Other people who are shunned and how it makes me feel

[Copabanana]

To punish anybody who questions your power, by rejecting your attempt to control and define them.

This last precept of shunning is unclear.

What I mean is this. I will work it backwards where it is clearer:

My mother is put in a rehab hospital by my sister, who has not told her why she went and where she is. My sister has pressured and manipulated the doctors to achieve this result. She has done so without a power of attorney and against the advanced directive. She has not informed me (named in advance directive) of what she is doing, until a brief email after she did it.

I find out. I tell my mother. I tell the social worker. My mother gets herself out.

My sister shuns us.

My sister then sends a letter to my mother 8 months or so later that she had gotten breast cancer, had had 14 hours of surgery, that my mother and I had caused all of it. That she can never see or speak to us again because we are toxic to her. My mother at this time must have been 86. She called me sobbing.

The original crime was my sister's who transgressed a legal agreement and immorally tried to confine my mother to the rehab hospital for her own interests.
She transgressed.

She was called on it.

She responded by shunning. To establish that others, not her, were responsible.
She did it to feel in control, still.

She then upped the shun, by the toxic letter. She inflicted more pain in order to punish for the cancer.

That latter action by her is really revealing because it shows how the shunning is used in a sense as means of communication.

What did my sister say in that letter: You are responsible for everything bad that happens to me in my life. You are poison. Toxic. I am pure. I was pure and would be pure if it were not for you who defile me. I define you. I can define you as responsible for my soiling, my defiling. I declare you doubly shunned.

My sister wet her bed until she was about 10. My mother hated it. My mother allowed her to walk around naked in the house (completely) in front of my stepfather. Nobody said a word.

COPA

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

That latter action by her is really revealing because it shows how the shunning is used in a sense as means of communication.

Yes.

A shunning is a dynamic thing, a living part of the family; a thing of gossip, even. Think of the time and thought devoted to its accomplishment and to letting the shunnee "get the picture". Think of the hurt for the shunned one and the secret triumph for the shunners, packing so much into that justification to shun.

I agree that purity plays a part, Copa. I wonder if it plays the primary part?

It's so complex a dynamic.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

the secret triumph for the shunners

Hi Cedar. Almost time for happy hour. Hi to D H.

You know Cedar, I am struggling with the win. I never thought there was triumph. I thought of it more as a defensive move. A way to manage self concept. Like, I'm feeling a bit low today, a tad vulnerable. Why not shun my mother more, so I can feel like a bigger guy. If it is this, it is really sadistic, I think. I wonder what D H thinks about it, if there is a thrill as well as a defense, either or neither.

I will ask M.

I agree that purity plays a part, Copa.

I will look for the book Purity and Danger which I have not read in maybe 35 years. It feels like yesterday. I will get books by Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner who started the subset of study called symbolic anthropology I think. I will also look for Marcel Eliade, who I remember is (was) fascinating. He wrote, I think, about religion. It is interesting to me how little this field is taken into account in the study of psychology when to me it is fundamental.

These anthropologists, none of them, I think believed in a universal human nature, the possibility of a unifying theory, but I think their concepts really help me understand me and my own experience.

COPA

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I think the perpetrator feels a thrill in setting his or her machinations in order. Sadism, in one of its manifestations, could be fueling the whole thing from the beginning.

The banality of evil.

Moral choices.

Cedar

Maybe I am going through a condemnatory phase. It could be true that tempers flare and evil things happen. But how would it be then that the evil things only happen in secret?