THE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME:
The name of the syndrome is derived from a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. In August 1973, four employees of Sveriges Kreditbank were held hostage in the bank's vault for six days. During the standoff, a seemingly incongruous bond developed between captive and captor. One hostage, during a telephone call with Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, stated that she fully trusted her captors but feared that she would die in a police assault on the building.
Psychologists who have studied the syndrome believe that the bond is initially created when a captor threatens a captive's life, deliberates, and then chooses not to kill the captive. The captive's relief at the removal of the death threat is transposed into feelings of gratitude toward the captor for giving him or her life. As the Stockholm bank robbery incident proves, it takes only a few days for this bond to cement, proving that, early on, the victim's desire to survive trumps the urge to hate the person who created the situation.
This would NEVER HAPPEN TO ME!
It DID, THOUGH!
I was held captive by belief systems from an abusive household. This caused me to live on my tiptoes, fight or flight, always afraid to say the "wrong" thing...even long after my father passed. I joined a religion whose God would punish the evil but talk about knee jerk response, the 'evil" was always ambiguous, with undefinable lines since we were all 'sinners' according to the church. The roots were deep and unconsciously affected every area of my life. Which then, in turn, affected others around me, who could not see the root system I had grown.
Thoughts are things, ENERGIES, That surround us, belief systems can and DO keep people hostage, and no longer serve to our best and highest.
I sat with a woman, and I saw an umbilical cord around a baby's neck. "This was not your fault", I said to her!
She had carried guilt for years, that her son's brain damage was her fault! The guilt had affected every aspect of her life, EVERYTHING that went wrong, WITH her, with her friends, with the world, was somehow HER FAULT!
She uprooted that belief, then and there!
Her life has truly prospered since that 'uprooting' of reading occurred last year!
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