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Comment by schwurb | Hacker News Reader

Hey there! I am sorry for what you have been through so far. Since I am to go soon, I will keep it short:

1) I heavily suggest going into counceling. The change of behaviour and self concept needed might be too much to manage on your own.

2) It is a unfortunate, but well-researched phenomenon that perpetuators go for a certain type of personality that expresses itself by way of talking an non-verbal communication. There is also such a thing as bad, bad luck, but social dynamics also play a role. This is an area where you can likely improve aswell: Recognizing your feelings, others feeling and actions, and what is okay and not okay for you,

Gotta go now, all the best tho! Your problems seem treatable to me, but it might take time. You can do this.

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I don't know how to say this without it coming across the wrong way, but if we look back up the thread the topic was about victims having difficult social circumstances, or even just unsolvable, abusive ones.

I always see this pattern when talking about tyranny and its victims. When it is talked about in an abstracted sense (meaning you are distanced from the situation by time or place), it is almost always in the above context of toxic environments. But when it is addressed directly, the focus turns to the victim and trying to identify what is wrong with them, not with the group.

I know it is a long shot but I am really eager to document the extreme abusiveness and kind of life-ruining tyranny I've experienced. I want to raise awareness and stop this from happening to anyone else.

> But when it is addressed directly, the focus turns to the victim and trying to identify what is wrong with them, not with the group.

This is because it is the only effective way to change anything. The victim has to recognize their situation, develop the will to escape / change it, and then do concrete steps. Of course, not alone. You are not guilty of anything, but it is still your responsability to change your life if you want it. It is hard and shitty, but nobody will change because you feel shitty.

It is the same as with every other difficult situation. I could stagnate my whole life, complaining about nobody helped me when I first voiced suicidal thoughts at age 10. I was fucking hard and many people failed me, including me. I did not have a childhood. I see every right to complain and blame others. But who will this help? No one. I had to change something. Because my environment is the last thing that will change.

> I want to raise awareness and stop this from happening to anyone else.

I will be blunt: This is not an effective way of achieving this goal. Much more effective would be to 1) get help (helps you to tackle those problems in your environment) and 2) join an organization that does deal with bullying (they likely know how to reach more people more effectively).

>I will be blunt

Are you sure?

Maybe your ideas would do better in my situation, maybe they'd fare worse?

Whenever we hear about bad history, such as what happened in Nazi Germany, religious persecutions, or even witch trials, everyone says they'd help them. My story is different mostly in the sense that whoever is trying to kill me or inflict ill will to me hasn't succeeded yet, and that my tyranny is not part of a collective, it is against an individual.

I don't want to be combative for its own sake. What I mean is to get at is I don't really know how much time to put into this advice. Help from whom? What organization?

I'd be very interested in some research backing up (2). Not because I don't believe you (actually I very much do). More that I'm curious and want to find out more about this phenomena.

I haven't read these thoroughly, but hopefully it's a place to start. I searched for "picking victims study." That seemed to come up with some hits. A search for "group dynamics abuse" was less helpful.

Targets who displayed vulnerable body language were more likely to report past histories of victimization, and psychopaths identified these individuals as being more vulnerable to future victimization.

https://www.workplacebullying.org/gait/

What Do Sexual Predators Look For When Grooming Victims?

https://www.oxygen.com/crime-time/jeffrey-epstein-what-do-se...

Short Circuiting the Victim Selection Process

http://www.protectivestrategies.com/victim-selection.html

Marked for Mayhem

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200901/marked-ma...

Sure thing! In all honesty, that was something that I heart from my mother. (She works in psychology, but she is not an academic. So I should probably retract the "well" in "well-researched") But a quick research turned up these two sources:

General info about Victims, Bullies, Victim-Bullies

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/07/bully-victim

More on point: In-depth about who is more likely to become a victim

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/98783/E9...

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