Sisters of Sonder

Glossary of Potentially Harmful Behaviors

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Why this exists

Most of what harms a group of people is quietly intrusive, arriving as a feeling you cannot place, a conversation that leaves you smaller than it found you, or a process that wears you down. These insidious items are easier to prevent and resist when they have names and definitions.

This glossary is not a list of rules nor offenses; every entry describes something people do, usually people who meant well. Knowing these items can shorten the distance to truth and understanding, and can reduce the amount of suffering of everyone involved when identified and avoided.

How to use it

Start with the section that matches where the pressure seems to be coming from, the name will usually find you.

  • Identifying or naming an item can start a conversation. Everything on this list could be done unintentionally. For example, you or someone else might unintentionally gaslight yourself or others due to cognitive dissonance. Aspire to have grace for yourself and others.
  • Every item in this glossary can be weaponized. Purposeful misuse to inflict harm or cruelty violates our core doctrine.
  • If mistakes are made, they belong to the person who made them to do with as they please. Mistakes are powerful learning tools and bring wisdom. Denying your mistakes is an act of shunning knowledge that was paid for. Owning mistakes is healthy and causes less suffering.

Section One. What can happen inside a person

1. Learned helplessness
After enough situations happen that cannot be changed, a person can stop trying even once things can be changed. Newer research says the giving up is the default, and it is having control that has to be learned. The way out is not encouragement. It is small real choices that actually work, made over and over.
2. Self-silencing
The private rule that saying what is needed will cost the relationship, which makes a person stop saying what they need. Holding a boundary quietly is not the same thing. The difference is whether the boundary and the cost is known or assumed.
3. Effort justification
The harder something was to join, the more it is valued afterward. This is why demanding entry processes create loyal members. The loyalty is real, but also manufactured.
4. Sunk cost
The years already spent become the reason to spend more.
5. Moral licensing
Good already done becomes quiet permission for harm. It sounds like: we are the good ones, so this is different when we do it.
6. Just-world thinking
Treating suffering as proof that someone deserved it. Turned inward it becomes the belief that what happened was owed.
7. Calling oneself finished
Deciding that what is done settles the future in stone.

Section Two. What happens between two people

8. DARVO
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. When confronted, a person denies the behavior, attacks the credibility of the person confronting them, and then flips the roles so they are the wronged party and the victim is now the offender. Research finds that being on the receiving end of this increases self-blame.
9. Betrayal blindness
Not seeing a betrayal because seeing it would cost something that is believed to be of greater value.
10. Intermittent reinforcement
Warmth and coldness given unpredictably. This produces stronger attachment than steady kindness does, and it is much harder to walk away from. It requires no beliefs and no doctrine. It is just a pattern.
11. Gaslighting
Being made to doubt what is seen, heard, or felt; attacks on perception itself.
12. Foot in the door
A small request agreed to first, then a larger one, then a larger one. Each step looks reasonable next to the step before. The distance is only visible from the start.
13. The extracted apology
Being worked on until remorse is performed. It ends when the performance is convincing, which means nothing gets fixed.
14. Scapegoating
Making one person the cause of something a system produced. Blame ends the search.
15. Required confession
Being expected to disclose faults, doubts, or history, to a person or to a group with no protections. It turns into performance, and heavy confessors gain the standing to judge others.

Section Three. What a group does with nobody leading it

16. Pluralistic ignorance
Most people privately disagree, each one believes they are alone, and the silence keeps a position alive that almost nobody actually holds. This is why anonymous ways of answering can matter more than open ones.
17. Diffusion of responsibility
The more people who see a problem, the less likely any one of them acts. Everyone assumes someone else will. A duty that belongs to everyone belongs to no one.
18. Co-rumination
Going over the same distress together, again and again. It makes people closer and it makes them worse at the same time. A group built to support people will produce this by accident unless they watch for it.
19. Identity fusion
The line between a person and the group dissolves, so a threat to the group feels like a threat to your body. It predicts extreme action on the group's behalf better than ordinary belonging does.
20. Trashing
Group condemnation of a member that arises organically. It spreads by contamination: supporting the target is suspicious, so friends peel away one at a time. It works through trust, which means it only works on people who believe in the group.
21. The no structure tyranny
There is no such thing as a group without structure. Refusing formal structure does not remove leadership, it hides it and makes it unaccountable. A test: are decisions argued out more outside the meeting than inside it? Whose approval has to be checked before something happens? Is it a faction leader or splinter group forming? Power often craves centralization.
22. Purity spiral
Each person takes a slightly stricter position than the last, and holding yesterday's position becomes suspect. Nobody set the standard, so nobody can lower it. Moderating is treated as evidence against someone.
23. Snitch-jacketing
Accusing someone of being a plant or a spy. It cannot be disproved, because denial is exactly what a plant would say.
24. Manufactured consensus
Disagreeing is made socially expensive, then silence gets counted as agreement. Consensus processes are more open to this than voting, because there is no private moment.
25. The litmus test
Using a position on some unrelated question as a test of belonging. It is how a group narrows without anyone deciding to narrow it.

Section Four. What is done from a position of authority

26. Milieu control
Controlling what people see, hear, read, write, and say, and eventually what they say to themselves. It ends in being cut off from the world outside. Everything else in this section is easier once this is in place.
27. Loading the language
Replacing thinking with in-group words. Slogans and catchphrases that end a question instead of opening it. This is the earliest sign, because it shows up before anyone means any harm. Test: could a first-time visitor read our documents without a glossary of our own words?
28. Sacred science
Treating a teaching as final truth that may not be questioned, and treating its authors and its current keepers as beyond criticism.
29. Mystical manipulation
Arranging an experience and presenting it as something that happened on its own, to prove authority or a special gift. It also excuses lying to outsiders, on the grounds that people outside can be deceived for a higher purpose.
30. Doctrine over person
Telling someone that what they experienced is not what they experienced, because the teaching says otherwise. Gaslighting specifically applied to doctrine.
31. Purity pledge
Requiring an answer to a pointed question that fits into a held view of perfection, then using guilt and shame to close the gap. It needs a scale, so anything countable feeds it.
32. Deciding who counts
A group claiming the right to say who is a real person, and denying anyone who isn’t declared a real person the right to live as they choose.
33. The inner teaching
Knowledge held back for those who are ready. Any two-level structure of knowing, however kindly it is explained.
34. The bottleneck co-opt
A closed text with controlled access. Closing a text does not remove authority. It moves the authority to whoever explains the text, and makes that position more valuable than the text.
35. Commentary swallowing text
A short core document beside a long explanation, where people quote the explanation because that is the part that answers questions. Over time the commentary becomes the scripture and its writers become the authority.
36. Thought policing
Any requirement to account for what is inside a person’s thoughts. Sincerity checks, loyalty tests, correct belief, purity of intention, purity tests, pledges.
37. The permanent advisor
The founder or former officeholder who stays on to advise. Influence without an office, which means no term, no limit, and no way to remove them.
38. Spokesperson capture
Someone outside, often the press, decides who speaks for us, and the choice becomes true because everyone treats it as true. No internal decision was ever made.
39. Shunning
Removal that requires other people to cut contact. The engine is the second rule: anyone who keeps talking to the removed person is removed too. That converts private conscience into enforcement.
40. The total institution
A body that absorbs an individual’s other obligations instead of sitting beside them. A belief that replaces family, work, other commitments, or other faiths.

Section Five. What is built into how an organization runs

41. Normalization of deviance
A departure from the standard that produces no harm the first time, and so becomes the new standard. Repeated, it moves the line without anyone deciding to move it. What would have been refused all at once is arrived at by steps small enough that none was worth objecting to.
42. Institutional betrayal
Harm that comes from a body failing to prevent or respond to a wrong done inside it. It makes the original injury worse. The known repair is institutional courage: accountability, transparency, responding well to disclosures, asking anonymously whether people have been harmed, and then acting on the answers.
43. Institutional DARVO
The same deny, attack, and role reversal done by an organization. The body denies the wrong, questions the motives of whoever raised it, and casts itself as the real victim of a witch hunt.
44. Shared betrayal blindness
Once a group has accepted a wrongdoer's version of events, raising the concern again does not get it reconsidered. It gets the person attacked. The group has learned to hear accountability as aggression.
45. Exit cost
Capture by price rather than by rule. No one takes away the right to go. Leaving is simply made to cost income, housing, family, or a person's whole understanding of the world. Everything else in this section is easier once this is in place.
46. Conditionality
Aid tied, even gently, to belief, attendance, or membership. Historically the converts were called rice Christians. This is the oldest way religion has ever taken hold of people.
47. Simony
A sacred act with a price on it. It drifts toward fear, because whoever is selling needs the buyer to be afraid.
48. Fusion of powers
The standing to say something should be done and the means to do it, held by the same person. Also, the power to say what the doctrine means and the power to control the property, held at the same level. Every religious body that went badly wrong held both.
49. Co-optation
A council or board that picks its own replacements. Also, the ability of an outside agent to seize power, authority, or both by invoking the organizations own canon.
50. State of exception
Combined power granted for a crisis and never given back. Nearly every constitution has this hole and most are eaten through it. An expiry that happens whether or not the trouble is over, and can only be reinstated by a separate entity.
51. Stratification
A horizontal distinction hardening into a vertical one. Standing that describes what someone has learned becomes standing that decides what others must do. The signs are a test that is unpublished or moves, a cap on how many may hold it, deference owed to the rank rather than to the argument, and a chain forming where there was a circle.
52. The ledger
When deeds and actions are compiled as currency to be leveraged; good written down as credit and harm as debt.
53. No door to knock on
The only place to complain about a person is that person's office.
54. Organizational silence
Information kept quiet to protect the body. It is always defended as discretion, privacy, or not airing things in public. Providing a unified front can also be a way to reinforce silence. There is a time and place to “handle it within” but it can also be a breeding ground of corruption. It is bad when people are unable to address issues because of leveraged silence.
55. Urgency
Pressure to act NOW. Fear of missing out, final chances, now or never. This is how reasonable people are pushed to skip thinking.
56. Attrition
Control through stamina. Long meetings, important items placed last, endless rounds. Whoever can stay the longest decides, which quietly hands the body to people without jobs, children, illness, or limited energy.
57. Funder capture
The work drifts toward whatever can be paid for, staff become the people it answers to, and the body turns into an organization rather than what it was.
58. Securitization
A real or imagined danger from outside used to justify extraordinary measures inside, secrecy first among them. Leveraging “good ideas” and fear to create more control.
59. Entryism
A small organized group joining an open one in order to take it over. Open membership and low barriers are exactly what this is aimed at.
60. The permanent campaign
A body that needs an enemy to hold together, and therefore cannot afford to win.

Section Six. Traps in argument

These are ways of arguing that leave no good way to answer. Naming one does not win the argument. Every name in this section can also be used to dodge a fair question.

61. The Kafka trap
Denial is treated as proof. Anyone innocent would not object. No answer is available, which is the point.
62. Motte and bailey
A strong contested claim is made, and when it is challenged the speaker retreats to a weaker claim nobody would argue with, then returns to the strong one later. The sign is that the two versions are never said in the same breath.
63. Bulverism
Explaining why someone believes a thing before showing that it is wrong. “You only think that because of how you were raised.” It turns a disagreement into a diagnosis that needs to be fixed.
64. Thought-terminating cliché
A saying that closes a question without answering it. “It is what it is. Trust the process. Everything happens for a reason. Understanding comes further along.”
65. Straw man
Answering a weaker version of a position than the one actually held, and answering it well. The sign is that the person defending has to spend their turn saying what they did not say.
66. No true Scotsman
Narrowing the definition of the group in order to throw out an example that does not fit. “A real one of us would never.”
67. Isolated demand for rigor
Holding one side to a standard of evidence the other side is not.
68. Sealioning
Endless polite requests for evidence and clarification, meant to exhaust rather than to learn. Any one exchange looks like good faith.
69. Just asking questions
Suggesting something through a question, so nothing was actually “said”; word games.
70. Gish gallop
More assertions than can be answered in the time available. Volume beats accuracy.
71. Concern trolling
Opposition dressed as worry for the other side's success. “We are just so worried for you, it’s strange you spent money this way, maybe if you share your banking information we can help you figure it out.”
72. Loaded question
A question built so that any answer accepts something never agreed to.
73. Nirvana fallacy
Rejecting a real improvement because it is not a complete solution. This is the purity spiral in the form of an argument.
74. Moving the goalposts
The standard is met, and a new one is given.
75. False dilemma
Two options offered as though they were the only two.
76. Special pleading
A rule that applies to everyone, with an exception carved out for one case and no reason given for the exception.
77. Poisoning the well
Discrediting a speaker in advance so that whatever they say next is already suspect.
78. Ad hominem
Answering the speaker instead of the argument. Character may be relevant to trust. It is never relevant to whether a claim is true.
79. Genetic fallacy
Treating where an idea came from as a verdict on whether it is true. A true thing from a bad source is still true.
80. Whataboutism
Answering a charge by naming someone else's wrong. It may be a fair observation. It is not an answer.
81. Appeal to nature
Treating what is natural as what is right. This one is aimed at us in particular. The teaching draws heavily on the natural world, and every one of those is a description rather than an instruction. Nature contains everything, so nature can be made to permit anything.

Section Seven. Persuasion and propaganda

These are techniques for moving many people at once. They are used on us from outside and they are available to us from inside, which is why they are here. The same tools build culture and shape values, sometimes for good. What separates the two is honesty about what is being done.

82. Name calling
Attaching bad names to a group, a belief, an institution, or a person, to create dislike without any examination.
83. Glittering generality
A fine sounding word used to win approval without evidence. Honour, freedom, family, security. Vague enough that everyone hears their own meaning, and always favorable. The tests are what the phrase actually means, whether there is a real connection between the idea and the words, and whether the idea still stands with the fine words removed.
84. Transfer
Borrowing the good name of a respected symbol by standing next to it.
85. Trick Testimonial
An endorsement from someone with no standing to give one.
86. Plain folks
A speaker performing humble origins to borrow trust.
87. Card stacking
True things selected and arranged to mislead. Nothing said is false.
88. Euphemism
A softer word put in place of the true one, so that what is happening becomes harder to see and harder to weigh. Harvesting, processing, letting someone go, enhanced measures.
89. Bandwagon
Everyone is already doing it.
90. Firehose of falsehood
A large number of messages sent fast, constantly, and through many channels at once, with no commitment to being true and no commitment to being consistent. The contradictions are not a mistake. It works partly because things repeated often start to feel true, and because people accept the first believable version they hear. Answering each falsehood does not work against it.
91. Flooding the zone
The same overwhelming done with actions and announcements rather than lies. Nothing can be examined because everything is happening at once.
92. Astroturfing
Manufactured support made to look like it arose on its own. It works because a story is believed more readily when it seems to come from several places at once.
93. Dog whistle
A message one audience hears clearly and another cannot, so it can be denied.
94. The big lie
A claim too large to be dismissed as a mistake, repeated until arguing with it seems unhinged.
95. Overton window
Moving a position by small steps until what was unthinkable is ordinary. Each step is small enough not to be worth objecting to. The window is the range of what can currently be said without penalty, and it can be dragged.
96. Illusory truth effect
A statement heard many times comes to feel true regardless of evidence. No one has to intend it. It is how memory works.

A last word

Nothing in this glossary is unique to us and nothing in it is new. Every one of these has been done by people who believed they were doing right, in organizations founded by people who meant well.

We will do some of these. The question is not whether we notice, it is whether noticing is safe.

Where these come from

Section Four draws on Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, chapter 22, for milieu control, mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence.

Section Two and Section Five draw on Jennifer Freyd's work on betrayal trauma, betrayal blindness, DARVO, and institutional betrayal, and on Smith and Freyd on institutional betrayal and institutional courage.

Section Three draws on Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, 1970, and Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, 1976.

Section Seven draws on the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, How to Detect Propaganda, 1937, for the seven devices, and on Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, The Russian Firehose of Falsehood Propaganda Model, RAND, 2016.

Learned helplessness as revised appears in Maier and Seligman, 2016. Co-rumination appears in Rose, 2002. The refusal framing behind stated boundaries appears in Patrick and Hagtvedt, Journal of Consumer Research, 2012, and the social cost of stated boundaries in Rudman and Phelan, 2008.