(posts still need to be posted on this website; currently the links still go to Reddit)
What is abuse?
- What is abuse? The transition from entitlement to mis-use of power
- The benefit of the doubt, and our internal models of reality
- What is “proof” of abuse?
- Unseen traps in abusive relationships
- Dynamics of Abuse: An Overview
- Not all victims of relationship abuse were victims of childhood abuse or trauma
- Characteristics of ‘meanness’
Power
- Psychologists generally define power as control over others, by providing or withholding resources, without social interference
- Why power brings out your true self
- Dominance = entitlement + power
- Types of power
- Being afraid of power leads people to give away their power
- Power in and of itself is not inherently abusive
- Toxic authoritarianism is driven by the diametrically opposed beliefs
- Why do we chase after people who are mean/abusive?
- Virtue-based ethics
- Beware of Tribal Shame
Abusers
- Abusers ‘show and tell’
- Why abusers are so focused on identity management
- 10 Benefits an Abuser Gets from Abusing
- How Narcissists Use YOUR Nervous System to Regulate Themselves
- The benefit of the doubt is part of the social contract that keeps things better for everyone, overall. People like this? They live their entire lives skating by in everyone else’s margin of error. They’re basically parasites living on the social contract that exists to benefit everyone.
- Pop Quiz: Do you want a boy/girlfriend or a really good dog?
- Abusers show a predictable pattern of behavior based on entitlement-oriented beliefs
- Abusers feel morally justified and righteous in their anger…which is why they allow themselves to do what they do in the moment
- What I want to know is why so many people in the world believe that it is their right, duty, or obligation to beat up, torture, kill, or restrict the personal freedom of others?
- The flip side of when someone cannot admit they’re wrong
- Anger is a feeling while abuse is an action
- Your abusive partner doesn’t have a problem with their anger; (s)he has a problem with your anger
- They lighten their toxic load by dumping their anger onto us and into us, so we carry that around for them
“If people can’t control their own emotions then they have to start trying to control other people’s behaviour.” – Robin Skynner; John Cleese
“When a toxic person can no longer control you, they will try to control how others see you…” – Jill Blakeway
“How to not abuse someone. ‘Don’t hit them’ would be mentioned but wouldn’t be the focus. The focus would be on ‘don’t try to control them.'” – Holly, The Pervocracy
“You don’t know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them to, Mother, you’ll always feel betrayed….you’ll always feel cheated. But you’re the cheat, Mother. You’re the one who uses our love for you to try and control us.” – Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
“I think too much emphasis is put on love in general. I’ve heard of many atrocities done within families in the name of love but never in the name of respect.” – Elvira G. Aletta
Characteristics of abuse and abusive relationships
- DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender
- Circular Conversations
- Characteristics of verbal abuse
- The flip side of when someone cannot admit they’re wrong
- Another litmus test I discovered
- 7 ways to tell if your partner might be manipulative
- To avoid circular conversations, don’t JADE – Justify, Argue, Defend, or Explain
- How abusers use “reasonability” to over-power their victims
- The process of ‘brainwashing’ in abuse
- The “I Love You” Defense
- The trap in figuring out a problematic relationship
- Red Flags of a Toxic Person: The Foolproof Way to Spot out Narcissists and Other Toxic People
- Five reasons why smart people fall for sociopaths
- Who is the abuser*
- How oxytocin causes trauma bonding and attachment
“The most insidious aspect of living with an angry or abusive partner is not the obvious—nervous reactions to shouting, name-calling, criticism or other demeaning behavior. It’s the adaptations you make to try to prevent those episodes.” – Steven Stosny
Couples therapy makes things worse for victims of abuse
- Couples therapy makes things worse for victims of abuse
- Why couples therapy doesn’t work for people in abusive relationships with narcissists
- Abuse is Not a Relationship Problem: Why couples’ counseling is dangerous with an abuser
- Couples’ Counseling/Marriage Counseling Does NOT Work in Abusive Relationships (female victim, male perpetrator perspective)
- Emotional Abuse: Why Your Individual Therapy Didn’t Help and Your Partner’s Made it Worse
- Verbal Abuse is Not a Communication Problem (some male perpetrator perspective)
- Anger Management Likely to Increase Domestic Abuse
If violence has been, and especially if it currently still is an issue in your relationship, then Couple Counselling is not recommended. Nor is Mediation if you are going through separation or divorce. Basically the abuse itself has to be dealt with BEFORE any form of joint counselling or mediation can be effective, and in the meantime can, at best, deflect from the actual problem and fudge responsibility issues. (source)
Victim-blaming
- The reason for abuse is that there is an abuser
- Victim-blaming and reasons for abuse
- When we start blaming ourselves for our ‘bad’ choices that led to our being abused
- When are victims responsible for what happened to them?
- Why don’t abusers leave?
- Victim-Blaming in Abuse and Relationships
- Healing Self-Blame After Abuse and Assault: How to forgive yourself for something you shouldn’t have to forgive yourself for
Emotional Regulation
- How to gain emotional intelligence
- The truth about anger
- All feelings have an important reason for showing up
- Anger, when properly managed and expressed, is power
- Anger lies in the disconnect between expectation and reality
- Resilience depends on an understanding that emotions — even those considered “negative,” like sadness, grief or anger — aren’t a problem to be fixed, but a natural consequence of being human
Cognition
Sense of Self
- WHY we have to start with self-love before we can love others
- The problem with demonizing self-esteem
Coping Mechanisms: Adaptive and Maladaptive
- Abandonment Rage
- Self care is triage, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- How toxic parents topple Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- The best strategy for breaking free of domestic violence is often the exact opposite of the strategy for surviving in domestic violence
- The truth about estrangment
- Emotional regulation strategies ranked most effective to least effective
Victim Responses
- Faaaaaaaamily
- ‘Playing the Victim’ and Chasing Validation
- Staying with an abuser when you ‘know better’
- “Is it me or is it them?”: Learning to Trust your Intuition (part 1)
- Trusting the World Again After Abuse: Learning to Trust Your Intuition (part 2)
- 10 reasons victims of child abuse pick the wrong partners
- Two Perspectives on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (“Love is patient, love is kind…”)
- On choice and misuse of empathy
- When misunderstanding empathy becomes a trap
- How to avoid the empathy trap
- Are you exhausted from trying to be stronger than you feel?
- The main things I’ve learned as a CPTSD survivor and trauma therapist so far
- How leaving an abuser can be a powerful act of love
“I thought we had a communication problem. It turns out, we had a respect problem.” – /u/SunflowerRenaissance, comment
Boundaries
- How can you tell if you have a power disparity in a relationship? Whether you can enforce a boundary. How can you tell if you have a healthy relationship? Whether you can even set a boundary.
- Setting boundaries allows you to see who respects them and who doesn’t
- This is mine
- How to spot an emotional grown up
- Interpreting unconditional love to mean “no boundaries” creates optimal conditions for abuse
- How to protect yourself in dating
- So you’ve found yourself in an unsafe argument
The healing/recovery process
- The truth about forgiveness and why healing doesn’t require forgiveness
- /u/Polenicus on forgiveness is the result of healing, not the cause
- The forgiveness imperative, and compassion
- The role of anger and pain in the healing process
- Before you can ‘hold on’ to negative experiences, negative experiences hold on to you
- The misunderstood role of blame in healing and why you should blame your abuser
- Pieces of the healing puzzle
- How to heal from disorganized or insecure attachment
- How do we reconcile the need to change with the need to love ourselves just as we are?
- We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety
- 4 Compassionate Reminders Every Survivor of Child Abuse Deserves
- The hard work of overcoming trauma when you have traumatized others
- 10 Steps to Recovering from a Toxic Trauma Bond
- Real love stories reflect the wisdom of attachment science
- How attachment theory works in the therapeutic relationship
- How humans ACTUALLY change
- How to gauge how far long you are in your healing
Healthy relationships
- Signs of an emotionally mature partner
- What is “unconditional” love?
- Unconditional love is not loving your partner “no matter what.”
- What is Healthy and Functional Happiness?
- Opting in vs. opting out of relationships
- Stages of trust
- Levels of Trust
- The Foundation of Self-Control is Trust
- What happens when we confuse love and respect
- Here’s how healthy couples survive
The Toxicity of Neo-Enlightenment Thinking
- The problem with the mindfulness movement
- When we are encouraged to try to understand the abuser, it is worse
- You are not responsible for your own abuse
- The pernicious schema of “all you need is love” and the cult of self-negation
- The problem of forgiveness-as-enlightenment
- Before you can hold on to negative experiences, negative experiences hold on to you
- Pieces of the healing puzzle
- The Truth About Being Told to Get Over It and Let It Go
Communicating your experience to a potentially skeptical audience
- One way to make your declaration of abuse credible and side-step victim-blaming, a lesson from attorneys
- More examples of non-deniable, context-establishing language borrowed from attorneys
- Indirect v. Direct Communication – “People had the information, but they weren’t appropriating it.”
Reddit: on relationships and partners
- Redditors who realized their spouse is a completely different person after marriage, were there any red flags that you ignored while dating? If so, what were they?
- What is a sure sign of maturity
- How to spot an emotional grown-up
- What do you wish you would have known before moving in with your SO?
- What are some relationship “green flags” that indicate that the person is a keeper?
- What are some subtle relationship “Red Flags” that are often overlooked?
- What are some subtle relationship “Red Flags” that are often overlooked?
- What is one of those little things that people do that reveals a lot about their true character?
Reddit: on parenting
- Now that you’re grown up, what did your parents do that you now realize was bad parenting?
- What are the most common parenting mistakes?
- Parenting lessons from /r/Science post on spanking
Reddit: on emotional states
- How do you shake yourselves out of it when your brain goes into a spiral of negativity?
- [SERIOUS] People who have gone through incredible hardships, how did you handle your day to day and avoid being a Debbie downer, without being disingenuous
- What are signs that someone is secretly unhappy?
- What are more signs that someone is secretly unhappy?
Reddit: on paradigms
Reddit: on argument
Being a human being
- “Because Boromir might not have seen it–we might not see it–but we tried and we failed but we didn’t fail at everything. Lives are made brighter for our presence. The world is better for our gifts and our convictions. And no fight, even a fight lost, is done in vain.”
- What is the nature of humanity?
- “…[forcing people] to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches. If I made him do this, then it would not be his doing.” – Frank Herbert
- The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity
- Their lives were not blighted by robots or spaceships but by people who had surrendered something of their humanity to unforgiving ideologies.
- The cruelty of dehumanization is the point: “The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.”
- “In the end what sustains us, and what we will remember about having survived this madness, are the remarkable people who endured this with us, the best of humanity — all of us — who demonstrated the best of our calling,” he wrote.
- What do we do when there’s darkness? We bring light.
- It’s easy to hate. But it’s always easy.
- “…you can’t make someone do what they don’t want to do unless you’re willing to risk destroying them.” – L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
- “When people try to take away your power and your voice, they’re always shocked when you take it back. This is because they’ve dehumanized you in their mind and they’re surprised you’re a whole person who deserves a voice.” – Dr. Vassilia, Instagram