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“I think for a lot of us, it’s about trying to get the difficult person to be good to us. Trying to get them to love us.”

Patrick Teahan, excerpted and adapted from interview

Years ago I saw a movie called “The Skeleton Key” and one of the things that stuck with me was that the evil magic didn’t start to work until the protagonist came into agreement with it, bit by bit, starting to believe, and therefore giving it (horrible) power over her.

Abuse reminds me so much of the process of evil witchcraft: speaking curses over another, convincing them to come into agreement with the fantasy an abuser wants to make reality, a siren call to destroy yourself at their alter and call that love, to steal your power and use it over you, to fashion a voodoo doll of who you are and pretend it’s real (when the purpose of a voodoo doll is to harm you), and to speak darkness over your future and have it come to pass.

It’s a like a spell they cast – over time, through words, through conflict, through the power of their rage, the depth of their hurt – to convince you to let them turn you into a puppet that pretends it isn’t.

They hijack your feelings and weaponize theirs, they outlogic and mentally overpower you, they use your values to convince you to destroy yourself.

Abusers have an idea of who you ‘should’ be, of what reality is, and they will force or coerce or wear you down into coming into agreement with them.

Abusers are the black counterfeit of a parent or loving partner: reflecting you back to yourself, but distorted; a funhouse caricature designed to horrify you into compliance; believing you should obey them because they have their best interests at heart, and so should you, otherwise you don’t love them.

Where a person who loves you builds you up, the counterfeit destroys.
Where a person who loves you supports you, the counterfeit sabotages.

…because the counterfeit doesn’t actually want you, they want someone who will erase themselves (while pretending they didn’t).

What gives them away is they don’t believe you have the right to choose for yourself: they will lie and steal your ability to choose, stealing your informed consent.

What gives them away is that they don’t believe you have the ability to determine your own thoughts and beliefs, to decide your own values, to think your own thoughts.

That’s why they want the puppet to believe they aren’t, because they don’t only want to control your actions, they want to control what you think and believe. They want you to act as if it is reality. They want you to agree with them and therefore ‘come into agreement’ with what they say.

That’s why these ‘relationships’ have circular arguments, because it’s not enough for you to comply, you have to change your mind and what you believe.

And so the argument goes late into the night, keeping you from sleeping, wearing down your will, exhaustion preventing you from being able to form arguments and counter-arguments, until you give up and give in.

There’s a reason Ursula has Ariel sign the contract:

…to use it against her, to ‘prove’ that Ariel chose to give up her voice and her gifts, to drive home the idea that Ariel deserves everything that happens to her because she participated in it. Abusers are no different. They want to convince you to give up your power, your ability to choose, which you NEVER TRULY GIVE AWAY.

That power is always yours, no matter what you’ve said or ‘agreed’ to or what you’ve done.

Abusers want you to give yourself a life sentence when there are murderers who don’t even spend that long in jail.

We know intrinsically that our words have power, and that power is the power of our will.

Our thoughts, our beliefs, our values, our feelings and emotions, our mind – all of it we speak with the power of our tongue – because these are the things of our soul. And that is what abusers are trying to kill, steal, and destroy.

Our soul directs our will, so they first diminish your will so that they can destroy your soul.

Your will is what protects you, what implements your power, what shields you from destruction. Anyone who truly loves you would never destroy your will – not a parent, not a partner, not a friend.

Our ability to choose is so important to who we are as human beings that without it we are made automata.

…a moving mechanical device made in imitation of a human being.

What makes us human is our ability to choose…and abusers try to convince you to choose to give that away.

Intentional v. unintentional abuse is, at least by proxy, a diagnostic tool of an abuser’s level of self-awareness

And like self-awareness, I think it is fair to conceptualize it as a spectrum versus a binary on/off.

I’m old enough to remember the idea of “abuse” coming into our cultural consciousness, and it was only accepted as valid in extreme circumstances (such as a parent only being considered abusive and abuser if they almost killed their child or physically injured them to the point of disability).

‘Abusers’ were conceptualized using the ‘psychopath’/’sociopath’ paradigm

…with the idea that they are intending to harm you, work to calculating ends to do so, and derive intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction from doing so. This cultural idea of the abuser was accurate for a subset of abusers but not all abusers.

As our definition of abuse was expanded, so too does our definition of what constitutes an “abuser”.

A primary definition of abuse is generally along the lines of “treat a person or an animal with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly”, and my personal definition (not surprisingly) is broader:

to unreasonably power-over another person at their expense and for your own benefit.

It shifts the definition from the effect of abuse (physical or emotional damage) or nature of the abuse (cruel or violent) to the action/method of abuse (mis-application of power at someone’s expense).

A lot of victims of abuse are higher in agreeability, are co-dependent, or have a submissive personality – and generally will go along with a lot of things. However, they will have at least one area that they will not submit on. (For me, for example, it was regarding my child.)

That area tends to be the ‘one thing’ that an abuser will become obsessed with.

‘The one thing’ operates under the ‘power’ definition of abuse instead of the ‘impact’ definition of abuse. The small ‘something else’ is representative of their efforts to power-over you, or make you submit, in an area.

It is the only area the victim pushes back on emphatically, or the one thing they won’t submit over.

So from the victim’s perspective it is an anomaly instead of part of a pattern because the victim doesn’t realize that the fact they accommodate the other person so much means they don’t see that pattern of controlling tendencies.

Either way, the abuser doesn’t see their significant other as a fully autonomous human being who has autonomy over themselves and gets to decide for themselves how they live their life.

They don’t respect their power over themselves.

Something that my dad said to me after they kicked me out, that for some reason hurt more than any of the mean things that they said, was “I just want my little girl back”.

For years I could not put into words why it made me so angry.

It’s the phrases like that that end up pulling you back into abusive situations because it hurts your heart so bad. And it makes you think, “Well, maybe they did love me, maybe they were just bad at it”.

But he just wanted ‘his little girl’ back because when I was little, I was too young to understand that he was failing me.

He talked about how excited I used to be when he would come home, like he couldn’t figure out why that had changed. Like he had forgotten all of the things that I went through that he failed to protect me from – my own brother, himself –

They didn’t love you, they loved that you didn’t call out their behavior.

They loved the lack of accountability.

They want a toy that will love them regardless of their actions.

They don’t want a human that can register their behavior as wrong.

And that’s what took me so long to figure out.

It was never about me, it was about losing their source of love, validation, and control. It was about the Christmas cards and social media posts so they could get that validation from other people to, for being “such good parents”, for “such a happy family”.

People who love you don’t treat you like that.

When you realize they never loved you, they just loved what you gave them, it helps so much to be able to just finally let go.

–@jelly_roots, Instagram

With recent comments, I realized that there are many new people here who don’t understand something critical about the healing process, and it’s because no one articulates the healing process correctly.

A lot of what we see in terms of healing is prescriptive (forgive! let go! move on!) tends to actually be DESCRIPTIVE.

Additionally, there are different resources for people at different stages of the healing process. When you are in the crisis stage, for example, you do NOT need resources for people who are further along in their healing journey. Those resources, in fact, could potentially be harmful.

A lot of the conflict we see in recovery spaces happens because people do not realize this.

So you might have well-meaning people giving advice or information such as “look at yourself and your actions: how did you get in this relationship? why did you let this person abuse you?” and that is extremely harmful to someone who is actively being abused. What that person needs to hear is that they are NOT responsible for the abuse and only the abuser is responsible for abusing.

There comes a point later, however, where the same information is helpful, not harmful.

Where someone – who is safe, working on themselves, and not in an easily triggered place emotionally – starts looking at the dynamic as a whole because they don’t want to repeat what happened, and they want to address whatever was going on for them internally.

For this person, this information is descriptive and not an admonition.

How can you tell where you are in your healing process? How the phrase “take responsibility” makes you feel. For someone further in their healing process, they recognize that they are “response-able” even if they are not responsible. (This is, of course, trickier for people who experienced moral injury – those who, as a result of being abused, engaged in behavior that is against their own moral code – because they may actually feel ‘responsible’ for the abuse or abuse dynamic.)

Victims of abuse go through different distinct stages mentally.

At first, they don’t think they’re being abused at all, and consider their relationship to be good or loving, if volatile. They don’t see that the other person is being controlling through their anger, their money, their willingness to escalate, sex, emotional manipulation, etc. That is because their concept of reality is off – they think they are in a relationship with someone they love – and they often go to relationship resources to try and fix it…which only makes an abuse dynamic worse because using healthy relationship tools with an unhealthy person only gives them more power and leverage over you.

Once they start to realize something is wrong, and start to look up resources, they’re trying to figure out if they are indeed in an abusive relationship.

People may have been telling them that their significant other is ‘bad’ or treating them badly, but they didn’t want to listen because they love this person and are emotionally attached to them. In this stage, as the dawning realization of the reality of the situation comes over them, they start to research abuse and (often, not always) share it with the abuser. They are unintentionally teaching the abuser how to be a better abuser, because now the abuser has more tools to use against the victim, tools the victim is in agreement with. Because the victim doesn’t understand the underlying issue with abuse (someone’s entitlement to control you and force you to think what they think, believe what they believe, act how they want you to act: they don’t intrinsically respect your autonomy) they think it is just a matter of educating the abuser. Like “Oh, I had no idea! If only I had known this was abusive, I wouldn’t have done it. I am sorry, I will stop and not do it anymore.”

When you educate the abuser on abuse, they simply switch to a different method of abuse…but the underlying pattern of not recognizing your autonomy, of trying to control you, or ‘logic you into submission’, is the same.

So the victim of abuse realizes that they’re in an abusive relationship and may legitimately be in danger. And then they start trying to figure out how to get out. And this is hard because the whole point of abuse is that it happens in the context of a relationship, whether parent or ‘partner’ or friend. Here’s where the victim of abuse often starts trying to figure out how to leave the abuser without fundamentally changing their life. How do I leave the abusive friendship without leaving the friend group? How do I leave this abusive job without loss of pay? How do I leave this abuser without losing everything I have? How can I go low or no-contact with my parents while keeping my relationships with the rest of my family?

And what’s hard with this is that it is different for every single victim of abuse.

Victims of abuse are often also struggling with a desire to be rescued, and feel helpless when the rescue does not materialize. What makes it especially hard is that escaping from domestic violence often requires the exact opposite strategy you use to survive it. To survive, the victim stops asserting their power, but to escape, the (adult) victim generally has to assert their power.

So victims at this stage are shackled with the chains of learned helplessness, and don’t even realize it.

In order to abuse you, they make you into a dependent they have power over and control, and it is extremely hard to see that in the midst of it, and break free of it.

Once on the other side of getting out, a victim often first spends a lot of time trying to figure out the abuser.

“Can abusers change?” is almost the number one thing I hear from victims of abuse.

And then that shifts to trying to figure out themselves and the context of their life experience.

At some point, the focus shifts to “How can I make sure this never happens again?” What once was victim-blaming is now empowering, what once felt blaming now feels like the key to triumph – because if it is in your hands, then you can protect yourself.

People then start focusing on what healthy relationships are and look like, and identifying green and red flags.

We start looking at other people, developing our discernment, as to whether they are a safe person or not. We’re trying to figure out the system to never get stuck in that situation again, to filter out abusers before getting emotionally attached to them, before being in a relationship with them.

We learn that we can’t, and shouldn’t, fast track relationships.

That all the old, boring advice was actually right. Because you have to see how someone behaves over time, and that instead of dating (and vetting) people, we’ve been jumping right into relationships with people we aren’t actually compatible with. So we’re consuming relationship advice and tools that – earlier in the process – would have kept us stuck, and then we realize we really need to look at dating advice and tools, and then you’re back trying to figure dating out again.

And this whole process unfolds over time, over and over, with us coming back to tools and dropping other tools and picking up new ones, trying to understand.

And then we get to a point of peace, a point where we no longer feel paranoid about people because we realize that we can rescue ourselves. That we are out of the fog of fear, obligation, and guilt because we have built healthy boundaries for ourselves. Things that used to attract us are now things that repulse us. And learning how to distinguish between safe people and unsafe people so that we can keep our distance from unsafe people.

And this is triggering to people earlier in their healing process

…because they’re often unintentionally ‘unsafe people’ who then are like “wait, but I’m not trying to hurt people, it’s not my fault, people shouldn’t abandon people who need help, that’s not fair”. And yet when they become healed, they themselves will keep their distance from unsafe or tricky people, they will need this information.

And so what we’re really doing in the abuse community is we are convincing each other to rescue ourselves.

Or that we even need to be rescued in the first place, that we are not safe.
Or that we’re unsafe and are unintentionally abusing others.
Or that we can’t rescue the abuser.
Or that it’s okay to let go.

There are so many different permutations of what people need, and that changes depending on where you are in the process.

Resources and tools are helpful and harmful, victim-blaming and resources: it depends on where you are.

What is poison at one point is medicine at another.

While watching this video on the impacts of climate change, this point on systems jumped out at me:

One piece of evidence comes from a 2023 paper that looked at temperature fluctuations in the Atlantic. The idea is that if the AMOC gets closer to collapsing, deviations from average get more extreme and they show correlations between each other. This is a general behaviour of systems near a critical point which has also been observed, for example, in stock markets close to a crash, or in Bose einstein condensates near the critical temperature, and so on.

and Sabine Hossenfelder made me realize something about abusive relationship dynamics: this systems theory applies to abuse dynamics.

An abuse dynamic reaches ‘near a critical point’ as it oscillates more between relationship extremes.

So while victims of abuse are looking at abuse/violence as an aberration – as something atypical to the relationship – the increasing abuse/violence is a “deviation from the average” that gets more extreme as the relationship reaches the point where it no longer practically functions as a relationship at all.

When someone is being abused, they often see each violent incident as an unusual event – something that’s “not normal” for their relationship.

And they might justify or overlook the bad because of the good. But in reality, these violent outbursts are getting worse and more extreme as the relationship moves closer to failing as an actual relationship. But the good may seem to increase in extremes at first…however, the honeymoon part of the abuse cycle eventually disappears.

The escalating abuse shows the relationship (the system) is intrinsically unstable.

Just as with a ‘system’ collapse, a relationship collapse due to abuse is marked by increasing intensity, with events happening closer and closer together.

And the 7 signs/patterns of abusive thinking are intrinsically de-stabilizing to a relationship:

1. their feelings (‘needs’/wants) always take priority
2. they feel that being right is more important than anything else
3. they justify their (problematic/abusive) actions because ‘they’re right’
4. image management (controlling the narrative and how others see them) because of how they acted in ‘being right’
5. trying to control/change your thoughts/feelings/beliefs/actions
6. antagonistic relational paradigm (it’s them v. you, you v. them, them v. others, others v. them – even if you don’t know about it until they are angry)
7. inability see anything from someone else’s perspective (they don’t have to agree, but they should still be able to understand their perspective) this means they don’t have a model of other people as fully realized human beings

Abusers always end up destabilizing relationships through their abuse, because their abuse turns their partner into a puppet, and therefore no relationship can exist.

For a relationship to exist, two people have to be in relation to each other. The abuser erases the other – slowly at first – escalating as the dynamic is more entrenched, the victim more trapped, and the abuser has more emotional blackmail against the victim.

Abuse destroys the very possibility of what it claims to be: a relationship.

When one person erases the humanity of another through escalating abuse and emotional blackmail, they’re not creating a relationship – they’re creating a hostage situation.

And so the relationship ‘system’ has escalating ‘deviations from the average’ that become more extreme as the abuser escalates in their abuse.

And the honeymoon phase of the cycle completely disappears.

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.

Sometimes abusers engage in humiliation as an intermediate form of abuse because of the rage and contempt they feel toward the victim, and yet they do not want to engage in physical or ‘real’ abuse.

Serial killers and many abusers often end up having to work themselves up to their ultimate actions.

Before a serial killer kills the first time, for example, they may engage in stalking or ‘peeping’ at individuals that would later be considered potential victims.

Abusers start with using their soft influence and intelligence to convince a victim to change their thoughts/mind/actions/feelings before demonstrating (and escalating into) outright violence.

The Gottman Institute identifies “contempt” as one of the predictors of divorce, but it is also a bellwether of abusive behavior

…contempt for the victim being a kind of ‘permission’ they give themselves to ‘punish’ the victim or escalate their own behaviors. Safe people divorce when they start to despise the person they are with, but an unsafe person may begin to engage in humiliation of the victim, both in public and private.

…this humiliation being driven by the abuser’s contempt (and possible rage) but they haven’t worked themselves up yet to actual physical abuse yet.

So you see humiliation of the victim by the abuser as they start to identify the victim as someone who they are ‘allowed’ to physically abuse.

This degradation is used as an intermediate form of abuse as their psychological barriers of harming the victim are eroded.

u/Soft_Choice_6644 (adapted; original excerpt from the comment)

Abusers use abuse tactics to frighten you or make you mentally distressed—thereby tilting the power balance in the relationship to their advantage.

To respect their “authority,” you must follow their orders and requests or meet their desires and needs.

[Note: In the short term, you may benefit from adopting an attitude of apprehensive respect toward your abuser, which is not the same as deference respect. This is the kind of respect we are advised to have for the ocean, because it’s powerful, unpredictable, and may endanger us. Likewise, keeping a watchful attitude can help you survive mentally until you can deal more effectively with your situation.]

What’s in It for the Abuser?

What makes abusers tick? Let’s review some motives:

• The Abuser “Gets Off” on Controlling You or Seeing You Suffer. The feeling of being powerful and in control gives some abusers immense pleasure. Abusers may also derive pleasure from seeing you suffer. Narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists may be drawn to abusing because of the pleasure they take in having power over others or seeing them suffer (Brogaard, 2020).
• The Abuser Stands to Gain from Incapacitating You. Your abuser may also engage in abuse, because of what they stand to gain from incapacitating you. Frequent abuse leads to mental distress and may impair your ability to function. You may lack the energy, drive, or clarity of mind to fulfill your normal duties—or even agree with your abuser that it’s in your best interest to get admitted to a mental hospital. By incapacitating you, your abuser may succeed in getting child custody or gaining access to your money.
• The Abuser Wants Attention or Sympathy. Some abusers use emotional abuse to solicit attention, affirmation, or sympathy. This is what makes a “martyr” tick. People playing the martyr engage in self-sacrifice to solicit sympathy and affirmation and evoke guilt in their targets.
• The Abuser Wants Revenge. Even if you haven’t hurt the abuser in the past, they may feel you have. In that case, they may use abuse to avenge the actual or imagined harm. Unlike sadists, abusers seeking revenge may not take pleasure in seeing others suffer per se. Their pleasure lies in their retribution.
• The Abuser Wants to Rise in the Ranks. Abuse in the workplace—or workplace bullying—may be designed to tilt the power balance between coworkers, because they are envious of your success or want a promotion you’re likely to get. If the bully succeeds in gaining power over you by inducing fear or distress, they can then exploit that power to make themselves look successful and you look like a failure.

–Berit Brogaard, excerpted and adapted from article