These circumstances bring to mind a distinction first made by trauma expert Pia Mellody, which I have found helpful in work with depressed men—the distinction between disempowering abuse and falsely empowering abuse. Disempowering abuse is the kind of abuse one normally thinks of. It is characterized by a major caregiver shaming a child, placing him in a one-down, less-than, or helpless position. False empowerment, by contrast, lifts the child up to an inordinately powerful position, pumping up, or at the least not appropriately checking, the child’s grandiosity. Mellody’s insight is that both
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