I was at a neighbor's house last night for a small dinner party. The five of us all oppose the Covid vaccines because of the reports of injuries and deaths. One of the men expressed genuine puzzlement. He said, "Why do doctors go along with this? They have to realize the lie. Don't they care about their patients? Why choose medicine as a career if they don't care? How do they justify the vaccine injuries? Why do they remain silent?"
The opinion I offered is, "People who experience a significant trauma often partition it off in their brain. They refuse to actively remember or think about it. Years later, the event may resurface and be better integrated into their memories, but not facing a traumatic experience is a survival mechanism. I think many doctors are doing that. Telling themselves adverse effects are ‘mostly’ not so bad or even denying the more devastating injuries are from the vaccine, while focusing on protecting their livelihoods and exaggerating the risk from the virus. Denying the evidence in front of their eyes is the only way they can get through their days."
I think it would be interesting to track doctor and nurse suicides looking back five years and going forward ten to twelve years, but that is a depressing intellectual exercise that offers us no solace in our present. However, I think we can find a model that offers hope by looking at the experience of the victims of narcissists.
Traumatized and Trauma-bonded
People in the midst of a trauma often dissociate. Dissociation is an unconscious act of splintering and disconnecting that occurs when emotions control the person in order to suppress uncomfortable aspects of self and world. It is a function of fear.1
Derealization, which is experienced as being disconnected from the world and environment, and depersonalization, which retains a sense of place but disconnects from person and consciousness, are forms of dissociation. Either way, reality and consciousness are fractured.
Memories are suppressed, and false memories may be inserted in order to protect the psyche from being overwhelmed. Brains are rewired based on intrinsic survival mechanisms.
People suffering from narcissistic abuse who continue in the toxic relationships focus on good experiences rather than considering the bad. That act subconsciously suppresses the trauma they experience at the hands of critical and controlling narcissists in order to preserve the relationship they once valued, and to preserve their own identity within a scary world in which they now find themselves trapped.
I suggest that when doctors and other medical personnel insist they are good people who trust their leadership while rejecting the evidence of vax-injured patients, it’s not just cognitive dissonance.2 They are dissociating. Their minds disappear the evidence of their senses in order to protect their identities as competent and altruistic people, and the image of their medical world as intrinsically good because of violence done to them.
In this way, hospitalists and others are managing their personal trauma while more tightly trauma-bonding themselves to the institutions upon which they rely - institutions that are traumatizing them with gaslighting and demands for compliance with capricious and illogical rules. The medical professionals are being used as pawns with limited options who only exist to protect the king. Like in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” an egotistical power-monger demands his illusionary world-view and false-self image be maintained, and his subjects indulge him in order to protect themselves.
Doctors and nurses, like the CDC and FDA, know the Covid vaccines weren’t adequately tested, don’t provide protection from Covid, and cause injury and death. But to admit that truth destroys their world-view and compromises their sense of identity as full participants in their world.
It has been suggested the vax-promoters are suffering from group-think or a type of mass hypnosis. Those theories can explain the phenomenon we observe. But, I think the strength of the denial of the evidence is symptomatic of something that is even more basic.
I believe that like victims of abuse, hospitalists slavishly try to appease their tyrant with their subservience because they experienced traumatic psychological abuse that brainwashed them into compliance. They believe the narrative instead of the evidence because it is necessary to act as an extension of their abuser instead of an independent entity. Keeping up the illusion of the narrative isn’t just callous protection of license and paycheck, it is a survival mechanism.
Victim, Survivor, Thriver
Individuals who recover from psychological abuse have to first admit that they were targeted and victimized. They have to acknowledge a deep betrayal. They have to give up their fantasy. They have to understand they were lied to and manipulated. They have to trust themselves and reject their authoritarian master. They have to get angry and to grieve the loss of their innocence.
Survivors figure out how to either honestly handle a limited relationship with the tyrant or walk away from the relationship in order to live honest lives with open eyes. When the abuser is an adult child or parent (or the medical board and the hospital that employs you), that can be tricky. It requires realistic expectations which include setting boundaries that will be tested and violated by the abuser.
Survivors who thrive find ways to maintain their personal agency without being subjugated to the will of the toxic party. This is nothing short of a revolt against the control of the tyrant, but revolts are not well tolerated by tyrants.
Just like abused spouses who walk away from their controlling partners often require the support of legal aid, the medical profession may require the assistance of the legal profession. Doctors may need to hire lawyers in order to sue their medical associations. Lawsuits may be the only way to set enforceable boundaries with agencies that demand fealty to the sanctioned narrative by threatening the personal security of the non-compliant.
The voices of the victims of both vaccine injuries and mitigation misrule are growing louder. I have faith that more doctors and nurses will find the inner strength to face and condemn the evil wrought by stubborn adherence to ideology and demagoguery. Once they admit this truth to themselves, I trust they and many more global citizens will heed the exhortations of St. Catherine of Siena:
“We've had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence. Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear!”
Maggie Russo is the author of “Dance with the Devil: Love in the Age of Covid”
We now realize that the adrenaline response is more complex than the fight or flight response. Sometimes, we freeze in fright. Other times we flock with others, seeking protection or emotional support. People in high stress situations might fawn over their abuser in an effort to prevent further abuse. When the overall context is dangerous, victims trapped in toxic situations use fluffing which is a strategic appeal to the vanity of the abuser which seeks to minimize abusive outbursts.
Dissociation is consistent with cognitive dissonance which is the psychological conflict from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously, but dissociation also includes a strong chemical component, i.e. a sudden jolt of adrenaline.