Remember that guy in the trench coat who always looked like he was lost in space somehow, but who always was in exquisite control of everything? "Columbo", his name was, I believe. He had a way of looking somehow befuddled all the time, and yet he had a video camera's eye and memory for virtually every detail of everything he encountered. Trivial or important, it didn't matter — he knew it all equally well.
Columbo was a "fog bound" personality, one who experiences life as a struggle to navigate due to lack of clear criteria and priorities. He responded by developing to a genius level his handicap, and he became the detective who missed nothing and to whom EVERYTHING was grist for the deductive mill. It worked well for him — in his profession. But what about his personal life? He didn't seem to have one as a matter of fact. Probably too confusing and threatening for him to have to handle vulnerability, availability and intimacy, because there one HAS to prioritize and to have the ability to feel and to be impacted on. Incidentally, it doesn't matter whether he did or did not have a personal life for our purposes. As a matter of fact, I believe he had a wife and she was killed somehow. The point is that his lifestyle was one based on complete tracking and control of everything.
And therein lies the trouble for the "fog bound". They have been so devastatingly damaged and hurt by their early formative experiences that they can't take the give and take of vulnerable, involved and intensely intimate living. They also have a very difficult time dealing with the "messiness", "changeability" and "overwhelmingness" of daily life. They have an inordinate need for the controllability of things, for things to be comprehensible and containable. Otherwise, they feel that they will be overwhelmed and destroyed by the world. Or conversely that they will overwhelm and destroy the world.
WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?
The whole process starts right at the very beginning in the form of intense ambivalence or agitated anxiety about the individual's entrance on the scene, often commencing with conception. However, these reactions are usually not conscious, and the mother's experience is one of anticipation. Nevertheless, there is great concern and concealed rejection of the reality of the situation from the get-go. The mother is full of unmet dependency needs, inadequacy feelings, intimacy-incompetence, vulnerability-avoidance, responsibility-paranoia, runamok-anxiety and/or unconscious hostility that is instantly precipitated full force by the onset of the pregnancy.
As a result, the incoming infant experiences an inextricable mixture of love and hatred all the way along. The mother's reaction to this is to seek to have complete control of the situation and her unconscious unacceptable feelings. She takes a totally dominating and awareness-suppressing approach to the situation, and she is ferociously determined to experience only her positive motivations, intentions and interventions, and to keep the unconsciously dreaded experiences and catastrophic expectation events at bay at all costs.
The result is what could be characterized as "smiling hatred" parenting. What makes the situation so difficult to deal with is that her positive emotions are genuine and valid experiences for her, and they therefore are not untruths. But the unconscious rejection feelings are equally powerful, if not more potent, and the truth of these can't be denied by the child either. However, they are vehemently denied by the mother, and her efforts are usually successful enough to result in the surrounding environment's inability to discern the true nature of the situation. This results in an unwitting collusion by the rest of the social environment in the process, leaving the child with no allies and no protection, in effect.
The most predominant characteristic of the "fog bound"-inducing parenting pattern is the mother's inordinate need to be in complete control. This can take several forms, such as the demand of the child to meet her dependency needs, the misuse and abuse of power, a "mannequin mom" going through the motions, and even viscous maliciousness and malevolence. In all cases, though, the general pattern is to appear (and to be actually attempting) to do the right thing, but without substance, connection or reality. Or more accurately, along with an underlying very different reality and motivation/ intention/intervention system going at an equally if not more powerful level of manifestation. The result is smiling hatred and superficial care, with little or no real nurturance or emotional support coming through, but with all the appearances and intentions of doing so also operative. The experience is one of being surrounded by a "fog" of hydrochloric acid vapor in which one has to feel one's way around.
"Fog bounds" get disguised malice in the form of acceptance and rejection at the same time in a manner that allows no discernment or determination of what is "figure" and what is "background". They are "marble cake" intermingled and there is as a result a meaninglessness and a lack of interpretability of the situation. The pattern is one of "come hither — go away" inconsistency and double-level messaging. There is also a pronounced tendency on the mother's part to use consistent inconsistency, capriciousness and arbitrariness to keep in charge at all times. The family pattern is systematically unsystematic, purposefully purposeless and blithely random. The only way to handle it is to "get through the second at hand" with no discernable pattern in a "crazy-making" and "eggbeater" behavioral system.
The "fog bound" typically gets overt acceptance mixed with highly unpredictable covert rejection. They are also subjected to "Heads, I win, Tails, you lose!" life-and-death stakes double binds disguised as love and "normalcy". There is a "What you see is not what you get" confusion-inducing reality-representation disruption process that occurs as a result of all this. The underlying threat involved in the whole process is abandonment-annihilation. In the meantime, the mother hides her hostility from herself and everyone else, including the child via coercing collusion with the logicalness and "normalcy"- seemingness of her "double-binding" process.
In a normal communication system and relationship, the potential "contradictions" between acceptance, anger and affection, between reserve and warmth, between indpendence and dependence are resolved by contexting one of the poles of the dichotomy in the other pole — as, for instance, in caring confrontation, so that the "ground" is the caring while the "figure" is the confrontation in the situation. In such a circumstance, the contrast of messages on the different levels gives the meaning to the situation. In normal relationships, criticism "nests" in the context of acceptance, anger in the context of affection, reserve in the context of warmth, independence in the context of dependence (during childhood), and so on.
But the "fog bound"-inducing situation involves confusion-induction in the form of things like continuous praise and continuous criticism at the same time. The result is that which is "figure" and which is "ground" is totally unclear. The child ends up wondering "Does she hate certain things I do in a love context, or does she pretend love in the context of real hatred?". There is an ever-ambiguous oscillation between "figure" and "ground", so that in order for the child to believe in the mother's love and non-abandonment, they have to falsify their own experience and pretend not to notice the real realities going down.
In order to live with herself and to explain to herself her own behavior, the mother ends up rationalizing her oscillations as being due to the child's "immoralities" and "stupidities". The result is that the "future fog bound" becomes the "distractor-scapegoat" and the "identified problem" who serves to prevent the family's and the mother's pathology from being discovered by others. In effect, then, she ends up totally controlling and defining the context so the child is wrong no matter what they do. In the process of doing this, she monopolizes all the virtue and she leaves the child all the vice in their situations. She prevents the child from being able to move to and fro in the value continua arena or to have a positive moral self-identity.
She also systematically jumps on any attempts at feedback, reality-readouts or "Emperor's New Clothes" reactions on the part of the child with subtle but devastating abandonment-annihilation threats. She repeatedly invalidates the child's behavior and experiences, and she holds all the cards. She is utterly unconsciously chock full of paranoically fear-based "boomerang defensive attacks" along the lines of, "I just hate that about you!" (as she figuratively shifts the finger of blame to herself as she says, "you"). She is full of "run-amok-anxiety" about her furiousness at the child and at the world. She responds by attacking the child for experiences she wants to avoid at all costs in herself. So she punishes projections of herself on the child elicited by imagined or "remindered" symbolic, incipient or full-fledged expressions of the child's sexuality, anger, or other "immoralities" and "stupidities". They are in effect told that they are ugly, unpleasant and never right. If the child gets affectionate or close, she withdraws or becomes intensely anxious. And as the "coup de grace", she discounts their experiences continuously, as in, "It's all in your head!". This says to the child that nothing in their head amounts to anything, which is a total identity-discount.
The "fog bound's" life history becomes an "Alice in Wonderland" mind-warping via "catch-22" double binds and figure-ground confusion-induction, meaning-destruction, and priority-prevention in life-and-death arenas. In the child's process, criticism ends up being experienced as acceptance, anger is experienced as totally out of control violent rage, affection becomes totally inappropriate eroticism, reserve becomes affection or "inappropriate" affection, independence goes into "autistic delusions:" and dependence is transformed into foetal symbiosis or "walking alum" parasitism.
The programming is a "Don't be who you are!" identity-decimation, a rejection of their essence. In effect, the message is, "I'll let you live if you don't have an identity that I hate!". The family lies to them, confuses them, terrifies them and enrages them with their "care-taking". And due to the earliness, pervasiveness, contradictoriness, confusingness and dangerousness of the parenting pattern, the individual ends up buying the notion that it is a "deserved" experience, that the world is incomprehensible and slyly dangerous, and that they are too.
The "fog bound" learns early on that if they express themselves they will be destroy-deserted, and they aren't allowed for form a separate ego, an "I". To make matters worse, the parent(s) are often so self- and other-paranoid that they become particularly virulent or even violent if they discover the child is hiding their feelings from them. In addition, there is continuous deception and disguise of the source and use of abusive power by the mother in terms of its being "God-ordained", "earned" by their "moral cretinisms", pleasantness, etc., mostly by "double-think" re-castings of realities. The child isn't allowed to label or even to experience the parent(s)' hostility/ persecution/crazy-making because the parent(s) are unaware, well disguised, and homicidally se defendendo (SE DEFENDENDO - criminal law. Defending himself). Furthermore, any attempts to anchor reality or to describe what is happening is usually mislabeled and misperceived by outsiders and other family members, so the child ends up being taught deluded and distorted perceptions.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
For the "fog bound" what you saw was not what you got, and they never had any idea what was really going on. Because of the earliness, pervasiveness and severity of their confusion-induction experience, they became effectively arrested in the early infancy period cognitively, and their thinking tends to be "magical" as a result. Their incoming inputs didn't match their experience, there was too much happening at once, and they couldn't keep up with the confusing experiences or communicate what was going on. It was, in effect, a "crazy-making" environment. As a result, they have a rather major meaning/significance/interpretation disorder that permeates everything they experience and do.
Their cognitive systems, languaging, environmental/social connections and communication systems and even their perceptual capacities in the more serious versions become "autistic" (self-referenced) and idiosyncratic, with a tendency to neologistic and neosyntactic thinking where they invent their own language and rules of logic. For instance, while we think logically in a major premise leading to minor premise leading to a conclusion, the "fog bound" tends to reverse the major and minor conclusions, with at times rather strange outcomes. For instance, they might think: "Christ was a man. I am a man. Therefore I am Christ". They also tend to go into dichotomous and extreme minimal or maximal responses to situations, with little or no differentiation, calibration or integration.
They have real difficulty filtering out stimulation, and they have great trouble with the "figure-ground" distinction, so that they can't attend selectively or prioritize importance of stimuli. They tend to "gestalt grok" the whole situation as one undifferentiated stimulus field or to see every little detail as equally important. They have a significant problem sampling stimuli from the field, and they have trouble paying attention to more than one thing at a time. They also are handicapped in their ability to switch from one stimulus to another or to attend to physically weak but relevant cues in a complex stimulus situation.
They have problems tracking patterns, making sense of sequences, and responding to redundancy in situations. They tend to select out a particular cue and to exclude all else, and they are often concretely literalistic and highly personalized in their interpretations. They tend to link ideas loosely and to put multiple meanings to things. They also tend to perceive features of their perceptual world that are separable and distinct as if they were related and connected, with the result that they have a problem telling things apart. They have great difficulty articulating and analyzing the environment into features, and they get overwhelmed and overloaded rather easily.
They have a hard time prioritizing the significance, meaning and powerfulness of the stimuli in situations. They also lack a filtering and understanding system for making sense out of the many stimuli they encounter. The result is stimulus-overload, leading to withdrawal, shut down and distortion to protect themselves. They have a problem with relevance-perception, and they don't share the cultural/consensual gloss reality that other people do because of the distorted processor generated by their confusing and life-and-death frightening life history. They had to retreat from the left hemisphere into the right hemisphere. As a result, they are holistic, complexly vague, and symbolic in their thinking. They tend to be over-inclusive and to interrelate realities and worlds that others don't see as connected. They are also unable to communicate very effectively what they are encountering, and they have a pronounced tendency to assume that you are on the same thought train with them — which only creates more confusion.
They tend to retreat into the right hemisphere to avoid all of this, with the result that they tend to operate on several levels of meaning at once, to see things in holistic configurations that aren't analyzable, and to become what could be called "spacey". They avoid their feelings and the harsh demands of reality by doing this. The "spaciness" reflects their tendency to exit the right hemisphere into the larger cosmos and to tap into spiritual dimensions and phenomena as well. The result is that they don't merge or blend well with the rest of the social environment, and they are not very "grounded" in the practical ways of the world.
They tend to come at everything from at least "three degrees starboard" and "three floors up" in abstraction and organization, if not "off the wall" entirely. They tend to respond to total gestalts and not infrequently to spiritual realities as well. Furthermore, they think in symbols that need unraveling to be understood. But their "distorter system" makes their contributions and interventions seem to be "coming from left field somewhere". When they become too "out of synch", they seem crazy or at least very confusing. When they aren't too far out of synch, they are uncannily and unnervingly penetratingly perceptive and intuitively attuned. And because of their fear and rage at their situation, they tend to "bend over backwards" as they come across as the "ultimate authority/expert" on everything. They then tend to invalidate, insult, intimidate and infuriate while at the same time demonstrating their penetrating perceptivity and making you afraid of your lack of awareness. They become quite alienating as a result.
They have fundamental and disturbing questions about their identity and worth, and they are somehow confused about how you go about the business of being a socialized and contributory human being. They feel hopelessly lacking in something fundamental which is the key to effective coping and successful relations with others (the "They've got a secret for success that I'll never have" feeling). The world feels like one large unpredictable acid bath, and they have a profound sense of permeability and vulnerability.
They fear invasion of their personhood, control by unlocalizable hostile external forces, or even being annihilated, killed, destroyed. They have poorly developed self-hood boundaries, and there is a vague confusion regarding "what's me and what's not me". They therefore freeze and hold themselves in and away from the hostile, terrifying world. They retreat from the world of people and active engagement into an internal world where they control what they experience. They also retreat from the part of the brain that deals with the world of action and emotional involvement, the left hemisphere, into the world of intuition, perceptual gestalts and potential spiritual experience, the right hemisphere.
They tend to occupy themselves with autistic (self-generated and self-contained) fantasies, and they avoid feelings, connection and people. They lose contact with pragmatic reality processes, and the pain and frustration of being unable to maintain consensual reality contact, self-definition, clarity of experience, and effective environmental interface leads to a deep and disturbing fulminating fury. They become terrified of being overcome by this rage, by psychic-spiritual experiences, and by "primary processes" (unconscious contents, non-rational thinking processes, primitive emotions and motivations, and collective consciousness phenomena).
They feel unable to tell themselves from the environment and from the cosmos, and they fear they are mad. They have a very difficult time seeing pragmatic patterns and negotiating the workaday and social world. They have low energy due to the enormous amount of self-suppression of their potentially homicidal infant-level rage, and they are cold, unable to contact, and lost in their own world. They hide inside to control their rage, terror, vulnerability and permeability, and to avoid being overwhelmed internally and externally. They are emotionally aloof, fearful of their perceived hostility towards the world, and people-avoidant.
To further complicate the situation, in their desperation to decode what was happening and to "make up for" their "moral cretinism", they become incredibly empathic, rapport-experiencing and psychically connected with the mother and with others later. They are intensely sensitive to "vibes" and subtle situational and nonverbal cues. But due to the circumstances of their developmental history, they have a very difficult time sorting out what it all means and communicating their understandings to others. All in all, they end up as being somehow rather "odd" in the eyes of others.
They feel alienated, misunderstood and peculiarly not a part of the social environment. They have backed out of the situation defensively, and they are emotionally unresponsive and self-protective. They distrust the world and they perceive other people as hostile, rejecting and dangerous. Some "throw in the towel" and become effectively incompetent and care-coercing. Some become super-rational and over-intellectualizing to compensate for their felt inadequate left hemisphere competencies, with the result that they become perfectionistic, out of touch with what's real, hyper-abstract and super-succinct, and sometimes bizarrely punny. Others tend to use distractibility, confusion-inducing and "red herring" tactics, preventing focalization of issues, never settling on anything long enough to allow real coming to grips with things. Still others tend to strike out and to rebel to keep people from hurting them. All seek space from people to avoid emotional arousal, disintegration, annihilation and "running amok".
They have low frustration-tolerance, a fear of direct rage from and towards them, a need to enter the world of sensations, logic and pragmatics, and a strong spiritual bent. Their isolation leads to idiosyncratic language, experiences, concepts and communication styles, along with difficulty in thinking clearly, understanding what is being communicated, and getting across what they experience. They avoid making unequivocal statements out of fear of emotionally violent reactions and dangerous intentions from the environment.
They are covertly hostile and they feel somehow responsible for all evils, and they are guilty and ashamed of themselves for their feelings and characteristics. Self-clarification and ego boundaries are always issues for them, and some of them push their body limits and pursue physical excellence to feel alive, able to see the limits of the self and the world, and to connect with, impact and control the world. They seek to counteract and to bend over backwards against the crazy-making unreality, confusion and left hemisphere incompetence and social ineptness they always have known — the "I, Robot" feeling.
"Fog bounds" are frightened, confused, lonely and angry. They know they are "different", that their history is different, and that others react hostilely to that differentness. But they have little or no comprehension of how or why this is so, but they assume that it is their fault somehow. They own and internalize the problem as inherent to their very nature. The future looks chaotic and hideous to them as they contemplate a "magical misery tour" experience of life. They are catastrophizing ( the tendency of an individual to overreact to mild symptoms of anxiety and to regard them as a prelude to a severe panic attack.) and chronically terrified of the world. It feels like a capriciously manipulative and incomprehensibly arbitrary and potentially dangerous universe to them.
They repress their reaction to being persecuted as well as their thoughts, feelings and responses that might set off the annihilation. They operate in a completely "self-sealing" manner. They don't dare come in contact with their body and their feelings, and they function in an "autistic" (self-contained, self-sustaining) manner that is an-hedonic (pleasureless) and feeling-avoidant. They take no pleasure in human contact — too dangerous and heavy. They have the delusion that there are no happy choices and that no matter what you do, it's wrong.
They end up evasively blame-avoidant to deal with their repressed guilt for "deserving" their whole experience. They are also chaotically confused in what feels like a totally manipulative world. Fin-ally, they are fulminatingly furious at their whole situation and life pattern. Furthermore, their rage at their whole situation is so intense that they have "world-destruction fantasies". However, this arises from the fact that their rage is that of a very young and impotent infant, rather than it's being true hatred. It is actually outraged self-respect. It is often used defensively in the service of derailing perceived threats to their very existence. But they don't know this, and they live in chronic terror of themselves in a massive "runamok-anxiety" pattern.
The result is that they are intensely rage-terrified and passive-aggressive, with a strong "twistoflex" accusational denial-distortion-defensiveness. They are severely passion-avoidant for fear of releasing the "world-destroyer" (the homicidal rage towards the mother, who was at the time it started experienced as the God figure). They end up arrested at the early infancy stage, and they therefore have the "megalomania" (humongous egocentric inflation) of that period. They have a massive fear of the misuse and abuse of their power, due to "God's invalidations and accusations". So they end up feeling both incredibly weak and incredibly powerful at the same time.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
The "fog bound" had to be in continuous control of everything that came their way or let mother drive them crazy, or be annihilated, or "run-amok" in a "world-destruction frenzy" when they were growing up. They had to be what was wanted at all times, and in order to do that, they had to find some way of seeing or knowing what was wanted in the inchoate (undeveloped) system they were a part of. They had to "go meta", to rise above the fray into an overview strategy of their own or they would forget who they were or who they were trying to be for mother or they would "go crazy" (world-destruction fantasies) or they would be abandonment-annihilated. Their experience was that they HAD to be on top of everything all the time or complete disaster would result. The outcome is an almost religious fanatic conviction of the ultimate significance of their imposed structure at the "meta" level, which they then seek to impose on the world in an insistent and persistent continuous manner.
For them, control became a matter of not forgetting what they were doing moment to moment, and of not letting themselves get out of control — the avoidance of annihilation and of devastation of the world. However, this is a major undertaking because of their constant state of confusion in which past and present, reality and fantasy are inextricably intertwined, and in which nothing is what it seems. Future-seeking and success possibilities seem out of the question. The goal is to minimize the damage in a chaotic world.
Another critical factor in this scenario is that to the "fog bound", ALL stimuli require a response in order to avoid utter calamity. In addition, they have a terrible time avoiding losing their identity to situations, people and contexts as they tend to operate in an uncontrollable chameleon fashion. They react to this with constant "red alert" controlling rigidity. They operate out of the basic bottom line feeling of helplessness. They assume the world is out of control, chaotic and catastrophic in its nature, and that it requires their orchestrated control trips to deflect disaster.
In order to do this, they tap into everyone's own experience of infantile helplessness at one time in their life to activate the fear motivation that that generates to gain compliance, cooperation, and contribution to their "Grand Plan". They are super scare-tacticians and they generate intense self-distrust and "avalanche-anxiety" with "boulders of truth" (undeniable facts that are then contexted in catastrophic terms) to keep everything and everyone under their thumb.
In doing this, they are seeking to make up for the capricious chaos they have always known with complete control in order to stay afloat and to deflect disaster. Left to its own devices, the world is utterly chaotic and out of control, and it requires total domination to prevent terminal entropy. Entropy-avoidance is their major motivation, and ORDER of a non-personal nature is the only solution. They have to impose their own order on the chaos created by the "dragon distorter matrix" that they experience. They are so frightened that they can't learn to let the Universe do its thing and demonstrate its trustability.
In effect, they are attempting to achieve pseudo-omnipotence, a rejection and repression of their "weak" self, and an identification with the Powerful Other (the mother in infancy). They HAVE to feel totally in charge of everything, and they'll go to great lengths to see to it that they have this experience. In the process, they re-define everything and invalidate all other interpretations of the realities they are facing. They become utterly implacable in this process and they coerce, con or confusion-induce capitulation in a total take-over trip. Unfortunately, then their underlying rage comes out and they become subtly sabotaging and systematically passive-aggressive.
They literally can't leave well enough alone anywhere any time, and they are insatiable and unstoppable dominators of every scene out of their "center of the chaotic universe" experience. They continuously control EVERYTHING in an experience-orchestrating and simultaneously "unpleasable parent" manner. They instantly seize control of every situation by taking the "definer" role. They then use all their "svengalian strategies" to induce complete capitulation and compliance. For instance, they change the rules, introduce novel or new considerations, parameters, processes or definitions, subtly guilt-induce, fear-inspire, confusion-create, pause-introduce (while "thinking"), initiative-punish, reality-redefine, doubt-inspire, mind-fuck by level-shifting, double-bind, process-orchestrate, and in all manner of other ways re-create their own experience as they do unto others what was done unto them. It is a highly unnerving experience for those around them, as they are constantly pointing out the absolutely vital parameters that others have "overlooked" that would have brought utter disaster. In general, they make others feel lost in a dangerous and uncharted sea with the "fog bound" at the helm and the only one who knows what's REALLY happening.
They also seize upon any shortfalls, handicaps, weaknesses, issues and underlying fears and negative motivations of others to gain complete control of the situation and capitulation by others to their "stewardship". They are so controlling that others either have to be cruelly abrupt and arbitrary (which activates an unbelievable frenzy of countermoves) or to be completely "trance-induced" by their tactics. They allow no casualness about anything and they allow no contact or co-creation in the situation. They are super-negatively oriented, and they are forever "holding the fort", in their experience.
They utilize their penetrating perceptivity and nuance-tracking capacities to see implications, ramifications and patterns in what's going down, and they coerce, con or confuse people to participate and contribute their part in the construction of the "Grand Plan" the "fog bound" is imposing on the world. As a result, they have a pronounced tendency to fall into the "messiah complex" pattern. They typically become paternalistically imposing of their interpretations and interventions in a "Papa knows best!" manner (either gender). They operate out of unilateral divining, defining and deciding, in an "I know what's right and real here; I can anticipate all contingencies" manner. They then engage in arbitrary action and "octopus tentacles" ubiquitous control to impose their will on the situation.
They tend to be rather intensely grandiose in their evaluations and experiences of situations because of their passionate mission sense. They are self-deludingly moralistic, and they are self-oblivious and fanatic and overbearingly harm-avoidant and limiting-restricting in their impact. They operate in a "guardian of morality" manner and they intend to impose their "Grand Plan" over all obstacles. They are political to the core, in effect.
They are full of missionary zeal and determination to make their model of "utopia" happen (or at least to prevent their version of "hell" from happening). Yet they are completely unaware of their process and they are profoundly resistive-deflective to reality inputs and influence from outside sources on these matters. It is a self-contained sealed unit system fueled by rage, runamok-anxiety and annihilation-paranoia.
Unfortunately, by having their fingers in every pie and on every button, they do sometimes generate some positive results and/or prevent some untoward outcome. This tends to validate their "Grand Plan", along with their strategies and tactics, and it gives them the "credentials" to continue their pattern to both themselves and the world in a misguided zeal manner. They also tend strongly to corner the market on their contributions so you have to go through them to get the few things that do work from them.
At the on-going process level, "fog bounds" have to add on, delete, or change everything that comes their way. They have to modify it in the direction of the "Grand Plan" and their model of the situation. They are masters of "sidewinding side-steps", insidious encroachments and "puzzle piece-planting" on their way to the culmination of their "Grand Plans". They also do a lot of sudden switches and "egg-beatering" level-switching in an unpredictable manner. This generates confusion and a "no win, no out" experience. To make matters worse, they often miss large chunks of reality in their "Grand Plans" — particularly with regard to their role in the problem(s). So they go around slyly orchestrating, withholding, "monkey-wrenching", "errors of omissioning" and "puppeteering", thereby creating at best mixed results outcomes. As they do this, they have the ironic impact of inducing confusion in others, a confusion which both validates their world-view and situation-interpretation and allows them to take control. The paradoxical resultant is that they become in effect a "chaos-keeper" and a "crazy-maker".
"Fog bounds" are masterful at what could be called "trance-induction". They generate an annihilation-anxious altered state of consciousness that puts people in a space of confusion, ambiguity and ease of influence. They do this by using a lot of non-referential and nonsensory-based vagaries, deletions, generalizations, irrelevance and "filler" material as they talk. Another way they do it is to go into a very rhythmic and pleasant manner of speaking that is highly hypnotic. When they have succeeded in inducing a trance state, they use it to totally dominate, control and determine events as they create a capitulation-collapse-collusion process in their audience. They then do exactly what they think they have to from their quasi-paranoid and harm-avoidant framework.
One variation on this theme is to induce a "raving maniac" state in their audience by "doing unto others what was done unto them" — double binding in a manner that you can't do anything about it, you can't escape from it and you can't talk about it, so that you end up a helpless enraged infant. Once they have achieved this state, they then switch to a super-reasonable approach to hammer home their intent, both by making the other person seem totally unreasonable and by persuading the environment and the other person with their reasonableness by way of contrast.
A favorite tactic of the "fog bound" is to induce in others what they experience all the time. They will do this by activating "anchoring stimuli" that have the effect of "age-regressing" you and of activating very, very young mind-states of helplessness and overwhelm from your infancy and childhood. They are expert at elicitation of this effect in others — they know just what to do. Another favorite is to undermine your model of the world, your self-confidence and your sense of reality with their "crazy-making" trance-induction stuff. They result is a "Jekyl-Hyde" pattern of experiences on your part of yourself, along with a sense of loss of self-control, self-hood, and self-trust. There develops a childlike sense of enslavement, dependency and fearfulness of the world which makes you utterly vulnerable to their worldview, values, priorities and manipulations.
"Fog bounds" have what could be called the "Rasputin response" pattern in which their mastery of the right hemisphere gives them an often uncanny ability to harness the forces of "magic" — clairvoyance, enchantment, hypnosis, telekinesis, remote event-determination, etc. to achieve their ends. Furthermore, they use subtle elicitation and "chess-planned" strategies to move people and events where they want them, taking advantage of their right hemisphere perceptiveness to "grok" the situation and people, to set their "Grand Plan" goal, and to micro-orchestate via subteranean influence techniques every aspect of the processes and outcomes of the situation. They also utilize analogies and metaphors from the right hemisphere a lot to generate experiences, to induce states of consciousness, and to elicit behaviors towards their intended interventions. In addition, they can use the psychic capabilities of the right hemisphere to "psyche out" what is going on and to intervene and interfere to fend off their version of disaster via forcing people to cooperate due to the experience of there being dire consequences if they don't. In short, they have a remarkable ability to "have their way".
They are also prone to unpredictably "take offense" to the implications and ramifications of something you have done in a "landmine explosion" experience-inducing effect. They also "discern immorality" in everyday events and they are prone to "punish" the "offenders". A favorite tactic of theirs is to always instantly find a crucial parameter-process from out of left field and to demonstrate how your overlooking it would have lead to Chernobyl in a catastrophizing, totally undermining self-trust-exploding manner. In addition, they require that you "prove" yourself to them as trustworthy and committed by seeing their indirect and unspoken messages through all the pretending and camouflage. Another favorite "fog bound" tool is to anchor cosmic and mysterious guilt-inducing "There I go again!" feelings along the lines of, "You're not (you weren't) here (there) for me!". But if you do come through for them, you get annihilating input from them about how you did it in such a way as to endanger everyone again! It's a double-binding no escape and no capacity to "go meta" to the situation type of thing.
"Fog bounds" treat life as a complicated puzzle with constantly moving pieces. They tend to get lost in the many irons they have in the fire as they attempt to impose "efficiency" and "elegance" of productivity and time-usage on everything so as to cover as many bases and levels and to control as many contingencies as they can with their every move and with every event. They therefore are prone to over-extend, over-commit, hold up operations, not follow through, and "last minute rug-yank let-down" because there are too many things in their hopper. They also constantly impose considerations and constraints on the situation that disrupt productivity and completion of projects. The result is a "centipede with one wooden leg stuck in a hole" effect — all with the best of intentions and reasons.
"Fog bounds" are experts at "trance-induction" of the people around them. They are so terrified-paranoid of being out of control that they use indirect induction in everything they do. They are masterful situation-readers — and they set out strategies to gain their chaos-inducing control constantly. Things do go wrong for them constantly and they therefore use predictions of disaster, catastrophizing and confusion-induction implantation processes to gain and maintain complete determination of the entire situation wherever they are. They are elaborate behind-the-scenes hypnotic inducers and subterranean three-dimensional chess-playing manipulators who regard life as a desperate struggle for survival against overwhelming odds in a bizarre world. They are constantly using their intellectual skills to try to compensate for their fear of confusion, immobilization and helplessness, along with trying to keep a cap on their explosive inner impulse. They have a "primal" fear of being "devoured", and they have a massive dependence on "self-reliance" and "other-abandonment" as self-protection against being done in and against running amok.
They are intensely super-sensitive to any indication of losing control or of things moving in a disastrous direction. This is an "advance warning radar system" designed to compensate for their realilty-scrambing incompetence and terrified infant experience. Their first response is always to withhold everything they can for purposes of control. They are auditory types who pay particular attention to what is being said and how it is being said, and they do a lot of auditory digital "tape-playing" in their heads. They are totally cut off from their body awareness, and they live in the mind, with an especial emphasis on visual vigilance. They therefore develop "delusions" or deeply invested systems of belief and intervention as an attempt to impose their own order onto the confusing overload of equal priority experiences. It is a lifeline survival strategy for them to organize their world so they can proceed with some sense of direction and relevance. They therefore hate irrelevance, as it assaults their identity certainty, it demands that they leave the protection of their shell, and it removes the foundation of control that relevance provides them.
There is often a subtle air of smug superiority to the "fog bound's interpersonal interface. It tends to make one feel stupid and immoral for not seeing some implication and impact of everything you do that they with their larger perspective and universal detail access always seen. This is partly a kind of subtle revenge for all their misery, and in part a kind of "ship of fools" reaction to the "idiocies" of the people around them. Bottom line, they are always deeply distrustingly judgmental and negative assumptive about everything and everyone as a result of their experiential history. They are, after all, the product of unpleasable parents, and they therefore themselves operate as unpleasable parents. They simply have to always show you how you screwed up, and they are in effect constitutionally incapable of approving or validating anyone for anything. There's always something that has been overlooked, mismanaged or incorrectly done. Indeed, all you have to do to "flush out" a "fog bound" is to make a strong assertion in an area they know a lot about. The next sound you hear will be an invalidation, control-grab and correction.
On the other hand, "fog bounds" have a primordial terror of discovery in whatever they are doing, out of the catastrophic expectation that it will lead to their immediate annihilation. As a result, the moment you try to induce some reality with them, all the hideous horrors of hell are unleashed in their experience of the situation. They then go into a massive assault to protect themselves that usually is so intense and inexorable that capitulation-coercion is the outcome. They become instantly furious and totally "district attorneying" via indirect induction, "eggbeatering" mind-fucking crazy-making when feedback is given. They allow no alternative to their way of doing things. They totally deny and prevent their taking accountability and responsibility with regard to their to-the-death iron-fisted total control and domination trip. When confronted, they throw up "smoke grenades" of confusion-induction and misleading, and they then attack you for your not understanding and attacking them. They also "blame-boomerang" (turning it back on you), compulsively invalidate, and "last-word" insist, in a total determination to control the process and outcome of the situation. They are, of course, terrified of annihilation and of world-destruction runamok.
To top the whole thing off, they are sitting on a gigantic rage reaction to their whole life history and pattern, and they systematically suppress and repress that with everything they've got, out of massive "runamok-anxiety". They don't dare say or do things directly or overtly, so they operate in a vague and ambiguous manner. The end result is a lot of passive-aggressiveness in which they screw up the works with the indirect rage-release patterns in the form of subtle and subconscious vengeance patterns. Some even seek to sabotage other people's success to bring them below the "fog bound's" level. Some "fog bounds" do these rageful type processes more than others. Those who do this more are more anger-based, while those who don't are usually more fear-based.
The other major characteristic of the "fog bound" is their intense avoidance of intimacy and vulnerability, along with a certain interpersonal distance that they always maintain. Intimacy involves control-sharing — which is absolutely terrifying to the "fog bound". They are afraid of social situations because things might get out of control, because they might be deeply hurt again, and because their communications are so "just off-kilter" that it creates painful problems for them. Although they often have a well-developed set of defensive and control tactic social skills, and they frequently can appear to be quite socially attractive, they nevertheless are massively deflective of merging experiences. A lot of them have a certain "sparkling spaciness" and "springy-shoed" charm about them, but it is usually accompanied by a "smiling denial" and minimization reality-avoidance pattern underneath. They have a constantly-in-place buffer against mental and emotional harassment by living in the "meta realm" and by taking complete control at all times. They tend very strongly to build their time-structuring around things, not people.
They feel under siege much of the time, and their experience is that if they do attack back, they had better win because if they don't they'll end up a "prisoner of war" or annihilated. So they seek to stay unassailable and unavailable at all times. When you do start to get close to their core, they distract, deflect, deny and discombobulate to prevent your getting any closer. They are so dedicated and determined in this endeavor that you don't have any means of dealing with them effectively and they end up exactly the same as always — alone and alien.
The peculiar thing about all this is that their whole pattern puts them in a weird double bind trip as a result of their "gaslighting" (drive someone crazy) the world around them (subtly controlling the setting of the gaslight and then denying anything of the sort is happening). They are terrified of losing control for fear of "going crazy" and of losing their ability to tell what's real and their "real self" from what's cover-keeping and defense. The irony is that by staying in complete control like a sword-fighter in a room full of people, they are crazy-making everyone else. They hurt everyone by being utterly irresponsibly irrational under the cover of total deliberateness, detachment and determination. Their control acts in a totally self-fulfilling prophecy manner by eliciting "out of control" and other "chaotic" reactions from the world around them.
This whole pattern can go into some rather severe manifestations. In one form, the individual is subjected to super-symbiotic parenting, resulting in super-incompetence and responsibility-avoidance. The motto here is, "Tis better to be sick than dead", due to the ferocity of the "folie a deux" (craziness of two) (A condition in which symptoms of a mental disorder, such as delusive beliefs or ideas, occur simultaneously in two individuals who share a close relationship or association) dependence-induction and crazy-making that went down. The individual ends up playing a "Dopey" role (from the "seven dwarfs") in response to all the crazy-making and identity-destroying. They therefore end up studied in-competent care-coercing (SICC) and rescue-elicters of the first magnitude. Another outcome is that they become unilateral deciders out of internally consistent but non-shared bases so that they become quite disruptive of all they enter. An accompanying experience for them is "Where am I?", as they are always on the razor's edge of pretending to be totally incompetent, needy and dependent and not forgetting that for one second. If they forget they're pretending, they might show their real self and get annihilated, or they might think their real self is their pretend self. Their experience in this situation is also, "I'm not really good. I'm pretending to be good", as they buy the parent(s)' evaluation and characterization of their inner core being.
A second severe form of "fog bound" is when they become a "walking cerebrum" and an "egghead" mentalist. They then become intellectualizing, rationalizing, detached, emotionally isolating and distantiating. Their mania for control of everything can then lead to desperate attempts to completely determine their thoughts, actions and environment in an obsessive-compulsive disorder pattern where they are compelled to repeat over and over little "safety rituals" of thought and action that override their ability to do anything else. They then also become massively self-justifying and fanatically control-avoidant to prevent utter calamity.
The schizophrenic psychotic version of the "fog bound" is the resultant of three primary factors. First, they have chosen as an entity to have a life of "re-evaluation" (where they are incapable of self-care and this frees them to process the past several lifetimes in the physical form). Secondly, they usually have to have the genetic vulnerability factor where there is a pronounced tendency to regress to primitive modes and levels of functioning under stress. And thirdly, they usually have to receive a gargantuan induction of the "fog bound" process in the form of being "catch-22'd" on EVERYTHING, not just the usual acceptance-rejection confusion-induction experience. All reality and self-related influences are "mind-fucked" to the point of disintegration. This is not always the case, however, and the soul's intention to have a "re-evaluation" life can turn the more normal range "fog bound"-induction processes into psychosis-precipitation if it wants to badly enough.
The psychotic version of the "fog bound" is a fusion-symbiosis or even an autistic arrest of emotional development in early infancy in the context of a "fog bound" -inducing environment. They end up shutting down and fending off all relationships and control impacts from the environment. They also retreat into the right hemisphere, where they encounter "supernatural revelations", "relationship to God" experiences and "cosmic encounters". However, they are so befuddled, developmentally distorted and left hemisphere-damaged that they can't relate to these experiences and resources adequately, nor can they communicate about them effectively. And to top the whole thing off, their experiences are distorted by all the rejection history, and they end up having hostile hallucinations and reframings of their right hemisphere experiences in such a manner as to be totally destructive to their functioning and self-survival.
When this whole process goes into psychotic proportions it can take one of three forms. In one, they try to define their situation and to control their experiences by assuming a potentially lethal meaning behind every message and event, thereby tying themselves up totally in trying to detect and deflect the anticipated annihilation (the paranoid pattern). In another, they seek to laugh at all the contradictions that go on at all sorts of levels (in the hebephrenic pattern). And in the third, they seek to seal off all impact and to prevent calamity by going utterly immobile and non-responsive/non-responsible (the catatonic "over-responsible" pattern).
The paranoid system emerges out of the intense deception and disguise in the source and use of abusive power by the parents. They experience it as "God-ordained", earned, self-caused, and even pleasant due to the "double-think" parenting processes involved. They end up with delusions of influence due to their utter confusion about what really happened and happens. They over-generalize from their experience and they engage in constant self-fulfilling prophesy "attack first" behavior patterns.
The hebephrenic (now known as the "disorganized" type) is subjected to such chaotic and confusion-inducing dysfunctional experiences on top of the "fog bound"-inducing processes that they end up being driven into the right hemisphere and out to the cosmos, where they can "go meta" to the whole thing. There they encounter the "cosmic giggle" awareness of the humorousness of how much of what happens here works, along with a "bird's eye view" of the family system and of all others they encounter. This they try to bring back to cope with and make sense of what is going on. But then they run into the "miswired" left hemisphere and the chaotic dysfunctionality at the life-and-death level of the situation, and they lose their capacity to comprehend what is going down. The result is a fragmented functioning system accompanied by "off-the-wall" hilarity and self-reassuring laughter.
The catatonic psychotic was placed in a pivotal position of responsibility and accountability by their family. They were responded to as if they were capable of "making everything all better" and of "making up for all that happened". And when due to their infant and child limitations and the "fog bound"-inducing parenting they were unable to live up to such gigantic expectations, they "pulled in all their horns" and went into immobilization as the only strategy to prevent further "world-destruction".
It should be noted that most psychotic "fog bounds" are absolutely horrified at the prospect of hospitalization. They utterly refuse to capitulate to the "fog-bounding" mother in an, "I WON'T go crazy!" reaction. They will do anything to everyone to not accept the reality of their psychosis and need. They absolutely refuse any form of realistic remedy and they cause great harm in the process. It's only when they are completely overwhelmed by the psychotic process and its effects and outcomes that they collapse in capitulation and devastation. Some of them go into a kind of "revolving door" process arising out of severe "Stay fog bound or die!" implants. They keep wanting to reconsider their script, but they keep "falling apart" out of annihilation-paranoia.
So to summarize the situation, we have an individual who was "crazy-made" to the degree that they feel somehow incompetent, apart and alarmed at the social world. They trade their feelings and involvement in the world and with other people for their life, as well as to avoid murderously acting out their homicidal hatred of the crazy-making parent. They are confused and confusing, controlling and control-avoidant, and dreadfully alone and alien.
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
"Fog bounds" are trying to become a separate individual, identity and person without abandonment-annihilation or world-destruction as the outcome. But between the control trip and the "fog" settling in every time clarity starts, they have a hell of a time breaking free. They have to give up the delusion that they need to control the world because they and the world both need it to prevent potential ultimate annihilation or world-destruction. They have to surrender to the Universe and to turn loose the control and the "ace in the hole" — the plan up their sleeve. They have to stop trying to out-think God.
They also have to release their rage at the Universe as well. They have repressed homicidal hostility towards their mother for the crazy-making and at their father for his active or passive collusion in the process. When they do release the rage, it is tremendously expanding and freeing, and their ineffectual compulsive control process disappears on its own. They experience a tremendous burst of fear that is all but overwhelming for a while. It consists of fear of having to be whole, of having their destiny, of letting God out and of being God, of the goodness of life, of world-destruction, of the world's practical demands, of surrender, of annihilation, and of people. But it passes, and a "bottom of the inverted pyramid" change effect occurs. Missing piece fill-ins occur all over the place and things start working for them for the first time.
This is a mighty tall order, and to pull it off requires a strong, gentle, nurturing, accepting, patient and understanding relationship therapy figure who provides nurturance, support, emotional realness, modeling of ego-integration, and lending of his/her functioning capabilities along the way. It is, in effect, a re-parenting process that has to happen, to take the individual all the way back to the beginning and putting a "new ending on the old story". This can sometimes happen "in vivo" (in the course of daily living) by such means as a truly loving friend, child or spouse, but usually it is far too demanding and objectivity-requiring for this to happen.
The therapeutic relationship will be quite trying to carry
out because the "fog bound" will lay out mazes as tests of
trustability — and the relationship figure has to be
able to avoid giving any form of attack experience or
misperception indications. To prove to the "fog bound" that
you care, you have to go through the "See me! Feel me!
Touch me!" process of being able to tell their real self
from their pretend self. And they are extremely sensitive
to being misunderstood — just like Mom did. And they
try to be understood and to obfuscate the issue if at all
possible at the same time. They entice people to buy their
contents and control with their process, and if you try to
deal with either, they switch levels and strategies on you.
You have to "go meta to the system" and label the "fog
bound"-inducing processes and to compassionately
insight-induce along with the message that "You had to do
it to survive". They need to be understood in terms of what
they are experiencing and told why it is happening
and acceptance for being that way.
It involves a slow, progressive reality-confrontation process that is non-threatening, along with pragmatics training which starts with the basics that should have been learned in infancy and toddlerhood. They need a strong model who doesn't demand that they drop their defenses, who doesn't have too high expectations, and who doesn't get too close emotionally too fast. They need them to maintain a proper distance while not abandoning them, lying to them, or getting unduly angry with them (all of which repeat home).
They are super-sensitive and perceptive in a danger-detecting manner, but while their observations are correct, their interpretations are distorted. They need to have these re-interpreted in reality terms and to be taught to translate their communications into logical, realistic, orderly and comprehensible form. They need to have repeated trustworthy experiences of consensual reality in order to ground them. They also need repeated experiences of being "out of control" with blissful results.
In addition, they need to reach out for contact with other people in guaranteed success circumstances for social strokes and "de-schizoiding" experiences. They need the experience of developing contact with the language habits of the community and to find that social vulnerability and interdependence is not only natural, it's the only way to fly.
They are out of contact with their feelings and bodily sensations out of a fundamental fearfulness. They use a mask of rigidness, stiffness and aloof unbendingness to defend against their enormous hostility and fear, and they need to learn to relax and flow more and more, in safe situations, and to release their feelings in an effective manner. A very useful adjunct in this process is deep, psychotherapeutically aware and profound bodywork such as that used in Hakomi therapy.
In other words, what is required is a "re-programming of the bio-computer" to fill in the missing pieces, to bring them down off the ceiling, to allow full comprehension and comprehensibility, and to join the human community in a relaxed, contributory and joyful manner.
WHAT IS THEIR PURPOSE?
Paradoxically, their great gift is their penetrating perceptivity and cosmic comprehension that arises from all this. When they recover from the limitations of the program, they bring to the world the remarkable perspicacity and prescience that is the resultant of it. They use their super nuance-tracking capabilities and their spiritual contact to come up with synergistic integrations that are marvelously effective. They make a great philosopher, shrink, mathematician, artist, political leader, and innovative inventor, to mention but a few of their potential contributions.
They use their spiritual awareness and the resulting love-based goals to enhance connectedness, contribution and commitment by means of their three-dimensional chess game perceptivity and their micro-manipulations on behalf of the cosmos, the community and themselves. They are masterful at attention-redirection, indirect induction of comprehension or motivation, discerning distrust-alleviation, productivity-elicitation and achievement orchestrations. They love encountering another "ex-fog bound" because they can play on the meta level safely, effectively and expansively.
In short, they are our "hot line to the Home Office", so to speak. They bring their intense sensitivity, never-miss-a-thing tracking and meta level synergistic comprehension to bear on "messages from the other side" and to the practical exigencies of daily living. They are the original "spiritual administrator".
More information: index.php
More information: email: Narayan-Singh@dbs2000ad.com
Books, Face Reading and More Information.