I wish to talk today about some of the issues that arise from the perspective of the "victim" of a dominant relationship.

The first thing to say is that domineering relationships are very common. It may be at the workplace, in the home, with friends. With the rise of materialism, the attempt to impose dominance is increasing in frequency, but equally, with the development of nuclear families, the tolerance to being dominated is declining. And, often you will be stuck with a domineering relationship, because it may be helping you in one or more of your objectives in life (health, wealth, happiness or love, for example). Of course the amount of dominance varies. You might be in a 51%/49% relationship or a 75%/25% one, but the basic issues are the same. Both the absolute quantum and the perceived quantum are an issue. Quite often the dominant person will be relying on your good qualities, good nature, etc to continue with his/her exploitation.

That said it is important for you to evaluate each relationship, both from your and the other person's perspective. Often, you may not have noticed that you are being exploited or dominated. The amount of love in the relationship is very important. Your inclination to endure should be a lot higher depending on this factor, as should your determination to fix rather than avoid the problem.

A dominating relationship is very harmful to the person doing the dominating, but it also harms you. None of us has infinite patience, energy, forgiveness, etc and you are essentially being molested. You need these energies to progress with your life objectives. This molestation may take many different forms, for example in doubting your morality, motives, abilities, putting you down, theft of 'your' intellectual property,... Clearly there will be two sides to the issue, but ultimately, it is your perspective that counts in relation to your actions. You should not be negligent in this matter and therefore be the source of harm to the domineering person, even if you can tolerate the position.

Dominance is associated with a dominating person having an impairment to one or more of his/her mental, emotional, physical or other energy fields.

Obviously, if the relationship is or has the potential to be beneficial to you or the other person, you should initiate discussions at a suitable time to see what you can do to help the person doing the dominating out of his/her issues. If there is a friend or relation that you both know, it may be appropriate to include this person in the dialogue, to even up the balance in the discussions. You may be able to send the aggressor this article, for example. You need to write out or remember in what way you are being put down and ask questions as to why this behaviour pattern is occurring. You should obviously make it clear that you do not appreciate this behaviour. You should see whether you can identify those aspects of the relationship that are causing the problem and suggest fixes to these. If these cannot be fixed, then it may be possible to withdraw from this aspect of the relationship. You may end up not discussing certain issues, meeting up or communicating in a different way. There are lots of possibilities.

Friendship is highly important, increasingly important with modern trends to destroying the environment and social interactions. The number of friends that you have is likely fewer than you think, and on average the number will in my view be declining over the years. Hence it is important not to just break a relationship, but if it cannot be fixed just break the damaging part. Of course in the final analysis you can just part company on good terms.

In the case of a marriage, it is vital to do everything in your power not to end up in separation or divorce, obviously even more so if you have children. Even a temporary separation of a year or two is undesirable. Hence the degree of forbearance that you may well require is a great deal more than in most other relationships. If really necessary, one 'solution' is to have you or your spouse become really busy so that the amount of domination declines. The separate articles on marital vows, marriage, and break up of marriage may help you.

At the workplace, besides a direct confrontation with the issue (which may be dangerous), you may have some of your colleagues on your side. Your manager or ultimately the HR department may help. Much depends on the cultural environment of your company: mostly HR and management will be focussed on their own self interest rather than genuinely helping staff. In some cases the law may be on your side and consulting a lawyer may be helpful. Most companies and staff are afraid of adverse publicity and shedding light on the issue may be a way forward. The presentation 'Human Rights at the Workplace' (which we can send you) may also be useful to you or to senior management. Your manager has a duty of care towards you and if you are being harassed he is in my view the main guilty party. If HR get involved and end up not helping you then of course they are the primary guilty persons.

A manager will often try and 'fix' the problem himself by taking actions to your detriment, particularly as is often the case in the workplace that the aggressor is a senior person: if this is the case quite often HR will be powerless to help you because the senior person will have influential friends. Or, he may ask you to be patient, and thereby aggravate the problem by ignoring it. With modern standards, a key issue will very often be that the aggressor will likely lie about the position. Often there is an ability to use the tool of blackmail. And 'mud' sticks. He may have lots of avenues to prejudice your position: there is often an 'old boy's network' to tackle. If you are new and he is not senior management may well be inclined to believe him/her rather than you. You should not assume that the truth will come out: this is in my view a fairy tale. On your side though is that often other people will have been similarly molested. Frequently HR, even if powerless to help you, will be basically sympathetic and may help you find other victims. Mostly though, you may simply need to bide your time, wait patiently for a suitable event to happen or just leave, unfair though this may seem.

In most other cases the relationship is voluntary. Relationships should be about helping each other to achieve the various goals that you each have. They should be promoting self respect, self confidence, joy, etc. They should be beneficial to at least one party. If one side is being exploited in some way then the relationship is injurious to both and if you have tried all the available fixes with an effort that is reasonable, and these do not work, then you will ultimately be better off quietly withdrawing from contact.

An aspect to consider is that often the domineering person may not be fully aware of his/her error. Often there will be sex/cultural/racial/income/position/health/etc divides that he/she takes as natural. In some way he/she consciously or subconsciously thinks of you as being inferior (different sex, race, background, level of health, views, abilities, etc). It is perhaps commonly believed that in these days of sexual equality, abolition of cast/class divides, withdrawal from overseas colonies, etc that Western society is getting better. In some cases this is probably true, but there are some severe trends which we can discuss another time which I believe will likely show this to be a temporary improvement: there is a veneer of civility which I believe will disappear as social and economic conditions deteriorate over the coming years. That said, it can be very valuable to him/her to get to understand this problem, but you should not approach this from the point of view of being a victim. It is his/her problem that you are trying to solve, failing which you will enforce some distance in the relationship that you will decide upon in his/her and your best interest. Well, that is the optimal but one should be practical and adapt to circumstances and use the opportunity to educate others too. Sometimes it may be useful to appropriately publicise his/her problem.

In terms of getting help, mostly, people are good natured and if tackled in the right way they will understand that they need to support the victim rather than the aggressor. However, a common attitude is also not to get involved, to be 'impartial' or to try and 'help' you by suggesting to you that the problem is less significant than you think, or to use the situation to embarrass you further. There are a variety of ways in which people interfere or do little in ways which harm rather than help the situation. Self-interest is a strong motivating factor. You therefore need to be very careful.

Whatever the circumstances, the dominating person is 'power mad'. You too need to develop your strength of will to fight this. An important issue is not to allow anyone else take control of the situation: at work, for example as much as possible you should face and tackle the person yourself rather have say HR in control.

Another issue needs to be carefully considered. The dominating person has some mental, emotional and other deficiencies. If you are doing what he or she says then he or she will be able to use you and everything might seem to be ok. But every now and again you will get warning signs: irrational demands, shouting, emotional outbursts, etc. The issue arises when you decide that you do not wish to be enslaved. In a significant proportion of cases the aggressor will stop at nothing to control or to destroy you. He or she will be jealous of your sanity. There is pretty much nothing that the person may not do to you. Seeming love may turn to hate. You are dealing with an insane mind, but one that has substantial respectability (with your employer, the police, your friends, etc) and has possibly trained for decades in refining his/her art. You need to be extraordinarily careful in this circumstance.

There is an evolving modern scientific literature on this issue. The proportion of a modern population with psychopathic tendencies at present is according to this some 1%. However, for obvious reasons, the person wishing to enslave finds opportunities with the accuracy of a homing pidgeon, like bees with honey: you are their honey. Therefore, for example, the proportion of managers in a workplace with these tendencies is far greater, and similarly the proportion of good natured husbands or wives, brothers or sisters, etc affected is hugely higher than a simple population sample would imply. The person has a skill at deception that is of a high order. Being faced with this situation, you should recognize that enslavement is a serious crime under God's law and that you should ensure that you are not a willing victim, thereby causing harm to both your own development and theirs. To get out of this trap is though difficult as you will likely be on your own and inexperienced at dealing with this matter. You need to retain your dignity, your compassion, and also use and develop your logical faculty. You are almost certainly in need of rather good advice, however competent you think you are. You may ask, is not the 51% or 75% partner in the relationship even more in need of advice? Whilst true, you will find that the preparedness to take advice declines the bigger this proportion. You will likely find that the person who is trying to trouble you will not take advice.

On another occasion, it may be interesting to explore why this specific phenomenon is on the increase and why, from some time ago, God decided to make our environment ever more hostile and to instruct the 51% or 75% partners not to take advice. In my view you will find that you attract 51% and above partners like a magnet. On a more positive note, although the number of situations that you will find yourself in is greater than for your ancestors, the opportunities for you to break out if you wish are also on the increase. In the past, for example, a woman facing a bullying husband could do very little. How many people take advantage of this increased opportunity is of course difficult to predict (and not relevant for your future development). If you do wish to choose right from wrong then you need to be well-informed: hence the purpose of this article.

In terms of the workplace specifically, in my view if you are an employee or manager, you owe it to your colleagues to fight for the introduction of some form of policy on staff 'Human Rights'. The key is not the policy as such but appropriate implementation, because most companies will pay lip service to the concept in the interests of top management but will rarely wish to see enforced compliance.

Who should you turn to advice? The number of your true friends is fewer than you think. The number of people who say they love you is rather higher than the actual position. The number of people who are prepared to give you advice is a lot higher than the number of people capable of giving you good advice. Often you will be on your own. Yet, when you obtain advice about a personal matter like this, it is typically far better to gain advice from someone who loves you, is a true friend and is qualified to give advice. That person will think about what is good for you rather than take advantage of your weakness, put you down further or consider matters theoretically. Obviously, a first step is analyzing all your relationships and to recognise that the difficulties you are in (and hence the opportunities for self-development and helping others) increase sharply as the dominance proportion inherent in the person increases beyond around 55% or 60%. As usual you need to continue on your path using all your rational faculties, and to choose right over wrong.