BioPsychoSocial Quicksand™ is the term I coined for the victim's experience of coercive control. Coercive control is damaging to our bodies, our brains, our minds and our relationships, and therefore, has negative biological, psychological and social impacts on the target. These negative impacts can become overwhelming, often leaving the target feeling like they are suffocating and drowning in inescapable quicksand.
In this blog I am revealing another Double in the BPQSM™, the Double Team (#DoubleTeam). Maybe you've never heard of the Double Team before, but if you have read much about narcissistic abuse, psychopathic abuse, narcissism, psychopathy or coercive control, I bet you have heard the term flying monkeys. The use of flying monkeys by a narcissistic coercive controller is a particularly alarming and painful aspect of being entrapped in BioPsychoSocial Quicksand™. It is a strategy often employed by coercive controllers when their target manages to wriggle free from the BioPsychoSocial Quicksand™ (even if it's only temporarily). I call the use of flying monkeys the Double Team.
Because coercive controllers use isolation to prevent their target from accessing support, that isolation can be compromised when their target escapes the quicksand of coercive control (even for a moment). While entrapped in BioPsychoSocial Quicksand™, coercive controllers isolate targets in three ways. They isolate them from the outside world. They isolate them from other members of the family or group, and they isolate targets from their own thoughts and feelings. (To read more about this, see Alexandra Stein's book Terror, Love & Brainwashing).
These three types of isolation force targets to rely on the coercive controller's version of reality (a distorted version of reality) and the coercive controller does NOT want the target to wake up from this reality. So, when a target escapes (or attempts to escape), and has access to support, and information that contradicts the coercive controller's false reality, the coercive controller becomes highly motivated to cut off access to that support and/or co-opt that support for themselves.
So... what do they do. They expand their reach by using many of the same tactics of manipulation and deception they use against their target. Their intention is to shift the narrative for the people who come in contact with their recently escaped target and view their target as the problem (victim-blaming). This is called the Double Team.
Believe it or not, it takes a lot of effort and energy to keep a target entrapped by coercive control for any significant period of time. Human beings don't enjoy being enslaved, and the experience of BioPsychoSocial Quicksand™ is one of enslavement. So, once a target escapes, the amount of energy required to force them back can be too much for one coercive controller to handle on their own. So, they enlist outsiders (aka flying monkeys) to gang up against their target. They Double Team the target so as to overwhelm them, and hopefully coerce or force them back into the BioPsychoSocial Quicksand™. (Some very savvy coercive controllers even begin the process of Double Teaming their target BEFORE they attempt to leave. In this way, the target discovers, to their terror, that the support they expected to receive isn't going to happen).
There are two main types of flying monkeys that coercive controllers use to Double Team: 1. other coercively controlling individuals and 2. ignorant, but innocent, others whom they are able to deceive and manipulate. Coercive controllers are perfect allies for the Double Team, because they already enjoy abusing power, and these folks can be recruited from a victim's previous abusers, and are not only willing, but thrilled by the prospect of torturing a previous victim. However, the majority of flying monkeys that are recruited are not coercive controllers themselves. They are usually convinced by the seemingly authentic Mirage™ the coercive controller uses to make them believe their victim narrative and Double Team the target in a misguided attempt to protect or stand up for the coercive controller. Although these folks are not coercive controllers, they might as well be, because they can do just as much damage to the victim as the ones causing harm on purpose.
One coercive controller is enough to incapacitate a target, but more than one is nearly impossible to overcome. This makes the Double Team extremely effective.
A few examples of the Double Team:
1. An coercively controlling husband tells his deeply religious mother-in-law that his wife isn't performing her wifely duties. When his targeted wife finally discloses to her mother that he's been abusing her, her mother quotes her scriptures about submitting to her husband, leaving the target confused and hopeless.
2. A cult leader is infuriated by a cult member refusing to perform a "required" task and brings his entire inner circle in to decide on a suitable "punishment" for the target's "insubordination". This gang-like response causes extreme isolation for the target and instills terror and dread over ever refusing the leader's demands in the future.
3. A coercively controlling boyfriend strangles his girlfriend, who scratches him in her struggle to get free. When the neighbors call police, the coercive controller remains calm and "rational", while the targeted victim is "hysterical" and can't even remember clearly what happened. Police arrest the woman, charging her with domestic violence assault as the "primary aggressor". The target learns very quickly NOT to call police for help.
4. A thirteen year old girl is befriended on social media by someone she believes is a teenage boy, but is really a 40 year old pedophile. The coercive controller convinces the girl to email him a naked photo of herself. Then he demands another.... and another. When the girl refuses to send any more images, the man threatens to, and then uploads, the photos to social media with her name and address. She is then targeted by numerous boys at school for ridicule, and expelled for her "conduct unbecoming".
5. During a custody battle a coercive controller files multiple false police reports, CPS reports, and contacts members of his ex-wife's family to turn them against her with half-truths and outright lies. The target is then forced to defend herself on multiple fronts, and may even lose custody of her children due to all of the false allegations.
Because the Double Team is often perpetrated by the target's own friends and family, as well as professionals they expected would help them, the attacks by these flying monkeys are also experienced as a Double Cross, or betrayal, by the target.
Have you experienced being Double Teamed by a coercive controller? Do you know anyone else who has been?
