Quora - July 30, 2023: Persecutors
What are your opinions on system persecutors? Some people say they're evil and others say they're misunderstood. I think they're misunderstood most of the time but what do you think based off personal experience or research?
Ok, we are a system (unimaginatively called the Dark System) that has a persecutor sub-system made up of a lot guys from different phases of our lives.
Let me tell you about our first persecutors. We were 4–5 year old. We kept getting told “why don’t you just die” or “you should kill yourself”. So, our first persecutors were the dark twins.
One used to remind us that we should unlive. The other would look around and find opportunities to do it.
But, the twins weren’t hurting us. That was actually soothing. Our middles used to find comfort in those thoughts. And for as twisted and perverse as it may sound, they have been comforting us ever since. When life gets really tough, talking through unliving with them actually keeps us living.
After that, we got someone else who used to just repeat what the adult man person used to say about how useless we were and we would amount to nothing, blah blah blah, and they would do anything to remind us. It was incessant.
And we were so scared of them that we never noticed their teary eyes. And every time our system got upgraded to a new level, they too had been recreated age-appropriate and properly skilled to continue tormenting us.
As time went on, we got more and the new ones were adept at even more cruel ways to torture us.
They were so good at keeping us in line. In making us stick to what was the brainwashed behaviour we were supposed to display. What is now commonly called masking does not quite convey the pain of spending every waking and even sleeping minute of one’s life pretending to be someone we were not enforced by these vociferous reminders.
But because they were so good at their job, we never saw their pain.
It was only recently that Neuro (RIP 🖤) managed to approach one. It was a young persecutor, probably their age was still in single digits. Looking a little like the one in the image above. Yeah, not so scary when you get to know them!
At that point, they were so angry that we were falling out of line. They had tried everything and were failing … Our caretaker just smiled and said “you need a hug!”
As these children started connecting, we felt their pain. Being a persecutor was not their choice. That is their trauma. Being alone. Being hated. Their sadness is so complete and intense that is fitting perfectly in our system’s Darkness.
And once they felt loved and accepted, their attitude changes completely. We now started working with the youngs and teens.
But we didn’t know that we had already done that with a few of the adult introjects. For example, one of our main critics became our fact-checker; that enabled them to keep skills and focus while being constructive. The one that used to repeat back all the mistakes we made, became our analyst; comparing new experiences with old ones and learning new lessons, they were the only one with access to all our memories. etc.
Finally, We do remember that nobody is perfect, and sometimes they do get back into their old behaviour, but that is easily remedied by dealing with the causes of the relapses and reminding them that they are loved and invaluable to the system.
So, when looking back we see that we can divide our persecutors into two categories:
- Those whose persecution soothes,
- Those who are stuck in a role that they resent but that they stick to, to protect the system.
So, I guess they are misunderstood.
However, we only experienced persecutors that were introjected without intent. I.e. we were in an hypnotic state due to the traumatic circumstances, and the person carrying out the abuse became imprinted in our brain.
However, there can be introjects that are inserted intentionally by abusers to facilitate control of their victims. We don’t have experience of these personally, but believe that these can be completely evil and uncontrollable. I am not sure how they can be handled.
Obviously this is our experience, which may or may not resonate.💙🖤
