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Learn to recognize and protect yourself from the People Who Play God.
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Text and Artwork:
Copyright © 2007 Beth E Peterson. All rights reserved.
80 to 110 million people in the USA... one third of our population...
Manipulation is endemic in our social environment; extreme levels of manipulation affect more people than anyone realizes....Preliminary surveys indicate that 85 to 90% of Americans are affected either directly or indirectly by extremely manipulative relationships and/or groups.
Why does this go unnoticed? Much of the reason is that at the onset, manipulation seems normal. It slowly builds into the higher, more extreme levels — which can be so damaging as to literally drive some people into psychotic breaks, and yet each manipulative tactic and action taken by itself does not seem so harmful. The reality is, extreme manipulation is like the normal process of influence on a steroid overdose.
Just how many people are affected by extreme manipulation, though? How many of us really lose our autonomy, our self-determination, to a manipulator?
Let's first look at the statistics for two of the most common extreme forms of manipulative relationships. If you take the statistics for domestic violence, 3 to 4 million woman (not including children or men) will be battered by an intimate partner in any given 12-month period. This is serious physical abuse; this does not take into account verbal abuse, emotional abuse, mental abuse, or financial abuse. This does not count those extremely manipulative one-on-one relationships which do not erupt into physical abuse. On top of this, many researchers believe the instance of physical battery, not including the other forms of abuse, is much higher — probably 10 times the reported numbers.
Involvement in destructive cults is the other more common form of extreme manipulation. 5 to 7 million people are estimated to be involved in destructive cults at any given time; Dr. Paul Martin, a leading cult expert in the US, has crunched the statisticians numbers and found some very disturbing realities.
· The chances of succumbing to a destructive cult are twice as great as those for catching chicken pox.
· The chances of contracting measles are approximately 1850 times less than those of joining a destructive cult.
· The chances of joining a cult are more than three times greater than the chances of contracting AIDS.
However, we again run into the high probability that such involvement is under-reported. Many instances of extremely manipulative groups are not reported in these statistics due to the way the terms "cult" and "destructive cult" are defined. Many such groups also 'fly below the radar'...they normally are quite vigilant to hide their presence and/or true nature from the public. It is safe to assume that involvement in destructive cultic-type groups is also under-reported in the same proportion as domestic violence and spouse abuse.
When we take the numbers together, conservatively we are looking at 80 to 110 million people in the USA who are directly affected by extreme manipulation. Out of 293 million people. A third of our population. But...extreme manipulation is not just occurring in battering relationships or in cults.
Were you affected by the events of 9-11? Does it concern you that such terrorist activity has wrecked havoc in other countries as well as the USA? This is a world-wide problem. Extreme manipulation is the genesis for the social pathology we are seeing in the terroristic groups in radical Islam. It is the driving force behind totalitarian dictatorships such as we currently see in North Korea, and have seen in the past under leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
In the shrinking world of today, we are all affected by extreme manipulation. We must all learn how to build autonomy, how to guard our autonomy, and how to strength our level of self-determination. We must discover the realities of yes, this new warfare and recognize that it all begins with us, the individual.