Abusive Authority

I wonder if you are like me and have been searching for a way to make sense of the madness of the last two years. I was glad to find that others have been thinking through similar issues and it has taken me a while to condense my ideas into this series of three posts on societal trauma and abuse.

I believe that what governments are doing in many parts of the modern world today is clearly abusive, no less here in Victoria, Australia. An American trauma coach, Meredith Miller in her interview with Dr Reiner Füllmich, has seen a connection between the micro (individual) and the macro (systems, family, society). There are characteristics of domestic abuse that have clear parallels in our governments’ behaviour.

Isolation

Isolating the abused from their support structures is necessary for abuse to occur. The abused must not be allowed to compare him or herself to others and get a sense of balance.

What about “lock downs” (a term formerly used only for isolating prisoners in revolt) as a means of quarantining the healthy (remember when it was the sick that quarantined?) Where once sick people, the elderly or new mothers received visits, instead there has been a lack of personal touch, comfort of another’s presence and facial recognition through mask wearing. Lives and businesses have been either changed irrevocably or destroyed by the lack of compassion and healthy connection, all in the name of health. We were shocked in Victoria in 2021 to find that while we were being kept alone during the lock downs certain parliamentarians created new rules to keep their executive ’emergency’ powers going in spite of the fact that there was clearly no pandemic anymore according to the old definition, as there was a cure and deaths were low.

Cognitive Dissonance

An abused person will often remain with an abuser because of cognitive dissonance. The abused wants to believe that their partner loves them but when the behaviour toward them is abusive they can go into denial and not see the truth. An outsider might present evidence, facts or logic but the abused is operating out of a primal part of the brain and access to logic is denied. The abused can even excuse the behaviour of those who have hurt them because it is too painful to believe the truth. If the outsider pushes hard enough the abused may get defensive and reject the counsel and even the company of those who really care for them.

Read more: Abusive Authority

I’m a trusting sort. I wanted to believe that our government would protect and provide so I went along with the early restrictions until I did my own research and found that none of the measures were based on common sense, logic or science. Like many others, I tried to express my opinion of excessive government overreach but was met with harsh or dismissive responses. Name calling has been rife. Terms such as “conspiracy theorist”, “selfish”, “activist”, spreader of “misinformation” and “extremist” all carry negative connotations and seek to cancel culture and all forms of honest debate.

The Abuse Cycle

There are two phases of an abuse cycle – inflicting pain, criticizing or withholding something needed, followed by “love bombing” or a reduction in the harshness. When abusers see that they’ve gone too far and may lose their ‘prey’ altogether, they either hold back on the harshness, or give gifts.

On a societal level the government locked us down and then provided an economic stimulus to keep us appeased. They restricted our movements for a time and then opened them up before Christmas. They told us not to travel beyond 5 km, then extended it when we were stifling. Such ‘push and pull’ kept us confused. Then came the vaccination mandates: “No jab, no job”. All traditionally accepted notions of “informed consent” for health decisions disappeared and coercion to take an experimental vaccine violated ethical guidelines set out in The Nuremberg Code.

The “rules” have continued to change frequently and individual conscience and common sense are thrown out the window. JP Sears’ Why Life Jackets Should be Mandatory sketch is a comedic attempt to highlight the ludicrous nature of the vaccination rules.

Control

The ultimate goal for the abuser is to gain control and to maintain it. When a person or group think that they are losing control, they tend to double down on their restrictive measures as they are often terrified of being mediocre or of being found out. Enforcing trivial demands and maintaining constant surveillance are ways for developing the habit of compliance.

The public was expected to be abreast of the ever changing rules; night time curfews, how to drink alcohol, one parent at a time in the playground, cleaning of surfaces, to name a few. QR coding and showing our medical information with vaccine check-ins have reduced our privacy.

Having control is like an addictive drug that brings a thrill but then takes more and more abuse to replicate the feeling. Comparatively trivial demands like keeping 1.5 metres apart have become more sinister as our bodily autonomy has been threatened with having to take a vaccine to keep our jobs, study or enjoy a recreational pursuit. Interference of the state in respect to personal freedoms is unprecedented.

When a perpetrator is being found out, they then can play the victim and make out as if the abused is the abuser. While we all know that both jabbed and unjabbed can both contract and transmit covid -19, the government (and their marketing through media) promotes the notion that the unvaccinated, the scapegoat, are the perpetrators of spreading the disease. I have heard this inconsistency parroted endlessly.

Fear

An abuser keeps his victim living in fear; fear of losing love, financial support, protection, or fear of punishment. Through inducing fear of a “deadly pandemic”, society was prepared to take drastic measures. People wanted a solution and were promised a quick vaccine roll out. Fear was heightened by ramping up the numbers of deaths and showing upsetting images of people suffering or dying from the disease. People were blamed for being spreaders. Fear was maintained through threats of being fined for not wearing masks, not social distancing, and not following mandates. Fear was further consolidated by turning people against one another and threatening loss of relationship.

Lies

The abuser monopolizes perceptions of reality such as using gaslighting – a form of abuse that causes someone to doubt their own perceptions. This occurs when an abuser distorts the abused’s perception of reality so that they feel crazy for questioning. The implicit message is ‘you can’t trust your perception; you need to trust what you are told by those above you in power.’

The constant barrage of daily updates of the case numbers on main stream news (MSM) with our premier, the messages posted on electronic billboards and the propaganda spread through every organisation to QR code in, mask up, social distance etc. all give a very skewed view of health and safety. We know the messages: “Stay Home, Stay Safe”; “Feeling Sick? Get tested;” “Stop the Spread”. What happened to exercise? Get some sunshine? Take some vitamin C & D? But questioning is not allowed. All dissidents are censored or fact-checked.

Mainstream media is culpable for neglecting to tell us many things. Reports by MSM of the protests against government overreach were totally misrepresented. At one protest in Melbourne that I attended, MSM estimated 3000 people present. The real numbers were more objectively measured closer to 30,000.

The narrative has told us to listen to “the science”. But what if we have been lied to about the science? The trial data for the Pfizer “vaccine” was fudged, and most of it hidden. When we look at the real case numbers, the reliability of the PCR tests and the actual danger of covid-19, we realise there has been a cover up. Globally, many governments, including Australia, prohibited the use of known safe treatments that when given early would have curbed the severity of the disease. This is simply abuse.

Adverse reactions to the covid -19 vaccines have been deliberately minimised. We have been told that pericarditis and myocarditis are both “mild and rare” – they are not! “Safe and Effective” could not be further from the truth when there is no long term safety data. See peer reviewed medical papers on adverse reactions. Our own Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has not answered questions regarding whether they did due diligence in confirming the results of the trials themselves or just trusted the US FDA conclusions (see Senator Robert’s speech at mark 3:17). Reporting systems like the DAEN (Aust), VAERS (US), Yellow Card (UK), and the Defence Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) from the US here (p.31-32), all confirm that the vaccines are doing untold harm and death.

Reinforcing Compliance

It is terrifying to be “outcast” from connection with people. Abusers use this truth to turn groups against each other. The group becomes a part of rejecting the non-compliant. If they can’t turn you to their side, they may attack you. This was seen in Hitler’s reign against the ‘socially unfit’. Some moral Christians turned a blind eye to how their government was treating Jews, gypsies, and the mentally or physically disabled. Many succumb to the narrative and sacrifice the truth for social belonging.

The term ‘Medical Apartheid’ has been coined to differentiate between two classes of people. It is discrimination and disgusting that some family members have been shunned for not getting vaccinated and have consequently been unable to attend weddings or family functions like Christmas dinner. But this has been blatantly encouraged by the media. The question, “Can You Safely Hang Out with Unvaccinated Friends?” in the article of the same name, belies its intention: propaganda surrounding the push for vaccination and the denigrating of those who aren’t. The following text shows the dismissive attitude prevalent among some in the community.

Loose Women Debate

Threats

The way the abuser maintains control is to threaten the abused to keep them in submission. This can be physical or verbal and is part of keeping the abused fearful and non-resistant.

Tony Archer has also made comparisons between domestic abuse and government overreach in his excellent article, “Covid and the Crushing Use of Coercive Control”. He says , “In Victoria, the threats quickly escalated from $200 on-the-spot fines for not wearing a mask to threats of $90,500 fines for individuals, and up to $452,500, for businesses, found guilty of breaching public health orders. Forced medical procedures in the form of vaccine mandates, were achieved the same way. No amount of prior loyalty or natural immunity mattered. Health workers, teachers, truck drivers, checkout operators, who were lauded in the early days of the pandemic for risking their lives on the frontline of an ‘unprecedented pandemic’, lost their jobs if they refused to be injected with the new-tech vaccine.”¹ MSM bemoans the lack of workers in hospitals and schools yet won’t admit the government has created the shortage. In Victoria, much of the public does not realise that these vaccine mandates are still in effect. The abuse hurts everyone!

The threats have extended to our medical community in a most disturbing way. Medical professionals can only promote the covid-19 vaccines, regardless of their patients’ prior health considerations or whether the first dose resulted in a severe reaction. I have a young relative who was recommended to get the second dose after developing pericarditis after the first and this is commonplace. I was deeply moved by The Conference of Conscience Part 1 and Part 2 where Australian medical experts speak out on the censorship and abuse they have received at the hands of the government and particularly AHPRA (our Australian Regulation Agency). To speak out means risking a loss of their registration. The “Covid Medical Network” has produced a recent open letter addressed to all relevant health officials and bodies calling for a withdrawal of the roll-out of gene-based vaccines and requesting answers to key questions, but it has fallen on deaf bureaucratic ears.

Mass Formation

How did we get so sucked in that we would accept these draconian measures? As Mattias Desmet, Professor of Psychology at Ghent University says, ‘where there is floating anxiety’ we have a situation ripe for someone or a group to present an object on which to focus that anxiety. He uses the term “mass formation” to describe the response of the masses. Psychologically, it emerges when specific conditions are met:

• Lack of social bonds – western society’s reliance on technology and the internet to connect has led to less face to face time in meaningful relationships
• Radical lack of meaning making
• Free-floating anxiety and frustration

A narrative was spun that the world faced a global threat, a deadly disease that disproportionate models, like the Doherty Institute, predicted would kill countless millions. Our object of anxiety became SARS- CoV-2. People became willing to agree with strategies to combat such a threat, such as mask wearing, lock downs and finally vaccination, even though they knew that the latter had been produced in haste. People felt connected with a new social bond, posting their virtuous behaviour on Facebook and found meaning in saving their grannies from harm. Relief came from compliance and channeling their frustration toward the non-compliant. Because only one aspect of reality was prescribed by the narrative, the collateral damage was ignored.

Desmet claims that roughly thirty percent of people in mass formation rely on the coercive measures and rituals to confirm the solidarity. Forty to sixty percent know there is a problem but choose not to go against the flow.

The rest make up the third group that refuse the narrative. They tend to be awake to the agenda and have an aversion to the trans-humanistic, biological reductionist ideology. They are people of conviction and find strength in sticking to their own reason. They don’t believe that man’s science is infallible nor has an answer for everything. The issue for this group is not that they disbelieve “the science” but that all available science should have a chance to be heard, examined and debated. It is this lack of integrity regarding science about which they have concerns.

Lemmings

Power of Truth

How do people come out of abusive relationships? Meredith Miller says that, “a visceral experience (is needed) to shock the system” – a crisis to pierce the denial. The abused must relentlessly face the truth and take responsibility for their part. If targets of abuse see themselves as victims they will only reiterate their powerlessness.

Jesus longs to help the victim. In relationship with Christ, we are overcomers, not victims. We have God’s strength – an internal fortitude to draw from. God promises us boldness to face adversity, to speak out for Him and shine His truth on the situations we face. Jesus taught that truth sets us free: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32. Of course, that truth is centred in Him as The Truth. God also provides community where one’s personal weakness can be made strong in the encouragement of other believers.

Mourn Loss

We need to mourn what we have lost. We are never the same after the trauma of abuse. It is vital to connect with others who believe us and can validate our experience, as that will help bring healing. See my earlier post, “Collective Trauma” for more on how how trauma wounds are healed. We can all go through the same trauma but the person with meaningful supports will usually process trauma more fully and subsequently be more capable of helping others.

Be the Voice

It is the power of voice in the MSM that leads people to fall sway to its propaganda. The antidote is to use our own voices to redirect people to the truth. It takes relentless courage to stand and speak out when the rest of our community is going another direction.

Former Australian psychologist, Ros Nealon-Cook, got to the place where she couldn’t not speak out. As a result of a video she made of her “existential realisation”, she lost her licence to practice. Her voice, as well as that of many others, gives courage to those who are awake to the abuse. I have been deeply appreciative of those who have had the courage to voice their dissent. Dr Josef Goldbaum, in his interview with Maria Zeee, (at mark 38:42) said, “when you suppress freedom of speech you suppress freedom of thought”. Our ability to think is what sets us apart from the rest of creation. We mustn’t allow the abuse to continue. We can turn our thoughts into letters, speeches or physical forms of demonstration. Writing is my way of both processing and proclaiming my understanding of the truth.

Be Awake

It is important to remain as alert as possible to the abuse around us. Those in control do not want to relinquish it and sadly, we are not back to normal, as more threats await us. It is time to embrace the painful truth, mourn the losses and use our voices. To do this alone is both foolish and impossible. My husband with others has started a co-op in our area to gather like-minded people to support and equip others.

Without God’s strength, I would never have had the courage to stand and speak. If you need the discernment, courage and fortitude a relationship with Jesus brings and don’t yet know Him, I would love to introduce you. You can read my letter of introduction here.

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¹ In her book, See What You made Me Do: Power Control and Domestic Abuse (BlackInc, 2019), Jess Hill outlines a nine point ‘Blueprint for Establishing Power’ that a domestic abuser will use in inflicting his abuse. Tony Archer helpfully compares what has happened in Australia to those nine points in his article, “Covid and the Crushing Use of Coercive Control”