is said so strongly so many times in so many different places, then it must be true.

But this is a false conclusion – no matter how often a lie is repeated, or in how many different places, it is still a lie.

3. Haters get personal.
Also in lieu of proof, haters take things to a personal level immediately – their approach is never about a person doing a bad thing, it’s always an attempt at character assassination.

Why do they do this?

Well, the first reason they do it is that everyone loves drama. When things get juicy and the gossip and accusations start to fly, do readers even care who’s telling the truth? Or are they just enthralled by the spectacle of watching people zing each other?

The point of a hate campaign is always to distract and discredit, and making things personal is the best means to the end – haters distract from what the target is saying or doing by taking the focus of the discussion straight into the spicy heat of personal confrontation, and they discredit the target by attacking them on a personal level and hoping that some of the shit they throw will stick.

Hate campaigns attract attention, and the haters want the attention focused on them, on what they’re saying, on what they want other people to think about the person they’re attacking.

The other reason that haters get personal is that the personal level is the emotional level.

Haters use rhetoric geared toward provoking an emotional response – both from the target and from the spectators. They use loaded words and catchphrases intended simultaneously to demoralize the target and to turn the reading audience against them – hoping that, with emotions provoked and engaged, nobody will actually think about the messages enough to notice that they have no substance.

Does this sound like any other situation with which dissociative survivors are familiar?
Who else tries to hook people through their emotional responses in order to slip their messages past common sense and rational thought?

Programmers do. Manipulators do. Liars do.
And that’s really what haters are – they are manipulators, trying to manipulate you, the reading public, into swallowing their poisonous hatred and to turn you against their target.

But instead of blindly believing them, it is worthwhile to ask yourself why it’s so important to them to discredit their target. Why did they choose that particular target for destruction? What does that person or group or cause represent to them?

Thinking about it from that perspective can throw a whole new light on a hate campaign.

4. Haters have no point except hate.
Haters have plenty to say – but what prompted them to say it? Why did three, or ten, or fifty people suddenly show up at the same place to talk smack about someone?
Why did even one person show up here trying to insult my character?

The world may never know…

They’re not going to explain themselves. There will be no A=B, cause-and-effect connection that can be made. The real reasons behind the haters’ actions, whatever they are, will never even be hinted at in the slew of negativity that makes it into public view, because haters really aren’t there to explain themselves to us.

Their goal is to cause as much damage as they can to the public perception of a specific person, group, or cause – nothing less, nothing more – and their goal is not going to be furthered by explaining themselves, because if you knew the real motivations behind what they were saying, you would probably think twice about listening to them.

If you knew that hate campaigns were being engineered by predators, to discredit the sources of information available to us so that we are more likely to stay their victims – would you be as likely to believe what they said?

If you knew that a hate campaign was part of a borderline revenge tactic best defined as “I imagined that you hit me, so I’m hitting you back ten times as hard”… would you still consider it to be valid? Would you still want to support it?

Probably not – because you’d feel pretty stupid believing or supporting the haters if you knew that’s where they were coming from, right?

So we need to ask ourselves why it’s so important to these people that we hate their target with them, because the haters will certainly never tell you – they’ll just show up, start the blitz, and hope that nobody remembers to ask.

5. Haters never let go.
We’ve all been angry or suffered hurt feelings in the course of our lives – but how long do these feelings normally last?

Assuming that we’re not talking about our feelings toward perpetrators, and that we have enough self-awareness to separate those feelings from the feelings that are evoked by other events – how long do the feelings last?

How long do we wish we could exact revenge on a person who made us angry? How long do we want to hurt back in response to feeling hurt? How long do we have to keep venting about something before the emotions wane and it’s just not that important any more?

In short, how long does it take before we get over it?

We might continue to feel some emotional response for a while, but the kind of emotional intensity that drives us to do something about it is a much shorter-lived phenomenon… unless you’re a hater.

Haters go after their targets like rabid dogs. They don’t get over things and move on – because in truth, whatever natural emotion they might have felt regarding their target (assuming they ever had anything that might be called a reason for their feelings) has long since been subsumed in a soupy morass of bitterness and resentment and desire for destruction that has nothing to do with the target and everything to do with the individuals themselves.

And this is why, although people with normal and genuine complaints or reactions are generally satisfied with one public statement of their feelings (and many never feel the need to make a public statement at all), a hater just never runs dry. Haters spew their venom over and over and over – not just for the few days when an emotional reaction might be expected to remain intense, but for months, or even years, long past the time when anything natural or reasonable could possibly be driving them.

So what is driving them??

There’s that question again – and it’s the most important question to ask yourself when you see a hate campaign in progress – why does it matter so much to them? Why are they putting in the time and the effort to seek someone out and beat on them over and over and over? Why do they keep showing up to grind the same old axe?

WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE THEY TRYING TO DESTROY BY CLUBBING US ALL INTO SUBMISSION WITH THEIR HATEFULNESS, AND WHY ARE THEY TRYING TO DESTROY IT???
And what would it cost us if we let it work?

We might not be able to answer those questions – I know that I certainly have no answers, even with regard to myself. Why do I merit a hater? I have no clue – but clearly someone thinks I’m worth the time and the effort. So I guess I must be saying something that someone doesn’t want said.

So… think about it.

There’s not much we can do to stop the haters right now – the law is a long way from catching up to the speed with which the internet is growing. No doubt, in future decades, the anonymity factor will be removed – precisely because of these kinds of abuses – but it hasn’t happened yet, so right now the haters are running amok.

But even if the law can’t stop them, we can – because it’s our belief they’re after. It’s us that they’re trying to manipulate. And it’s up to each of us to decide how much credence we’re going to give the haters.

Do we believe their lies? Buy into their messages? Follow where they lead?
Or can we hold on to our common sense – step back from the dramatic intensity of the fracas, consider what they’re trying to accomplish – and wonder why?

Another Kind of Internet Predator

In my earlier articles on internet predators (here, here, here, and here), I spoke primarily about cult recruiters and other perpetrators trained in mind control who claim to be dissociative survivors in order to find new victims. These predators are difficult to recognize because they are going out of their way to look like members of the community — but at the same time, their methods of operation can become more apparent if you know what to look for.

However — not all predators are recruiters. Some of them have nothing to do with organized perpetration of any kind — except for the fact that they have been victimized by those groups. They are survivors, just like you are, but they can also be predators.

Dissociative survivors who are either not actively involved in therapy or not very far along in the process are very likely to have parts of their systems engaged in activities about which the “day people” know nothing. They might be acting out their pain and trauma in any number of ways — through prostitution, or excessive casual sex, heavy drinking, drug use, attending S&M clubs or psuedo-slavery groups — or some of them might be choosing to use the techniques learned at the hands of their perpetrators to hurt others.

Dissociative systems created through purposeful programming are not composed only of the hurt children longing for comfort and the noble adults who have managed to hold the system together through all these years. Survivors who have been subjected to organized mind control programming will have some very very dark parts to their worlds — such as people who learned to abuse others, or people who learned to program others, or people who learned by force of necessity to like the world in which they were trapped. These parts can and do cause serious damage.

Some might feel it’s unfair to classify these people as predators simply because they’re also survivors. Haven’t we all been hurt? Don’t we all deserve understanding and compassion? Aren’t we all trying to heal?

Well… we have all been hurt. But we’re not all trying to heal — and even if we are, we start at the beginning of the road, not the end of it. And some people stay lingering at the beginning of the road for months. Or years. Or decades. Or forever. The simple fact of being in therapy does not make all survivors safe and harmless. If a system’s dark ones have not been addressed, then whatever it is that they do to vent their own pain and rage and fear and frustration — they’ll keep right on doing it.

So you’re free to expend all the compassion and understanding you want — but don’t kid yourself into thinking that your compassion and understanding will be the magic balm that will reach these wounded souls and kindle the light of warmth and caring.

Not everyone is waiting for the one person in the world who will reach out to them. Some people are simply waiting for the next person who’s stupid enough to try.

Sure, they’re acting out of their own pain and woundedness — but that doesn’t change the fact that they are dangerous.

Anyone who purposely attempts to cause damage to someone else is a predator. That includes survivors who would rather hurt others than help themselves. It also includes survivors who simply haven’t gotten to the point in their healing where different choices can be made .

Dissociative survivors, and especially the front-world people of dissociative systems, want communities where they can find understanding and validation and support — of course they do. It’s a basic human desire to find connection and society. And I’m not discouraging any of us from doing that.

But don’t throw caution to the winds when you do. Don’t assume that the system members you meet and get to know represent the totality of someone else’s system. Don’t assume that every member of someone’s system looks kindly on you or wants to be your friend. Don’t assume that the person you think of as your friend is incapable of looking on you with predatory interest.

Guard your own safety and your own healing work. Talk within your group about the people you know and the interactions you have with them. Be sensitive to the way things are presented to you, and to interactions that seem intended to hit your sensitive emotional hot buttons, pushing you into some action that you wouldn’t have done if your feelings hadn’t been so worked up. Don’t believe another survivor blindly, especially if they’re telling you negative information about yourself, your other friends, or your therapist. Don’t let your child parts have unsupervised interaction with anyone. (As I’ve said before, a therapist or a friend with nothing to hide and no agenda to pursue will have no reason to object to your supervision.)

And if you can’t do these things — if you can’t talk to your system members or supervise your child parts — then at the very least, keep all your interactions with other survivors in a group setting, where the public nature of the conversation will impose some restraint and substantially lessen the likelihood that your vulnerabilities can be taken advantage of.

Having friends is a good thing — but not at the risk of your own safety, stability, or chance to heal.

Internet Predators: Why Do They Do It

The big question is, why. Why would these predators go after the online survivor population? What’s the point? What’s in it for them?

Well – since I’m not one of them, I don’t really know. All I really have are some guesses, based on the knowledge I unwillingly gained through 33 years being victimized by a particular organized group. So for what that’s worth, here’s what I think.

There seems to be an idea among the DID community that organized perpetrator groups are acting with some greater goal in mind. There has to be something BIG to explain why they do what they do, something big enough to fit the monstrousness of their actions.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is.

I believe their only real gains are money, profit, and a limited sort of power – the most plebeian and prosaic goals imaginable, but extremely powerful incentives all the same.

I believe the “conspiracy theories” have grown from the stories of victims who have escaped from their various abusive groups. These victims emerge from the years of torture believing it was for some greater purpose – becoming a moon goddess or a high priestess, being a satanic bride or some other form of chosen one, playing a vital part in their group’s plans to take over the world or gain secret control over world leaders – no matter what group was behind the abuse or what specific beliefs the victims were taught, they universally received the clear message that their group was special, and that they themselves were destined for a higher purpose.

What nobody seems to realize is that the abusers have been saying  exactly the same thing to every child victim for decades. Every single child is told they are The One, that they are going to grow up to rule the moon, become the high priestess, or play an instrumental part in the group’s plan for world domination.

It’s like telling every eight-year-old gymnast that she’ll be on the Olympic team someday – although there are millions of eight-year-old girls in gymnastics, and only six girls on the Olympic team. Obviously there are a few million girls who are never going to make it. And yet, each of those millions of eight-year-old girls has a better chance of being an Olympic gymnast than any victim of organized abuse has of being a high priestess or a moon goddess. Those things will never happen. They are complete and utter lies.

Abusers teach the myth of specialness for the same reason that gymnastics coaches sell the myth of the Olympian – because it gives the recipient an incentive to tolerate whatever harshness and sacrifice is necessary to achieve that final goal. It drives people to reach as high as they can. It is a motivation.

It is also a control. With the promise of a reward glittering ahead, people will psychologically commit themselves more deeply. Every drop of blood and sweat, every moment of pain, becomes a sacrifice that increases the worth of the envisioned reward. When they are the high priestess or the triumphant world conqueror (or the Olympic champion), then it will all have been worth it. To quit before achieving the reward becomes a failure, a waste of all the effort already put in. With a reward in sight like a carrot on a stick, abusers can drive their victims until they drop, and without having to give them anything more concrete than a promise to spur them on.

And the cold truth is, many predators don’t need any better reason than that. Controlling others, manipulating them, twisting their minds, dancing them around like a puppet – these things are enough of a reason for predators to do what they do.

In fact, if we remove the blatantly cruel and abusive element from these examples, probably everyone can think of someone who delights in controlling others just because they can. There may be no real reason they need to, but they like to do it. Anyone can be a controlling person. Predators are just willing to go to greater lengths to gain and keep their control.

And there is another, perhaps more compelling reason for some of them – they don’t want anyone messing with their monopoly. Because let’s face it, the predators have had things pretty much their own way up to now. They operate in the shadows outside the boundaries of society, where the laws can’t touch them because it can’t even see them. They abuse their victims so severely that most are too terrified to ever risk attempting to expose them. They hide their identities and their locations from their victims so that, even if the victims do dare to tell what happened to them, they can’t turn the perpetrators in to the authorities.

Predators have lived undisturbed in the secret shadows behind our every-day world, and they have been protected by secrecy and fear.

Until, that is, the age of the internet…

When has there ever been so much information available to learn the truth of what these abusive groups do, or so much support and knowledge available to their victims? When before have we ever been able to group together, share stories, receive validation of our memories, and learn from each other like we can now? And when before has there been so much good therapeutic information available, even to those of us who are not able to find qualified therapists where we live?

Of course, the predators don’t want this to happen. They don’t want therapists who understand mind control or organized abuse to share their expertise with the community at large. They don’t want survivors congregating and sharing knowledge and support with each other. These things threaten the ignorance and isolation and secrecy they need in order to thrive.

So… predators go to great lengths to sow distrust of therapists and other supportive people among the survivor community, and to spread seeds of discord and dissension in the support groups.

This is an extension of what they have always done. They have specifically taught their victims to fear and distrust the authority figures that a child would be most likely to turn to for help – such as teachers, police, judges, therapists.

In this case, the predators are simply activating the distrust they have already created toward real-life people and linking it to the online world. They are seeking to discredit the available knowledge and turn survivors against their helpers, each other, and themselves – because they know that survivors, once isolated by their own distrust, will neither give nor receive any help.

And in doing so, they continue to seek the power and control that has always been their turn-on.

With knowledge and caution, however, we can be armed to protect ourselves, our systems, and our opportunities to heal and create the our own safe lives as we deserve to do.

Internet Predators and Child Alters: 10 Ideas to Keep Them Safe

Another way that internet predators can infiltrate a dissociative survivor’s system is by befriending child alters.

These younger alters can be (although they are not always) more trusting than the adults, or they can be conditioned to unquestioning obedience, either of which makes them vulnerable if a predator wants to take advantage of them. Child alters also tend to have more difficulty discerning when someone is trying to trick them or manipulate them. With their child’s perspective, they can be influenced to believe things that would not get past an adult’s critical thinking skills.

Generally speaking (which is to say, true in many cases, but not necessarily true for every survivor or every child alter) – the child alters know vast amounts of information about the survivor’s dissociative system, information that can be very dangerous if it is given into unscrupulous hands. Some child alters also can wield immense power within the system. They might be able to affect other alters or even to change the system landscape.

As one might imagine, a predator could do a lot of damage to a survivor’s system by gaining influential control over the child alters.

Someone once mentioned to me, when I suggested that I thought it was risky to let their child alters go without supervision, that she didn’t have to worry because her background did not involve organized abuse or mind control – this is not true.

ANY AND EVERY CHILD ALTER IS VULNERABLE TO PREDATORS.

Your background does not have to include programming, mind control, ritual abuse, or cult activities to make your child alters vulnerable to a predator’s approach. All a predator requires is a malleable mind and an uncritical perspective, and any child alter will give them that.

Since this predatory tactic is designed to take advantage of divisions or dissociative walls within a system, it is most effectively combatted by developing and maintaing strong communication skills among alters. Dissociative survivors who are wrestling with denial, or those who leave their system to manage itself because they are too depleted to fight about it – those survivors are at particular risk for being victimized in this way.

It is absolutely critical that the adult members of our systems protect our younger alters from doing anything which might be dangerous to them or to the entire system-and there are a number of common-sense things we can do which will dramatically reduce the likelihood that our child alters will be easy pickings for an online predator.

1.       Build communication skills! Among all the other reasons why internal communication is such an important part of DID work, here is another. Predatory influences on your system can be detected and defused more quickly if the system is able to work together and communicate effectively.

2.       Child alters should never do anything online without an adult’s close supervision. It doesn’t matter if you think you know what they’re doing, or you trust them to follow the rules you’ve set for them, or you’re sure they can’t get into trouble at the sites they’re allowed to visit. Better safe than sorry. A child alter’s online activities should always be closely monitored.

3.       Child alters should not have instant messaging conversations or receive private e-mail. This is especially true if your system communication skills are still in progress. The most certain way to make sure that child alters do not become a predator’s target is to prevent them from conversing online at all. If you are not able to monitor what is said to your child alters or by whom, then in the interest of your own safety and that of your alters, keep the littles offline. Do not rely on conversation histories, as these can be erased. Do not rely on the belief that your online “friend” is a safe person and would never hurt you or your child alters. Online appearances can be deceiving.

4.       Be suspicious if someone wants to talk your child alters alone. There should be no reason for any outside person to speak to your child alters without your supervision-and a trustworthy person will have no problem with your supervision. If a person is persistent about having private conversations with your alters, there is likely a reason they don’t want you to know what they’re saying. Don’t be guilt-tripped into allowing private interaction because someone acts hurt that you don’t trust them. This is a blatant manipulation and a big red flag.

5.       Be suspicious if someone requests to speak to your child alters on a regular basis. Regularly asking for child alters, or turning the conversation in a way that they know will bring your child alters out, is a danger sign. Anybody who is attempting to manipulate your system in this way probably has other manipulative intentions in mind as well.

6.       Keep in touch. Talk to your child alters about the outside people with whom they interact. Even if you saw every word of the conversation, this is still important. As with any child, keeping yourself interested and involved in their activities will maintain a strong bond between you, and consistent attention can enable you to pick up on developing problems much more quickly. Some signs of possible trouble include the child alter appearing reluctant to repeat the conversation, any claims that they can’t or are not allowed to repeat what was said, or appearing more secretive than usual. Even if the conversation looked innocuous to you, these can be signs that a covert message has been passed to the child alter, and it should be thoroughly explored as soon as possible. The earlier you detect this and address it, the better for you and your entire system.

7.       Watch for patterns in your system. If your system begins to act or react in ways that are unusual, if things internally appear or feel very different from your norm, or if you experience any feelings or thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere and not relate directly to anything, pay attention to when they occur. See if they routinely occur within a predictable space of time after a child alter has talked to a particular person. If so, then your child alters should no longer be permitted to speak to that person-even if this means you have to stop talking to them too!

8.       Be suspicious if system communication inexplicably breaks down. Once they get a hold on your child alters, predators will instruct the alters to hide their activities from you. In some cases, the alters themselves will be hidden. Be sensitive to any shifts or changes in your ability to see or speak to other alters in your system. Early detection can make all the difference in your ability to help an alter who has been entrapped by a predator.

9.       Stay away from known predators. This should be self-evident, but experience has proven that it needs to be said. If you become aware that a certain person is suspected of harming others through any kind of predatory behavior, DO NOT GO STRIKE UP A FRIENDSHIP WITH THEM.

10.   Have an open mind. Child alters will pick up on your attitudes as easily as outside children do. If they fear they will be rejected or disbelieved, or if they do not have a good relationship with you, then they are less likely to tell you if anything is happening. No doubt we all remember, on some level, what it was like to be a child living in fear of punishments and reprisals for “telling.” Predators can and will use those same threats on your child alters in the current day.

Safety is something we all deserve-but it is also something we owe to our younger selves who have already been hurt enough. It is up to us to prove to them that the current day is a safer time than our childhood was. Part of this is protecting them from any predatory influence.

We need to make our systems strong enough and cohesive enough to repel any attempt by a predator to breach our inner walls and run rampant through our worlds, and until we develop the necessary skills to do that, we need to take the necessary precautions to prevent our defenses from being breached.

Surf safely.

Internet Predators: One Way They Work

Survivors generally have a lot of trouble with trust. For many of them, trusting other people can seem like a near impossibility – with one major exception: survivors tend to have an inordinate amount of trust for other survivors. And this is something predators know.

It is therefore very easy and very common for a predator to create an online persona and say that he or she is a survivor. Such a persona earns them an instant claim on the good faith of other survivors. It is a predator’s entreé into the groups and forums where their targets congregate, and a password to unqualified acceptance within those groups.

Beyond that commonality, there are a variety of tactics that predators may use.

One effective approach is to exploit the distrust of Self to increase the fear of Other. This tactic, successfully employed, will encourage the target survivor to separate themselves from other reliable sources of support and make them emotionally dependent on the predator, who can then manipulate the survivor as they wish.

The reason this works is that, much as they distrust other people, for many survivors the person they distrust most is themselves. They are painfully uncertain of their own decisions, afraid to have their own opinions or feelings, often unsure what their opinions or feelings are, and terrified that the feelings or thoughts they can identify are “wrong.” Self-distrust is the legacy from a lifetime of having one’s thoughts and feelings stifled, ignored, or punished.

Unfortunately, self-distrust can be exploited in adult survivors. If someone is profoundly uncertain of their own thoughts and feelings, then they are vulnerable to anyone who is authoritative enough to overwhelm the survivor’s fragile personal beliefs with their own.

Predators can take a survivor’s doubts and fears and twist them unmercifully into an even bigger and much more serious issue.

For example, if a survivor expresses any doubt in a current relationship, “my spouse isn’t respecting my needs” or “my friend did something that hurt my feelings” or “my therapist isn’t available right now but I really need to talk to them”…

… then they have opened the door for the predator. “I hear you, that’s terrible, and it’s way worse than you think, let me tell you what I know about that person, here’s the rest of the story, now that you’re finally beginning to see it for yourself, I can tell you, this is the truth, listen to me, I know…your best friend is spreading rumors about you behind your back… your therapist is cold and withholding, your pain makes them happy… you can’t trust your spouse/lover/friend/therapist, they don’t care about you like they say they do, if they really cared about you then they wouldn’t do what they did, they don’t care about you like I do… I’m your only real friend…”

From the smallest moments of insecurity, a predator can begin to reshape the survivor’s entire perspective toward the safe people in their lives on whom they rely.

The survivor, beguiled by the insights and empathy the predator demonstrates in early interactions, begins to look to the predator to help them interpret everything that happens to them. And the predator is only too happy to make those interpretations for them.

Predators build a framework of half-truths and lies. They build in small steps, never straying so far from the truth that the lie becomes obvious, but giving everything a twist calculated to play on the survivor’s own insecurities. The survivor is effectively blinded to the predator’s manipulation with their own fears. The cumulative effect can be quite dramatic.

Under the predator’s influence, survivors turn on the people they have far more reason to believe in, people with whom they have had longer and more intimate relationships. They confront these people, both directly and indirectly, with the fears and suspicions bred by the predator. Human relationships are never without occasional disagreements or misunderstandings or mismatches between need and response; however, in the skillful hands of the malicious predator, each and every one of these occasions is transformed into a major grievance with which the survivor will accost friends, spouses, partners, and therapists.

Some indicators that this might be a manipulated action are: (i) the survivor is committed to making everything the fault of the other and is unable to retain or process any contradictory information; (ii) the survivor’s presentation is repetitive, with unnaturally excessive use of a precise phrase or description; (iii) these repetitive responses are used even when they are not actually a response to what is being said; (iv) the survivor persists in their accusations beyond all reason (i.e. in the face of clear and concrete evidence to the contrary); and/or (v) the same argument keeps breaking out again and again across months or years, with the same strength and virulence, as if it had never been addressed before.

The most common immediate reaction to confrontation and accusation is anger. People can generally be relied on to “snap back,” especially when they’re accused of things they think are ridiculous or when the accusations are based on a faulty interpretation of reality. Defensively trying to “set the record straight” is also a very common reaction. The survivor will then take these reactions back to the predator, who will continue to interpret for them. And so the cycle continues.

This is an easy and reliable way for a predator to shape a survivor’s perspective without the survivor recognizing what’s happening. At each step, the predator will appear to empathize with the survivor – but will also touch on the survivor’s deeper fears and insecurities, connecting to those feelings and relating them to current events. A predator will use and manipulate the feelings, magnifying the “wrongs” of the other person, subtly expanding the suggestion of hurts caused and damage done to the survivor by that person.

If this is done right, the survivor will believe at each step that the thoughts and feelings are their own, rather than things being suggested to them. For outside observers, it will become clear over time that some other influence has been at work, but by the time this recognition is possible, the predator will already have closed off their prey from outside intervention. The survivor will have been coached to believe that the predator is the only one who has their best interests at heart, that others are jealous of the relationship and want to destroy it, that others will say anything to pull the survivor away, and that they are trying to hurt the survivor by doing so. Intervention at this point only serves as proof that the predator is right.

This mirrors in many ways the dynamics and mind tricks used by perpetrators on children. All adult survivors, and dissociative survivors in particular, are well-conditioned to be victimized by this kind of manipulation. And too many of them are, in fact, falling into precisely this trap.

Ultimately, the survivor will break off relationships with friends, family, therapists, everyone who was once important in their lives, leaving them alone and isolated with the predator. At that point, the survivor is truly at the predator’s mercy – and mercy is something that no predator understands.

I have a few guesses as to the motivations behind the manipulations, but they are only guesses. And that is a subject for another day.

For today, suffice it to say – the visible results vary. Most times the predatory influence appears destructive. I know of several people who were induced to take medication overdoses. Two survived, one did not. A few, once isolated, were abandoned by the predator. They were left utterly alone and in despair. One such victim committed suicide. Another drifts through life, barely functioning, in a miasma of chaos and darkness and confusion. I do not know what became of the others. They simply vanished.

In a very few cases, the influence appears constructive – to the predator, at least. Some few targets have become willing tools for the manipulative predators who control them. Human tools provide predators with new potential targets, bring them important information about the targets, give them “home bases” from which to work, and generally cover their activities with a veneer of respectability so that other survivors will approach and lower their guards. I am not certain whether the tools realize the truth of what they are doing or not. I tend to think that they don’t – but then, I also don’t consider ignorance to be an excuse.

But what is to be done about it? Internet predators hide in the virtual shadows behind showy mouthpieces who give them an appearance of credibility. Nobody knows who they really are behind the anonymous screen name – and even if we did know, “internet predation” would be an incredibly difficult allegation to prosecute.

So, as survivors, we need to protect ourselves on the internet. And it is up to each of us to do it for ourselves. The so-called security measures of any web site will not do it for us. Nobody else will do it for us. Nobody else can do it for us. We have to accept and attend to that responsibility ourselves – we have to exercise care and caution in every interaction with the online community – or else we are leaving ourselves vulnerable.

And the predators are out there, looking for their new best friend.

Internet Predators: They Really Are Everywhere

The internet can be a great resource for survivors. So many of us have issues with trust, anxiety, panic, and other pitfalls of face-to-face socializing. The anonymity and digital distance of online interaction feels like a safer alternative to many.

Unfortunately, predators know how to surf the web too, and survivors are often just as vulnerable to their ruses and imprecations online as they would be to any real-life perpetrator. Sometimes, in fact, the online connection creates more vulnerability, since there is so much less information on which to rely. There is no body language to see, no chance to study a person’s eyes or facial expressions, no ability to observe the person in their real world or verify what they say of themselves. A person hiding behind an anonymous screen name can tell any lies they want with very little risk of exposure.

Predators take advantage of this anonymity. And survivors, in my experience, are overly trusting in online communications. They are gathering mainly in forums which are either wide open to the passing public or protected only through the need to respond to an administrative e-mail that “yes, I’m dissociative, may I please join” (because nobody could possibly lie about that). And yet, survivors seem to suspend all critical thinking, rational judgment, and common sense when they participate in these communities. Not that they don’t possess these skills – they do possess them, in the same proportions and across the same range as any other group of people – they simply stop using them.

They are in such a rush to accept and support every member that they never pause to question or evaluate the information they’re receiving, even when it’s blatantly false. Apparently, within these groups, it is a greater crime to call attention to an obvious lie than to tell the lie in the first place.

They are so desirous and willing to believe that every member is a genuine suffering soul seeking solace that they are lured into private conversations and individual face-to-face meetings where they are vulnerable, and they walk right into traps of all kinds.

(Just because someone says they’re a survivor does not automatically make them safe for private chats or real-life meetings! An axe murderer could say he was a survivor if he wanted a new and creative way to meet victims! And yet, most survivors will not even question someone else once they’ve claimed to be a fellow survivor… just saying that seems to be taken as some kind of infallible insurance of safety and credibility. *sigh*)

Survivors can be so trusting that they will share full names, personal email addresses, home addresses, and phone numbers in public or semi-public online settings. I don’t care how “secure” a forum or web group might be – people should always always keep their personal contact information to themselves. That is always a stupid thing to share. We can’t control who sees what we put online, so we should never put anything there that is too personal for the world to know.

And by “personal,” I don’t mean our memories or our most embarrassing moments. I mean the addresses where our kids live, the numbers to the phones we carry with us everywhere we go, or the legal names by which we can be easily traced and located. Not everyone in the world is a nice person! They’re not going to give us a break because they feel pity for the trauma we’ve already suffered! They’re going to look at all the information we’ve provided for them, and they’re going to see a big sign saying “easy mark” – and they will use that information against us! For god’s sake, you would think survivors already understood that…

To top it off, there’s actually a blog out there in cyberspace where a person claiming to be a dissociative survivor has posted their entire system map on an open page for anyone and everyone to see, complete with the names, ages, and functions of each of the alters. Is this person insane??? Are they not aware how dangerous it is for any dissociative survivor to expose that much of themselves where any idiot with a computer can see it??? Even a dissociative survivor with a non-organized background can be manipulated and used by perpetrators who know how to take advantage of the dissociative condition. I can hardly conceive of the stupidity attendant upon making this level of disclosure online. Why would anyone make it so easy for the perps to get to them??

Unless it’s a ploy by a predator to draw out genuine survivors…

The tricks of the predators are many and varied, and they don’t feel obliged to play fair.

But say it is a genuine survivor. Then this just exemplifies how survivors all over the internet are making themselves vulnerable to internet predators, apparently without the slightest awareness of the danger they’re creating for themselves.

This is true in every web community for dissociative survivors of which I’ve been a participating member. (To date, I have participated in a total of twelve such communities over seven years.) There is not a single exception – every single one of those communities, regardless of what they claim, has been infected to some degree by predators taking advantage of the naivétè and blind good faith of the genuine survivors who have gone there seeking support and companionship.

And this should be no surprise to anyone. The communities are not hard to join, and there is no way to substantiate that a person is who they say they are.

I would never suggest that survivors should not gather in their forums and communities. I think the strength and support that can be gained from these groups is invaluable.

I am, however, saying that we absolutely cannot check our common sense at the door when we go in. We have to keep our eyes open and our antennae out. We have to use some judgment regarding what we say, and regarding who can be believed and who can’t, instead of blindly trusting everyone without discrimination.

I know many people who have been very seriously hurt by internet predators. There are some whose healing has been set back years. There are a few who have died.

And I know of some who are still blindly following where the predators lead, lost in denial and refusing to see the source of the devastation being wrought in their minds and in their lives.

I can tell someone the truth as I see it, but I can’t make them see it the same way. They have to be able to see the truth for themselves, and the best thing I can do is to stay away from them until that happens – because until then, they’d prefer to bring me down with them rather than believe I might be right.

Next post I’ll be writing some of my observations on how internet predators get their holds on people. Maybe a future post will also address some of my speculations on why, although I really can’t presume to know why. It doesn’t always seem to make much sense from what I can see. (Of course, there is doubtless plenty in those relationships that I DON’T see.)

In the meantime, be safe in your surfing.