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Torture Vs Abuse

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My apologies if anyone has already identified or gone on about the fact that torture usually adeptly blends, sexual, mental, socio-emotional, and also very hightened simply physical torture in one event.

In other words, torture is "calculated" to bring an individual into states of total overwhelm to the edge of death and leave them there long enough to break them up into whatever they want them to be. It is said that torture is sometimes a means to an end, but I argue that it is mostly not. It is usually its own addiction for the torturer, who is trapped in an obsession with his own mortality.

Torturers are prepared to be killers. Like a cat, they toy with death like a mouse, someone else's death. This brings them a sense of control that all abusers crave, but they also feel they are mastering death, which is not what most abusers need out of the abuse. They may enjoy playing in the liminal space between what their victim can and can't survive and feel master over death in this way. There is a seduction for the torturer in the temporary mastery over death, for various reasons. There is pleasure and there is fear, all kinds of things mixed up in this person.I would argue that torturers who practice voluntarily and regularly have a particular disorder that is uncoined, and that is obsession with death and the inability to feel alive without deliberately and regular masterbatory death simulations in order to cope with this death fixation.

My torturers were raised in the business of death. They, from their earliest memories, were helping work in a funeral home working on dead bodies with their dad. I believe for these boys being exposed to mortality at an age that cannot process it fully (across cultures this is a human development absolute) there are unsolved breakages in the mind of the person growing up. This then mixed in with sexual urges and who knows what, and they have become fixated on recreating the same fears in another child to cope with their own fixation.

As part of the torture, I was threatened with being put in the caskets with the dead bodies and left there, perhaps to be burned or buried alive or plain forgotten by the living.

In my experience with people who torture for its own sake, using known torture techniques, the fixation on death and bringing people who resemble them at the age they were introduced to it via OverExposure again and again is a clear issue.

I don't know if my torturers were themselves tortured at one point. I do know that they were overexposed to death at a very young age without regard to their mental health.

Science claims sadists were OverExposed to negative stimuli when vulnerable to it. I would start by looking at torture as a type of Sadism that fixates on near death experience or the emotional fixation on bringing victims to what they think is death's door.

You have to look at intent to profile this stuff. You have to look at them as a group, and you have to look at their experience leading up to their behavior pattern or else you have only opinions. Opinion is fine and worthy, but it is not as evidenced nor as sharable as logic.
 
You have to look at intent to profile this stuff.

You see, but that's the problem here:
Not all (or even most) people who torture, are sadists.

Profiles for sadists won't work here, with the group, as it's a varied group, and more varied than sadists (which itself is also a varied group).
If profiling, admitting there just isn't a one type profile torturers would fit in, would be a good start. More correct start, keeping misunderstandings that are bound to happen at an arms length, while they're not farther away.
 
My experience with torture is political / criminal. Different places, but in that sphere. I do know, though, that some religious cults use torture on kids and new members as part of brainwashing them. Part of fragmenting reality & creating dependence. That kind of torture may well normalize, but I'd have nooooooo idea what that does to a person..

Normalizing, but with a different effect in my experience.

Destruction of values, more specifically.
In different ways than criminal & political torture does.

I'd go to say brainwashing in a way is 'good' because it gives meaning to the destroyed values.
Part of why it catches on. It provides meaning to that nothingness eating up everything about a person away, even while not a person / heading there, already.

Criminal & political are easier to navigate in that they're still very goal oriented.
Even where the goal is just so disagreeable / bullshit, it's clear, it makes sense as a goal.
The cultist type, on its own, not so much.
Tools of it & what's done & how can make sense with time, but that 'good for nothing' sense doesn't.

(No idea if any of this translates. I'll probably be able to rephrase after a while.)
 
FJ hit it directly on the nose. When we say it's different. That's the difference. It exists outside the spectrum. It's not native. It's not natural. It's not organic. It's not an organic, natural process. It's machinery and metal and mechanics.
 
Then what drives them in your opinion
I'm going to say there are different, VASTLY different, reasons why people torture other people. And, maybe, this somewhat splits on a "private citizen vs military/political axis? I think it might be true the the majority of the people who torture in a private citizen context. have some at least hint of sadism. But, if you're talking about military situations, or political situations? Maybe not so much. A lot of those people are truly just doing a job. Maybe they believe in their cause and then that the ends justify the means. Maybe they're just scared to say "No".

Have you read about the psychology experiments that have been done where some students play the role of "prisoner" and others are "guards"? Or the ones where the subject is supposed to use an electric shock (fake) to punish a "subject" (in on things) for failing to get the correct answers? They have to STOP those experiments because the punishers get carried away. But these are "normal" people, for the most part. A few people will refuse. Some people agonize and go on, but most people go ahead and "punish". As a species, we tend to be like that. :(
 
Some of the people who were involved with me were not sadists or even abusers. They were very business-oriented. You aren't seen as a human but a means to an end. That is the biggest difference.

For me the lines do blur. Sometimes abusers used similar techniques because they wanted to see. There is the difference. Turn up the dials. It is a way to instantly get me in a space of complete control. A line in when someone's playing a power dynamic with you and you're looking them in the face and you're challenging them.

They weren't experienced, or predictable. Or effective. In a way, I respected them less. It was a business. I was a product. A service. Even now, sometimes, I am? proud? I earned my place. I earned it. This thread has helped me to narrow that down. Organic isn't predictable. It's bendy and twisty and it crops up anywhere, at any time. Growing like vines. Buzzing like bees.
 
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Yes, scout I have seen the experiments that you speak about. They were horrible to watch. And you have a very good point there. I think with enough pressure (peer?) people can tap into some very dark sides. Perhaps the idea of 'parts' could be put into play here. Many people have dark sides that they may not even realize exist until being put into a position of being pressured to self preserve (whatever that means to them). That is how I saw those experiments.
 
@Cashew How do you think people who have been tortured by a non-public official feel about having a UN law thrown at them to exclude them and invalidate their experience?
 
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And I used the dumping example because I thought it would be non-triggering. A lot more non-triggering than telling people they weren't really tortured because it wasn't a public official.
 
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