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When people are protected from the consequences of their actions, they become adults who feel entitled to treat others poorly. They take advantage of a society where people aren’t aggressive by default, and then use that to bolster their ego. When people start responding in kind, they’re shocked.

It’s like they can’t comprehend that people will change based on how they’re being treated. They expect you to be the same as you always are and they can act however they want.

Like Libertarians who don’t want government because the stability of their lives that government creates is so invisible. In this case, the ‘unseen infrastructure’ is the civility of our culture.

If you want to abuse the social contract, don’t be surprised that the structure and mechanisms of that contract are also destroyed.

A lot of times they think it makes them clever or special or super charismatic. It’s dumb, ordinary, and gross.

It makes them dangerous in our society because they leech off of all the things we built to make life easy to live.

I was that person when I was younger, so I’m speaking from experience here. At the time I thought everyone played these social games and that I was just a much better player than everyone else.

It didn’t occur to me at all that I was just cheating at the game and nobody cared to call me out on it

…up until I pushed my ex too far and she became my ex.

…the average person has very limited experience in detecting lies or navigating conversations with liars, and abusers often seek out these kinds of people.

They always want to tilt the odds of winning even more in their favor.

–u/SignificantCats, excerpted and adapted from two comments

Most people when faced with outrageous behavior don’t react strongly.

We tend to avoid conflict as a society, to give the benefit of the doubt or just not make it our business to call people out. We are taught “be the better person” and “turn the other cheek” and other platitudes.

It’s like everyone gives everyone else a .05% margin of error.

Someone cuts in line at the grocery store, you get mad but let it go. You know that you’ve certainly accidentally cut into lines, or spoken rudely when you were tired, and so you give leeway because you know other people give you leeway. We’re all operating on the assumption that if we all need that margin of error, and that we all give it and all need it – occasionally. It’s 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 ALWAYS cutting in line, but everyone is giving them a pass because ever single individual thinks it’s just a onetime thing. They’re basically parasites living on the social contract that exists to benefit everyone. And they might not even realize it. When you live your entire life collecting everyone else’s “one time get out of jail free” cards, you think you’re just going to keep getting handed them everyday allday. You think it’s normal. You don’t realize everyone else isn’t operating this way. You might even think other people are suckers for not just living off those get out of jail passes.

After all, you get so many you think they’re plentiful- you don’t realize you are only supposed to get a few of them.

If someone isn’t part of a disadvantaged group (prejudice makes people drop their benefit of the doubt pretty quickly), then it’s actually really easy for them to coast by with behavior like this for years and years.

And if lots of people do this, the system/society breaks down.

–u/neonfuzzball

One of the things that victims of abuse struggle with so much is the idea that the abuser is getting away with the abuse.

It seems like they experience no repercussions for their actions while the victim has to bear all of the burden.

It seems deeply unjust.

One of the things I have realized over the years is that, if you are a good person, and you treated the abuser kindly, then their karma is that they no longer have a relationship with you.

Not only that, but being the kind of person who abuses others is its own jail.

Very few people are completely free of a conscience. Someone might be selfish…but they know. They know that what they did wasn’t okay; that’s why they lied and why they gaslighted and why they tried to turn others against you.

If they truly believe that what they did was okay, they would be proud to stand by their actions…in the full light of day.

It takes time and age and wisdom to fully realize the extent of how much this weighs on a person’s soul. Because they seem to be fine, they seem to move on with their life without a care, they seem to suffer no consequences for their actions.

A person who can do this – someone who is morally bankrupt – is someone who has a horrible inner self.

Someone whose ego is so fragile and so dependent on the validation of others, that they can never rest. Someone who can not fill the emptiness of their own soul and so – like a succubus or incubus – they go through person after person, desperate for the ‘object permanence’ of being happy. And yet all they can do is sate their ego and their pleasure, and it is so fucking hollow, I cannot describe.

People who power over others and use them are people who cannot tolerate themselves…or reality.

I get it. It is horrible for the victim. You just…stand there in shock as an abuser seems to be completely fine in the way they treat others. But it grows, the conscience and the guilt. What I tell my son is that he can cheat – and he can lie and steal – but the only person he is cheating is himself.

True happiness comes from centered self-awareness and character.

And so the person who ‘gets away with it’ can never be happy. Because what is required for true happiness – not hedonic gratification and pleasure-seeking – is what would require them to face themselves and their actions.

I never underestimate the universe’s ability to serve someone their just rewards.

Even as the ‘most powerful man in the world’, for example, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin live in suspicion and fear. No power is enough to banish their demons.

I’m not a perfect person, but I am a pretty damn good one.

I was a good wife, I am a good friend: I am fun to be with and interesting, but also happy to sit and listen to someone talk about what weighs most on them. I know my value and my worth, as a mother and neighbor and sister, as a girlfriend and spouse, as a human being in this world.

And I’ve had the opportunity recently to receive several apologies from people who, quite frankly, were horrible to me.

There was the one from my abusive ex who finally, after five years, admitted the truth about something he did. He wasn’t able to bring himself to be fully honest, to accept that he gaslit and abused me over this thing he lied about. But he’s tried to replace me and couldn’t.

There was one from an ex-fiance. Someone who left out of nowhere after emotionally cheating on me with the person he’d left before I met him. He went back to her and suffered for two years. His apology was even less self-aware. Did he apologize for lying, emotionally cheating, mispresenting himself and taking my money? No. He apologized for ‘leaving me out of nowhere’ and ‘making the wrong the choice’. His last two years have been miserable.

I had a former friend (and stalker/harasser) text me for my birthday. This person couldn’t even bring themselves to apologize. But somewhere in their disordered thinking, they know. They know that I was a good friend to them; and they, too, have been unable to replace me.

Quality and values and self-respect stand for themselves.

You can trust them. Even when toxic people take advantage of them, they still want and crave what a solid person has to offer. I’m not saying that means people don’t make mistakes or have their own shit to deal with; I’m certainly not perfect. But people know that I tell the truth as best as I am able and that I show up for the people I care about and that I can be trusted.

You can’t trust toxic people.

And they know it. It’s why they are paranoid and ridiculous, because they assume everyone thinks and acts like them. But a person who is honest and authentic and good-hearted? That person is worth everything. And so you can take advantage of them, sure, but it means you have destroyed your relationship.

And you have to live with it.

You’d be surprised at how hard it can be to live with the loss of a good person. You can’t just replace them over and over and over. At some point, the toxic person is only surrounded by other toxic people. Other people who lie and misrepresent and are inauthentic and who do not show up and cannot be trusted.

It’s a horrible way to live.

They’ve put themselves in The Bad Place. And they have only themselves to blame.

People have done entire course-corrections because they were shamed.

Not to mention, many abusers feel shame whether they are actually shamed or not, and are actively shame-avoidant.

People really struggle with nuance.

And then they mis-prescribe these ‘rules’ at each other. We hit a “shame is bad” period of social understanding, and we are mis-using that idea with respect to abusers.

Abusers should feel shame.

…it doesn’t mean they have to feel shame forever.

You are who you are as a result of your choices, and you can CHANGE who that is as a result of your choices moving forward.

But coercing people to act like you are different than you are (to act as if you are not abusive and unsafe) and that reality is something other than it is, is misguided, wrong, harmful, and circumvents the real mechanism of change.

I’ve had the unique experience of growing up going to my father’s A.A. meetings.

And what I observed over many years is that before any change can happen, someone has to want to change. And what often gets a person to that point is consequences and shame. The behavior has to no longer benefit them or make them feel good, instead it provokes deep pain.

That’s why people using or harming others often don’t change until they ‘hit rock bottom’.

I’m not prescribing shame, per se, I’m just saying that I’ve seen it work. And it is a crucial mechanism for some abusers to stop abusing, while for others, it causes deep avoidance. And you can’t tell ahead of time which one it’s going to be. It might even be the same person at different stages of their life!

And as someone who has been unsafe, I can tell you that it is only ‘shame’ if you are allergic to reality.

I think back to a time in college, when I was driving somewhere like a jackass, and a woman followed me to the office supply store and got out of her car screaming “This?! You were driving like that just to go to an office supply store?!” and I was completely taken aback. I’d learned to drive in Miami, and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than driving normally. (We were NOT in Miami.) She was incensed, and justifiably so. I actually apologized to her (which didn’t help, because she was in the fight of fight-or-flight) and her husband had to pull her away. I legitimately was sorry, and I may not have recognized how dangerously I was driving had her response not been so intense.

However, I’m not saying ANYONE should follow an unsafe driver to yell at them, that was extremely dangerous on her part.

I cannot emphasize ENOUGH how one should never do that. But, because it happened, it gave me an opportunity, if I was willing to take it.

There isn’t a system you can apply to make people change

…so ‘shaming’ abusers doesn’t ‘work’, but it does provide intense feedback and consequences that can be an opportunity for change if they are willing. And sometimes those seeds lay dormant for years, even decades, before they bear some kind of fruit.

Is it ‘shaming’ to hold someone accountable?

To name the behavior? For them to experience consequences for what they’ve done?

shame: (n.) a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.

There’s a reason abusers hide their abusing, and gaslight the victim into thinking they ‘deserve’ it: it’s because they would be humiliated if people knew the truth.

That’s not the fault of the truth.

(Note: that said, we should be careful with shame, and not excessive or egregious; like anything, we can take it too far – but that’s a different discussion – remember, there are many abusers who actually believe they are victims and would weaponize this concept to further abuse a victim)

(versus just appearing to be a good person) and they are genuinely concerned on an ethics- and human-level. This can become – as Issendai says – a trap: ‘victims can become trapped by their virtues not their vices’.

Their moral code is often weaponized by the abuser against them to keep them in the abuse dynamic. Victims often have to completely re-examine their understanding of love, loyalty, and goodness in order to leave.

That’s why the difference is so stark when the do finally put their foot down about something. It’s because it is important to them, and they have an expectation that the abuser is their partner and will support them or care the way the victim always did.

There’s that meme of the person who insists “it will all just work out” with their harried spouse being the person who is making it all work out: their labor completely invisible, the stress that only they carry.

And I don’t think it isn’t because someone who has a life that you want doesn’t have feedback, they just have a different perspective about it, and deliver the information in a different way. They aren’t using criticism as a Trojan horse to enforce their contempt.

One of the most horrific stories of abuse I’ve ever come across involved a little girl who had been removed from her abusive family, lived with her foster family for several years, and then was returned to the abusive family over the objections of the foster family.

The abuse she experienced was horrific.

What happened was that when they took her out of the abusive home and placed her in a healthy, functional home, she lost all of her maladaptive coping mechanisms. She lost the freeze response to an adult’s anger, and the understanding that this anger means she was in danger. She forgot that she can’t be too happy with an unsafe adult, because that only draws their attention to you.

When she tried to operate according to the ‘rules’ she’d learned with her foster family, her biological mother found her ‘stuck up’ and entitled.

It essentially enraged her biological mother. And once her biological mother started hitting her, apparently the ‘mother’s’ thought process was that since she was hitting the girl, the girl deserved to be hit.

And once that barrier was broken in the family, the little girl became the family effigy.

I was trying to articulate the concept – whipping boy, scapegoat, black sheep don’t work because they’re blamed for someone else’s failings – where here, the little girl was chosen to be destroyed out of rage for who or how she is.

I went to workshop the concept with Claude A.I., but it wasn’t coming up with the right thing either, and then I said: “She’s like the family effigy – an effigy is something you burn in rage.”

And the reason I’m explaining all of this is so that I can put in context what the Claude A.I. wrote in response:

“Yes – “family effigy” is a powerful and apt metaphor. An effigy is something created specifically to be destroyed, to have rage and hatred poured into it. And like a literal effigy, the more it resembles what the angry person hates (in this case, emotional health and normal human responses), the more it draws their destructive impulses. The term captures both the ritualistic nature of the abuse and how the victim becomes a symbol that the abuser feels entitled – even compelled – to destroy. It also captures how, like an effigy, the victim isn’t seen as a real person but as an object created for the purpose of absorbing violence. The fact that she became more of an “effigy” specifically when she showed signs of health and normal human responses makes the metaphor even more fitting – like how an effigy is often made to look more like its target specifically to justify its destruction.”

And I could let this stand here, because the concept of “the family effigy” has not ever been articulated in an abuse concept, as far I am aware.

And it is one of the most powerful tragedies I have ever been able to articulate.

But even more important than that – for victims of abuse – is understanding that people give themselves permission to mistreat you.

As soon as you cross an specific line, you are marked as someone who is deserving of ‘punishment’ and torment. (If it happens on a societal level, you can get ‘swarming’ mob behaviors.)

Abusers often (mis)believe that the victim has ‘given’ them permission to punish/torment the victim.

Thieves will believe that if you leave your car or house unlocked that you are ‘asking to be stolen from’. One well-known murderer said he believed victims were ‘inviting him in’ if they left their front door unlocked. (This was in the 70s when, depending on where you lived, you did not lock your door.) I had a low-level superior bully me at work because I was ‘too nice’ and so they decided I was ‘fake’, which is how she self-justified her behavior.

You see a similar thing, in my opinion, in 80s college culture with men who wouldn’t consider themselves rapists would rape a drunk or passed out woman because ‘she was asking for it by getting drunk’.

I want to be clear that this does NOT mean a victim has given ‘permission’ for the abuse. But there’s a reason why a lot of abusers tell on themselves at the beginning – why they explain they’re a ‘bad person’ or that they’ve hurt people before – because they transform that into “you knew what you were getting into”, e.g. you ‘gave them permission’.

And once they have ‘permission’ to hurt you, the punishment always escalates.

Because – in their minds – if you are being punished, then you deserve to be punished.

And the more the abuser breaks down social or personal norms about harming another person, the easier it becomes.

Abusers construct their own permission to destroy, pretending you gave it; and breaking that first barrier against harming another person makes each subsequent act of cruelty easier than the last.

That’s why they think it’s your fault.

‘You’ gave them permission. You crossed the line and deserve to be punished. They wouldn’t treat someone else this way, because that (fantasy) other person doesn’t cross the line, doesn’t ‘deserve’ to be hurt, therefore – ipso facto – they would never treat another person this way.

If you hadn’t been ‘bad’, they would still be ‘good’.

And the more they destroy you, the more they want to destroy you.

Because they make you into an effigy of what they want to destroy to justify your destruction and their actions.