Who Murdered Love - Part 3
Blaming the Victim
The Traditional Enemy of Child Groomers
Sexual predators are known to groom their victims in a way that knocks down mothers, who might prevent the predator from targeting her children. This is the 4th stage of sexual grooming.
Advertisers may not want to have sex with our children, but they do want to earn their trust, sell them products and maintain control by earning their loyalty. Mothers in previous generations were considered in charge of guiding and educating children and were also in control of the household budget; hence, they stood squarely in the way of marketers selling products directly to their children.
THE SIX STAGES OF SEXUAL GROOMING
Stage 1: Targeting a Victim
Stage 2: Gaining Trust
Stage 3: Filling a Need
Stage 4: Isolating the Child
Stage 5: Sexual Contact
Stage 6: Maintaining Control
If we see the purchase as stage five and isolating the child (stage four) being achieved by knocking down women’s status in the family—to prevent mothers from interfering with the marketer’s aims—the sales process they use is strikingly similar to the six-stage process of sexual grooming.
Open Season
The social engineering that has isolated children from their mother’s influence has been wildly successful, with child-led spending in marketing now a multi-billion dollar business.
Children now wield enormous purchasing power, both directly and indirectly (indirectly in the sense that they can persuade and influence parents on what to buy). Companies spend over $15–17 billion a year advertising to children in the United States, over $4 billion (by 2009) by the fast-food industry alone. - https://www.globalissues.org/article/237/children-as-consumers#Advertisingtochildrenisbigbusiness.
As mothers lose their confidence, they struggle to maintain their family’s status by purchasing the brands that their children demand. In this way, mothers become primary and not only secondary targets of this form of predatory grooming.
This social engineering, which has stripped women of this most critical executive function in their homes, undermines fathers as well. Mother and father no longer discuss spending as a shared executive function. Like servants, most parents now slave at work to keep up with their children’s demands for the latest consumer goods advertised to their children by marketers.
Large food outlets have massive advertising budgets and use every means at their disposal to create an insatiable desire for their products. Parents influencing their children to eat healthy food is, therefore, a constant battle. Who do you trust to feed your children, Mum or Ronald McDonald?
In 2011, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver used his high-profile personal influence in the media to highlight some of the toxic ingredients that were added to meat products in certain fast-food restaurants. A public outcry followed and a statement from the McDonald’s corporation was subsequently posted in 2013 to assure the public that the toxic processes used to produce their hamburger and nuggets were no longer part of their ‘supply’. Oliver had described their meat as unfit for human consumption.
In the corporate battle that exists to win a portion of our family’s food budgets, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that food’s primary purpose is to nourish our bodies not dazzle our taste buds or make us look cool.
The level of marketing that targets children has grown into a juggernaut that produces stress within families. The battleground is far from equal. Junk food producers have money, staff and marketing psychology to push their garbage onto our children. With mothers’ influence undermined, mothers need all the help and support we can give them.
Kim was raised in a family that valued a highly nutritional diet, her focus has always been on providing our family high quality meals. In the past I over-valued my abilities in the kitchen and didn’t support her as much as I should have. Our children learned to eat a wide variety of healthy food and none of them are overweight, but I certainly could have made her job easier.
Steve Cooper
The easiest way for marketers to isolate ‘tween’ or young adult targets is to create real anger in them towards their mothers. As we will expose now and in much of our work in future, fuelling conflict between a child (all of us at one point) and their mother is an effective tactic these predators use to cause deep emotional insecurity in us—and hence isolate us as victims—by making us feel miserable, inadequate and needy.
No matter how much money we spend, there are no consumer goods that will ever heal the wound in our psyche that occurs when we are persuaded that our mother is to blame for our insecurity.
PR and salespeople are even more potent than advertisements. So, the messaging that causes us to feel anger towards our mothers is generally placed alongside, but separate from, corporations’ product offers. Mothers are presented as knowing so little about ‘reality’ that they cannot possibly understand their young adult children’s world. Shopkeepers regularly override a mother’s judgement in front of their tween and young adult children—even though she will pay for the final purchase. Mothers regularly being treated as a questionable influence that children must necessarily be shielded from by just about everyone.
Actors are chosen (or encouraged) to groom young adults. While these actors may have genuine sympathy for their young audiences’ desire for freedom and rebellion, the contrived relationship they nurture is abusive, shallow and destructive, slowly isolating their targets from caring adults who might, through genuine concern, negatively judge the poor decisions these young adults are making about their lives.
Fathers should guard themselves against joining in this game, ensuring they respect and support their wives’ opinions—in a confident and affirming manner—in front of their children.
From tattoos to computer games and all types of illicit recreational drugs and nonproductive pursuits, causing anger towards mothers benefits marketers by helping the child or young adult feel justified in making allegiances or purchases that might defy her judgment. It also causes parents to become more likely to allow their children to take charge of spending decisions and make purchases that parents may judge as unwise in a desperate attempt to win back their children’s love.
Learning to negotiate lovingly and respectfully with our parents when our views differ is a crucial skill, a coming-of-age initiation into adulthood that, while uncomfortable, is also essential in developing relationship skills.
Adding insult to injury, instead of young adults being left to face the challenge of learning to negotiate and develop their conscience and sense of personal responsibility, later in life, many come to blame their unhealthy hunger and thirst—for these same addictive and unhealthy pursuits that the marketers have pushed on them—on their mother’s failings.
Marketers acting as groomers must delight in this as evidence that they have successfully reached the control stage of the abusive relationship, where, as long as the target continues to scapegoat their parents for their bad choices, they will remain powerless to break free and choose a better path for themselves.
This control stage often continues well into adulthood—and even old age—with many people continuing to blame their poor choices and addictions on their mothers.
While the world attempts to hunt down actual and fictitious child sexual predators, predatory grooming has seeped through our entire culture, isolating victims for reasons that go far beyond sexual exploitation. While actors feed our self-pity in numerous ways, including emotionally potent song lyrics, long-running animation series, and all forms of popular culture, we are at the same time encouraged by pop psychology to view our relationships as possessions that should be discarded the moment they don’t serve us. Mothers attempting to influence their children, in particular, is put forward as a sound reason that mothers should be judged as controlling and further labelled as toxic (waste).
In modern folklore, the view of a mother’s negative influence on her children is passed off as profound psychological wisdom, with mothers regularly scolded—by anyone listening—if they have any opinion on their child’s choices or opinions.
The genuine wound that these stories—that separate us from our mother’s love and guidance—create within our psyche leaves us nowhere to run. The only escape is to abandon ourselves to fantasy, addiction or groupthink, which is also a symptom of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The relationships these outlets offer are all as destructive as they are artificial.
We will deal with each of these types of relationships individually:
Fantasy relationships abound now in our multimedia world, with the largest group of people we believe we know intimately often consisting of people we will never meet or speak to personally. Actors, singers, musicians, comedians, talk show hosts, politicians, etc., may or may not be fantasy characters. Still, being only a one-way street, the idea that we have a genuine relationship with them is pure fantasy. Most of these actors have disclosed or undisclosed corporate sponsors and political agendas.
Addiction relationships may consist of people we know where the whole basis of the relationship centres around an obsession or drug. They can also be our relationship with the obsession or drug itself. Many people would consider their drug of addiction as their best friend and also their worst enemy.
A groupthink relationship, in layperson’s terms, takes place within a mutual fan club where anyone who disagrees with the group’s opinion is excluded, derided and mocked. These groups tend to consist of peers of approximately the same age.
Where older children once helped younger children with their school work in mixed-aged classrooms, marketers (and social engineers) targeting a demographic didn’t want objections from other voices to be considered by the group. Hence, since the 50s, our society has been deliberately constructed into a strict class system where groups of children are divided, based on socioeconomics such as cost and suburb when determining which schools children will attend, but then broken down further into strict age groups within those schools.
Cut loose from family elders in a sensory sea of faux connection, will the loss of our very souls be the final cost?
Where we stand, Freud’s most significant (and destructive) legacy is a world that now scapegoats all of our mental health issues—with a whole range of causes that obviously should include the profoundly abusive tactics used by marketers—on our mothers.
Blaming the Victim - Evil Mothers
Freudian psychology led a campaign that has now so thoroughly programmed our society that many of us blame our feelings of loneliness and alienation on the very person who has probably given us the most love and care.
As we have exposed in our journey, marketers expertly target us negatively daily, deliberately fuelling our insecurity to make us feel inadequate or unlovable without their products or ideas.
Instinctively, we feel our mothers are responsible for our innermost feelings of love and security and buy the message that her failure must have caused our feelings of being unloved and insecure.
It’s an easy sell that can leave people devastated that they did not receive the mothering they needed to feel a sense of worthiness and eir lives. Many feel angry at their mothers and even cheated. How could mothers have left us so ill-equipped emotionally to stand alone in this world? How could they have been so cruel? We long to return home to a place we do not know where to find.
In his 2007 book, Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis, Edward Dolnick provides a detailed account of the unrestricted rise of blaming parents and especially mothers, for diseases such as schizophrenia and autism (both now universally acknowledged as stemming from organic origins, as opposed to failures in nurturing).
The book is aptly subtitled Blaming the Victim, as the psychoanalysis industry that flourished after World War Two created many victims. In his book, the victim he refers to is the mother whose role of authority was undermined by untested theories administered as (psychological) therapy in the post-war period.
Dolnick writes:
‘Like unwary tourists caught in a gang fight, these unfortunate parents happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For mothers especially, to live in America in the 1940s, '50s and '60s was to stand convicted.’ Blaming the Victim - Edward Dolnick
Steve Cooper
This trend is on the rise once again, with many mothers now cruelly being cancelled by their young adult children.
With psychology offering mothers up as such easy scapegoats, why should anyone find the courage to take responsibility for their vices and failings?
With little authority or respect left in their homes, any mother attempting to guide or direct her family’s choices will likely find herself labelled invasive or controlling. This horrendous situation of lost influence and authority alongside increased responsibility for all of society’s emotional problems set against the backdrop of an apparent new era of women’s emancipation.
The con job that was women’s liberation will be covered in Part 4.
Today, older women are further losing their position as matriarchs and have become the fastest-growing demographic of people becoming homeless in Australia and, most likely, other places in the world.
The truth is that mothers are just humans who have usually done their best under increasingly difficult circumstances. They are not the evil villains that Freud and nearly a hundred years of Disney movies—alongside so much other marketing propaganda and social engineering—have led us to believe.
‘Anyone who grew up watching animated Disney movies has probably come to a disturbing realization: Disney movies use a dangerous formula when portraying motherhood. The protagonist’s mother is either terrible, inexplicably absent, or dead. Of course, there are a few exceptions, as is the case with any rule. But generally speaking, the animation studio sticks to singular depictions of “good” and “bad” motherhood.” - Evil, Absent, or Dead: Disney’s Problematic Depiction of Mothers https://www.fandom.com/articles/evil- absent-or-dead-disneys-problematic-depiction-of-mothers
With marketing groomers’ manipulative tactics surrounding us and standard street wisdom suggesting that a person becoming autonomous from their parents at an early age is a sign of positive mental health—a mother’s influence on a growing child is now even viewed with suspicion.
We will discuss the unhealthy relationships that can occur between mothers and their children at some point. But for now, we would like you to consider that parents—including mothers—have an essential role in their children’s lives that deserves our compassion and respect.
A mother’s influence on her children may not be as detrimental as is often claimed.
Karen Fingerman is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has worked for fifteen years as a faculty member in Human Development and Family Sciences, focusing on the context of family life and development. Her article quoted below suggests that we should reassess this view.
She states from her work with parents and their adult children that:
‘...grown children report greater life satisfaction and better adjustment, controlling for factors that elicit that support (Fingerman, Cheng, Wesselmann et al., 2012). For example, if two young adults are unemployed and one receives parental support (but the other does not), the adult receiving parental support will fare better.’
Later in the same article, Karen Fingerman concludes:
‘For individuals who have a bond to a parent... the ties typically are highly rewarding. Current trends of frequent contact and supportive ties may continue. Today, the downside of these ties is ambivalence associated with changing norms regarding whether it is alright to have such strong ties and for parents to continue to help grown children. But as values come to align with the presence of strong intergenerational bonds, parents and children alike may benefit.’
Karen Fingerman Professor at the University of Texas at Austin
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/february/ascension-parent-offspring-ties
The article states that more adults live at home with their parents than was typical in the 1950s and 1960s. Hence, a concern has arisen that causes parents and their adult children to worry that this situation may not be healthy. Before the 1950s and 1960s, however, it was common for adult children to live at home;
Fingerman points out that the unique social circumstances in the 1950s and 1960s were an aberration that we should not consider the baseline for what constitutes a healthy family.
The Problem May be the Solution
If mothers are so easily targeted as the problem, logically, they must also provide the solution…
At least two influential psychologists believe this to be the case. Arthur Janov and Artie Wu’s work suggests that rather than humanity’s central emotional wound coming from defective mothering, the damage is from the disconnect from our mothers that many of us have come to experience.
Arthur Janov, author of The Primal Scream—arguably one of the all-time best-selling books on psychology—developed a therapy in the late sixties and early seventies that every one of his clients reported as highly beneficial. In a clinical setting, he placed his patients in a safe environment and encouraged them to call out for their ‘mommy and daddy’. This simple action invariably released a lot of trauma in individuals who later claimed that it put them back in touch with themselves and their feelings. Adults admitting to needing their mothers, in particular, caused a reconnection in their emotional centre that healed them of neurosis.
Mother-child relationships are not always healthy. With the horrendous manipulation, loss of status, and blame they have suffered, is it any wonder that women and mothers have become angry and confused? Using our mothers as scapegoats, however, for all of our emotional problems, while convenient in the short term, robs us of something primal that is both sacred and rational, leaving a ‘hole inside of our souls’ that, over time, becomes harder to fill. We will discuss this wound in depth in later chapters.
Taking personal responsibility for our psychological problems will help us understand that we, and not our mothers, have control over our lives. Reopening a connection within ourselves with our mother, no matter how imperfect she might be, is at the heart of emotional healing. If she cannot provide us with a supportive and loving sanctuary in our physical lives, we can still know that deep in her heart, she probably wishes the best for us and would have loved us better if she hadn’t had so much opposition.
Mother is a universal concept far broader than our physical mother—the matrix of life. Our Heavenly Mother will be introduced to you as a divine and historical being throughout our work. Her voice has been removed from much of the Old Testament but remains in Proverbs 8. I suggest you consider turning to her for all that you need in life that your physical mother was unable to provide. Similar to Arthur Janov’s work, calling on Our Heavenly Mother in our prayers and meditations, in my experience, will bring the gift of emotional healing to your life.
Opening this channel can be difficult when society places such unhealthy and unrealistic expectations on mothers. Yet casting mothers as evil villains—to blame for society’s problems—blocks our natural sense of love and belonging.
The world can be a confusing and dangerous place. It may take us years to discover the challenges our mothers faced when raising us as children; most mothers do their best. Suppose you stopped holding your mother in a place of unrealistic expectation and judgement and instead held her in your heart as a source of constant love and support.
It’s embarrassing for me to admit how I once undermined Kim’s authority and respect in our family. A simple example is that our children (all adults now) continue to deride me for the terrible school lunches I made for them when they were at school. I had decided that I was the authority in the kitchen, side-lining Kim, who came to hide in our bedroom in the morning to avoid my criticism and verbal abuse. I am still living down those lunches to this day. I think the kids have forgiven me for the awful sandwiches, but my disrespect caused further damaging repercussions, including guilt, that I still must atone for to this day. Kim is a fantastic cook and nutritionist; I should have left her to enjoy making our children their school lunches and getting them ready for school. It is something I can never give back to her now that our children are grown. At that time, I wasn’t aware of just how damaging me undermining Kim would be.
Our family is still on the long road to recovery by me ensuring I now fulfil my role as father; maintaining the appropriate level of respect from our whole family that is crucial for a mother to perform at her best.
Never underestimate the deep division that occurs when a mother's role is undermined or side-lined by her husband.
Me finally giving Kim total authority in our kitchen has resulted in the healing of my heart disease and both of us losing a lot of weight. I feel 20 years younger and have come to love the food Kim now makes us even though it looks nothing like what I would choose to prepare. I grew up on pizza and pasta, but Kim has taught me to eat slow-cooked meat off the bone, salad, vegetables, fresh leafy greens and home grown sprouts.
I once scorned Kim for wanting to make school lunches that did not include bread, but now know that eating bread and pasta almost killed me by making me sick and fat. Kim makes cheese flatbread now with grated cauliflower instead of wheat flour. The salad sandwiches she makes with this are something out of this world! My mouth waters just thinking about them!
Likewise, my early history with my mother is a story of how I decided it was easier to scapegoat her than to examine my own performance and responsibilities.
My Mum did her absolute best, in highly challenging circumstances, but many years would pass before I came to recognise this. Similarly, it took many agonising years of conflict to realise how my undermining Kim would hurt a further generation in our family.
We probably all have some difficulty in reframing uncomfortable or troubling memories of the past with our mothers. Maintaining a healthy relationship requires hard work. It is usually mothers who are assigned the tough task of maintaining the standard. Why should we make it so hard for them? Are our mother really to blame for everything wrong in our lives? Surely, we can let mothers off the hook.
Bad social programming leads to poor systems of family governance which set the stage for wives to be stripped of their authority—as happened in our family in the past. For mothers to regain their lost status, men must demonstrate respect for their wives in good faith—while ensuring that all family members do the same. A father's most fundamental role is to ensure that all family members treat their mother with respect. This can only be accomplished by acknowledging our wife's essential role in our family and never putting her in a position where she feels forced to demand that respect from us.
I am still working every day to repair the damage my past behaviour has caused our family, by reminding myself and our adult children that Kim's role as mother must be treated with compassion and respect. It is rewarding work. Taking this path has caused Kim to blossom into the best wife and mother a man could ever hope to have.
Protecting and loving our mothers is the best investment a person can ever make. We will cover the limitless bounty this commitment offers in later chapters of this work. Mothers should never be left to demand our love and protection. Steve Cooper
‘Our new mission of liberation is to put strong families together again. Because the family is not only the embryo and the beginning of all that we can call civilisation—but it’s the beginning of all that anyone can call civilisation... the essential network that leads to nation.” - John Henrik Clarke - A Great and Mighty Walk.