WHAT EXACTLY IS A DOUBLE BIND?
It is the oldest trick in the book, literally.
A double bind is a mental man-trap that can be superficially described as a “Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t” paradoxical communication.
Here is an example. An attorney asks you in court:
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
But a schizophrenia-generating double bind has a twist to it.
It involves the deep emotional attachment of the victim to the predator.
In other words it leverages love like a judo move but it does it in a way so subtle that it goes unnoticed to the perception of the victim.
Because of the relationship the child or victim cannot escape and must respond. The victim does not have the option to leave the relationship. Children are especially vulnerable because of their limited experience in life.
Your wife asks you…
”If there was one thing that you could change about me physically what would it be?”
Even silence is a bad choice in such a situation. The longer you remain silent the worse it gets.
This is often done to a child by a mother that doesn’t love him because he was born out of wedlock. He is and has always been unwanted and she views him as a drag on her life. He loves her but she secretly hates him. So she pretends to love him and yet he picks up on the metacommunication she is sending out. She tells him she loves him but does not demonstrate it correctly. Her words say one thing but he feels another message entirely.
Example:
A child draws near for a hug but his mother pulls away.
When he stops short she says,
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
This confuses him so he goes for the hug a second time and she says,
“Go to bed, you’re tired and I want you to get your sleep.”
He knows he is not tired but he cannot question her judgment.
COVID Example:
Your government announces:
Bioweapons are bad. But we need to make them to find cures for them. They escape occasionally but we are closer to finding a cure.
This occurs in our minds because metacommunication is important for framing HOW we should process a statement. Without it we cannot accurately differentiate between sarcasm and direct communication. We cannot differentiate between hostility and play, posturing and real aggression, jealousy and rejection, facts and comedy. Really, a joke’s punchline is funny to us because it causes a complete reevaluation of the metacommunication of the story. Metacommunication occurs even in animals but in humans it is conveyed via facial expressions, actions, hand motions, tone of voice, rolling of the eyes, etc. It is learned by observation during childhood as a crucial supplement to the language.
When kittens wrestle they sometimes act like they are fighting to the death but they are playing and they each know it. How did they communicate it to each other?
Next: WHAT EXACTLY IS A DOUBLE BIND? Part 2