Emily observed: << Ah ha ha ha. Barry, as head of the *real* Mean Girls Club, you just described the MO of you, Share, and Richard perfectly. I don't know how you do it - your ability to talk about yourself and your compatriots is bar none, the best! Merry Christmas. >>
Here's a translation to show what he was really talking about. Makes a lot more sense, doesn't it? Trying my best to speak generically, Share, I think you'll find that this is a quality shared by Mean Girls like you and me everywhere, not just on this forum. If I were to pass along the occult view of the 'dynamic' in place in such interactions, it would go sorta like this. Mean Girls (of any type, or sex) feed on Attention. I am hooked on it in the same way that smack addicts are hooked on heroin. And when I see someone getting more Attention than I am (or, let's face it on this forum, any Attention at all), I get pissed off at those who are attracting the Attention because it's "Mine, damnit." If one could auto-color posts according to psychosis, the posts from me would consistently be green, for jealousy. :-) So anyway, wannabe occultists like me see someone else getting the Attention that I seek, so I Can't Have That. I have to combat that somehow. My most common tactic -- Stage One, as it were -- is to try to attack the person who is getting more attention directly, *to make them feel bad, and lose their self-confidence*. This first psychic attack is intended to weaken them. If it doesn't work, I move on to Stage Two, which involves trying to make the other people in the immediate environment see the person who they're paying attention to as flawed or broken, as 'less than themselves.' This is the Stage in which I usually pull out all the stops. I'll say anything I can think of about the person I'm trying to demonize, because the Whole Purpose is *to* demonize them. Since I *obviously* can't compete on equal ground and gain a similar measure of Attention, I attempt to discredit the ones who are getting more Attention than I am, in the hopes that it will shift back to me. So *naturally* I focus on what I perceive as their mistakes or faults. *My* whole act is about pretending that I don't have any. So if you do, *you* are not worth paying Attention to, and I am. Yeah, right. This is such an old, tired act on the Internet that it amazes me that people still fall for it. But they do. Bottom line from my POV is that *if* people do, and *if* they write me off because of what a few people say about me, they really aren't worth having in my sphere of influence, are they?
