I’ve been looking in detail into this pipping phenomenon, with a friend, lately deceased (him, not me!) Per Schiøttz, my Danish friend and mentor, has come up with some surprising insights that we planned to share with the world together, but now I must do it on his behalf.

Now there is a great new text, from beyond the grave, so to speak, showing you a whole new way to go about your life; how to stop pipping yourself and how to recover the freedom to be yourself, as radiant and assertive as you want to be.

No more taking your cues from other people. In a matter of hours you can re-assert yourself and put an end to pipping. What’s more you can do it for others too! Spread a little freedom. Reclaim your world. Raise your self-esteem. Grow wise to the little games people play in the hurly-burly and jostle of life!

The new book centers around what Per called his “Freedom Tools”, a brilliant psychological insight. He had a saying, repeated often, which is that freedom is a quality, not a quantity. You can have as much of it as you like. Just ask for it!

The trouble is, social media and cultural norms instill in people the false idea that there is only so much freedom—thus, if I want a lot, I have to take it away from other people. 

This just isn’t true. Freedom is something you FEEL, you MANIFEST, not something you get or measure. It’s impossible to quantify freedom; you can only say whether a person has it or not.

But the merchants of pipping are out there. Plenty of people want to solve THEIR problems by bringing down those around them. This has many faces, from inept parenting, to trolls and bullies on the internet; pernicious teachers to former lovers’ spiteful mouthings; political “meddlers” in other peoples’ lives, to bosses of the Genghis Kahn school of leadership.

Strong clues that a person has been chronically pipped would include (but not limited to) the following:

Pretty grim!

If you adopt another’s point of view or opinions, you are pipped, simply because they are not your own opinions. Do you see that? It doesn’t even matter that the strong individual may be quite correct. He or she has been elected as the reason for abandoning your own point of view and the mechanism kicks in accordingly. So, the target for correction is rightly the pip, NOT the person who is dominating.  

A lot of wasted psychology centers around the idea that the client was a victim. Bad things “happened to” him or her. You poor thing. So your husband was a brute? Your father abused you? Oh my God! She did WHAT to you? Kind of crap.

It’s disempowering because it doesn’t provide any role for the person in his or her own miseries. It’s also a wrong indication, or big misownership, to ignore what the individual did to create their own problems. Yes, the husband may or may not have been unfaithful—but what did YOU do wrong or fail to provide, that he was ultimately discontented? Why didn’t you talk about it long ago, before things got out of hand. Did you actually listen to what your husband was saying years before and deal with it in some way? No? OK, you lose.

Even with the subject of bullies and brutes, you have to ask: why didn’t the wife just walk out, instead of staying around to be “abused”? It’s a core precept of the Freedom Tools writings that you cannot be free while you think nasty people do nasty things to you and hurt you. Yes, nasty people do bad things, but it only hurts you if you let it into your life, that’s your fault, not theirs.

So we re-instate a person at cause. You cooperated with the domination, so YOU are the one who has to un-create the mess. In a counseling or coaching situation, a client must be brought up to the realization that domination, or what used to be called “suppression”, is something you agree to—otherwise it doesn’t exist. It’s just water off a duck’s back, as we say.

This goes wider in psychology. Bad happenings, stress, PTSD and a whole host of “causes” of misery have to be bought into, in order for them to take effect .

Did you ever feel you were...

By who exactly? We always identify the person, even if you felt attacked by a group. There is always a “ring-leader”. We then show you how to eliminate that person’s effect in your deeper psyche.

This phenomenon sometimes surfaces BIG TIME in a relationship. Through practice, habit and belief, one partner becomes dominant. The other one is thinking of them being a “bully” or “unreasonable” or “demanding”. The supposed weaker partner keeps giving in to their demands and feel hard done by. It’s not always the man, of course, the spectacle of a “henpecked” man is common enough, even the subject of comic book humor.

Thing is, it’s not the strong person’s values necessarily. The partner who is put upon mostly is the one to blame, for putting up with it. For BEING the pip.

After the years go by, it matters very little where is started, or WHO started it. It becomes a fact of life that one of the partners always gets their way, the other always gives in and submerges their own wishes to the stronger partner.

It has to be seen to understand how the dynamics of such a relationship change when the pipped partner starts to object and push back. It can be a time of quarrels and tension, as the new relationship emerges. But so often it transpires that the “bully” is no bully at all; just a person used to getting their own way and being very impatient if the other doesn’t give in quickly.

But once the pipped partner starts to push back, the challenger emerges as a sensible and tolerant person, who understands the other partner has needs and they need to be respected .

One of Per’s brilliant contributions to human psychology and spirituality is his personality “de-mix”. See, if you have spent your whole life buying into someone else’s opinions about you, it eventually becomes a jumble and is hard to identify what are your own, real thoughts and what are merely the opinions of this other person!

Per has an answer for that too. It’s vital you de-mix yourself from him or her. We slice up the story with techniques like:

Repeated, over and over, it’s marvelous how this starts letting in the light!

There are lots of these de-mix question; too many to give here. Another “pair” could be:

We live in a world where we are pushed towards pipping ourselves all the time. The Church elders, bless ’em, insist you see yourself as totally unworthy, stupid, even fundamentally bad! But a lot of people buy into this creepy control mechanism.

They promise you a golden future after you die, provided you suffer in the here and now. The bummer is you won’t know if they are lying till after you are dead and gone from the world.

It could all be a big hoax. Just ask yourself this simple question: how could they really know what happens after death?

Then there are political controllers. Not everyone is an evil dictator. But somehow politicians seem to think it is their right to enforce on others what they hold most dear.

These days we have self-appointed guardians of public opinion, like Facebook and Google, who try to tell others what to think, will censor other people’s work on the internet, even take down web pages that are disapproved of: not pages of filth or inciting violence, you understand… just opinions about President Trump, vaccinations, Russia, GLBT, etc. which are not approved of.

These internet giants have enormous powers to hurt, demean, destroy and pervert other peoples’ lives and they are not shy about (ab)using these powers. They do indeed take away freedoms wholesale and without a shred of responsibility or care for what harm that does to others.

Well, this is to introduce a rather magical book, that has the power to heal and glorify people’s lives, so let’s not dwell on the unpleasant politico-social aspects of our world.

But to be sure, you need to know and understand these phenomena, if you are to be able to protect yourself and your loved ones from being forcibly crushed by those who are skilled at manipulation but have a very dark and unpleasant agenda.

Freedom at last!