Victims, Cowards, and Bullies, OH MY!

Everyone is actually innocent. I believe everyone is doing the very best they can with the lives, faculties, and the circumstances they have been given. That’s very often tragic.

Here’s tune for ya: We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel

Have you noticed the monsters of the world aren’t monsters at all?
They’re mediocre cowards.

I had a childhood of predators. I was well-trained by their shame-washed enablers to be prey.

Their predatory behavior was normalized.
Their blustering entitlement assumed.
Their mediocre successes and “contributions” celebrated.

This is what happens when generational harms go unspoken, unchallenged.
Shame goes unfelt across generations.

When victims are gaslit, blamed, shamed, and ostracized… the shame doesn’t disappear.
It moves into the shadows, quietly taking root.
It becomes self-perpetuating harm — living in the shadowy recesses of our lives, bullying and sabotaging even our thoughts of liberation.

Freedom becomes a cage, even as we hold the key in our hand.
We call our cage reality.
And then we judge — sometimes violently — anyone who dares question it.

Our bodies deteriorate.
Shame first takes our connection to our body, then inspires compulsions and addictions, and eventually compromises the freedom of our health entirely.

Our minds become confused.
Shame takes our clarity, leaving us anxiety-riddled, depressed, uncertain.
Self-agency is deferred to anyone who shows charisma… social media, some authority, harmful systems.

Our capacity to feel goes underground… and becomes explosive.
Shame takes our felt connection to others, even as we’re surrounded by people. We become only the stories we tell — separate from the beautiful capacity of our bodies to feel and heal the life we are living.

Shame doesn’t just hurt us. It recycles us.

First, as victims.
Then, as cowards.
Eventually, as bullies.

This is the shame cycle.
It’s how our wounds become the weapons we wield in the world.
How silence becomes tradition. (Speak about this, but not that… And, don’t use that tone.)
How harm is disguised, and often celebrated, as protection.

The victim learns to disappear, to shape-shift, to survive.
The coward hides behind certainty, authority, systems, obedience.
The bully lashes out, projects shame, and then calls it strength.

Sometimes all three live in us at once.

Shame is a bully. And we become its messengers.

Projecting our shame onto partners, friends, children.
Shaping our lives around rules, compulsions, intellectual positions, religious fundamentalism.
Desperate for order. Terrified of reckoning.

We align with the cowards, because shame prefers familiarity to truth.
We repeat the cycle — because that’s what they did.

(I have no interest in mediocre cowards turned bullies or what made them that way. Be assured, I do not care. We all have ample reason to become monsters.)

I’m interested in those who know they’re hiding — and still want to be free.
Who are being called to drag the secrets into the light.
Who are willing to feel their abject terror and uncertainty —
to risk what they “think” they know,
to step beyond the only place they “think” they belong.

All for liberation.

Liberation from cages built by cowardly predators and the broken systems they hide inside.

Here’s a tune for ya: For Her by Fiona Apple

Breaking cycles is brutal.
It means being honest with ourselves and each other.
It means grieving what we weren’t allowed to feel,
and taking responsibility for what we’ve passed on.
It means risking real human connection, where we’ve only known control.

Do you want your liberation? I’m positive it wants you.

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Lie to Me: Illusions of Truth & Independence