Author: Invah

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.

They believe it gives them a kind of permission.

You see this thinking a lot with rapists…

They tell you that ‘you’re so great at [thing]’ and you get flattered into doing it, whereas negging is when they criticize you so that you’ll chase their approval and do what they want.

One manipulates you by making you feel good about yourself as a method of getting you to do what they want, and one manipulates you by making you feel badly about yourself as a method of getting you to do what they want.

Unfortunately, you’re essentially chasing their approval – or centering it – regardless of the method.

You may have been conditioned to think you are entitled to nothing. (You may not even feel entitled to exist.) You might not feel entitled to basic respect and human dignity from others, and therefore may not protect you, your time, your things, etc. You don’t feel entitled to what is genuinely yours.

Over-entitled peopled feel entitled to other people’s things and time and resources, and believe it should be for them, that they deserve it. They will incept bad self-esteem, abuse another person, to get access to what they believe should be for them. They won’t accept someone’s “no” and don’t respect their boundaries.

Healthy self-esteem, reasonable entitlement, and boundaries all work together. We should feel entitled over ourselves and our things, our time, and our resources, and entitled to set boundaries related to those things. The entitlement comes from knowing what is yours.

All of this is fascinating, unpacking the why behind a relationship dynamic or uncovering motivations, but it is a lie. You’ll feel like you are Solving The Problem, but all it does is give you more information; information you’ll bring to your your significant other’s attention, hoping they’ll be as interested and amazed by these revelations as you are. But they won’t.

People can change, but you can’t change people. More information won’t help you because all information your ‘partner’ receives is filtered through their perspective, which is fundamentally dedicated to protecting his or her sense of self.

And knowing the problem, knowing how to solve the problem, and implementing that solution are three different things which are challenging in their own ways. Figuring out the why helps in identifying the problem, but it doesn’t do anything on its own, yet it provides a potentially false feeling of accomplishment and progress.

The only thing you can control is yourself and your responses, your ability to set boundaries or walk away.

It is appallingly easy for unsafe people to believe that someone else is the problem, that they are ‘making’ them mad, or ‘choosing’ to be defiant. Hostile attribution bias is the number one predictor for abusive relationships, and it is also a cognitive distortion. You can’t change someone’s cognitive distortions, you can only challenge them, and that is incredibly dangerous with an abuser.

To define and categorize and plan and implement solutions is one coping mechanism for dealing with an abusive experience, but the truth is that there is nothing someone can do to solve their ‘partner’. ‘Helping’ them is a form of trying to change them. You have to accept that this (unsafe) person is who they are – not as they could be, or should be, or might be – and then make your decisions based on that.

Perpetuating the cycle of abuse, enabling abusive or problematic behavior, a victim finding themself “stuck” in a painful dynamic can have the same thing in common:

Giving the abuser/aggressor the ‘benefit of the doubt’

• to decide you will believe someone or something (source)
• to believe something good about someone, rather than something bad, when you have the possibility of doing either (source)
• regard someone as innocent until proven otherwise; lean toward a favorable view of someone (source)
• believing what they say and taking their word because you, yourself, have some doubt about what happened (source)
• default to the belief that their intentions are honest, and not assume malice when there is uncertainty or doubt surrounding the circumstances (source)

The ‘benefit of the doubt’ is essentially the opposite of hostile attribution bias.

Why do we do give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are acting in good faith?

• confirmation bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.
• attribution bias: Rather than operating as objective perceivers, people are prone to perceptual errors that lead to biased interpretations of their social world; attributions do not always accurately mirror reality.
• false-consensus effect: People tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others.

There is also an interesting ‘flipping’ that occurs with fundamental attribution error –

“the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else’s behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation’s external factors”

For example, thinking other people are ‘bad people’ where we, ourselves, were only in a bad situation. We are judging ourselves by our intentions and other people by their actions.

The flip occurs when we judge OTHER people for what we believe their intentions to be.

Instead of judging the abuser/aggressor for their actions, we judge them for their intentions; which is really what we believe their intentions are, either through “intuiting” them or someone else (such as the abuser or an enabler) telling us what the abuser/aggressor’s intentions are.

This is why it is so important to distinguish between what someone shows us and what they tell us.

“Good faith” and other legal concepts

There is a concept in law called “good faith”:

“an abstract and comprehensive term that encompasses a sincere belief or motive without any malice or the desire to defraud others” – (source)

and it is the underpinning of any contract:

“In contract law, the implied covenant of good faith is a general presumption that the parties to a contract will deal with each other honestly and fairly, so as not to destroy the right of the other party or parties to receive the benefits of the contract” – (source)

This is not the first time, in fact, that a legal concept has been mis-adapted to interpersonal relationships; the concept that people are “innocent until proven guilty” enables abusers and blames victims for coming forward without any proof.

Another mis-applied legal idea is that everyone is entitled to a set of “rights”, regardless of circumstance or situation.

• “You gave up your ability to get a “reasonable” outcome by behaving completely unreasonably for six years. This is on you.” – u/Ramady <—– see also, “Reasons are for reasonable people.” – Captain Awkward
• “It is not necessary to be free of all reasonable doubt in order to set boundaries or take steps in one’s self-interest.” (source)

This person is like me.

Victims and third parties (outsiders to the relationship, including enablers and flying monkeys) assume the abuser/aggressor is like them, and give the aggressor the benefit of the doubt because they assume the aggressor’s good intentions, would want others to do the same for them, and believe they are.

The aggressor, on the other hand, often assumes hostility by default, that other people are like them and out to get others; the aggressor/abuser may not actually be acting in “good faith” because they believe that to do so is to allow themselves to be victimized by others, because they assume others are doing the same to them, and because they may believe that anyone who doesn’t is naive or stupid. (Which brings us to a whole different fallacy, the just-world hypothesis.)

A result of this is that, when things go wrong, victims often assume there is a relationship issue or communication problem. This is because we are trying to move reality in line with our internal model of what is going on. And trying to fix the ‘relationship problem’ or ‘communication issue’ is a trap.

Our models: of reality and other people

“Interacting with another person is different from interacting with a rock. Unlike a rock, the person I am interacting with is creating a model of me at the same time as I am making a model of her. The model I create of you helps me to predict what you are going to do, which also helps me to communicate with you. My model of you will have many different aspects. I will try to discover what sort of person you are. But in my view the most important aspect of you that I am trying to model, is your model of the world.” – (source)

A dysfunctional or non-functional person will have a dysfunctional or non-functional model of the world and other people.

Their ability to create an accurate model of other people is fundamentally compromised, and they have no tolerance for when reality is not in line with their expectations.

Anger lies in the disconnect between expectation and reality.

This explains the Teddy concept, and why abusers become so angry when another’s actions are not in line with the identity the abuser has internally constructed for that person, and believes the faults lies with that person.

A victim’s model of the abuser (and, potentially, the world) is also compromised. When the abuser/aggressor’s actions are not in line with the identity the victim has internally constructed for that person, the victim feels pain and hurt, and believes the fault lies in the relationship or communication.

A victim or aggressor or third party’s internal model of the world also affects how they filter and classify information, even determining what data receives attention.

A common misunderstanding is that abusers do this consciously.

And that abusers are calculating in their harms and aggression. Some are, but most are not. But many abusers are completely unaware of the internal processes that drive their actions. This plays a role in why they are completely unable to validate a victims emotions and experiences.

This is also why validation is fundamental to the healing process, as the victim has to reconcile their model of reality with their experiences and reject the abuser’s projection of reality and identity onto them.

The very process of abuse is the process of dissociating from what you know or understand to be true

…of dissociating from your sense of self and your sense of reality, and accepting the abuser’s sense of your self and their reality.

A victim has to be re-integrated with their self, with their sense of reality, and learn to trust both.

This particular explanation applies to adults as, tragically, a child’s reality is in fact created by the abuser. Their process of integration is even more involved as it requires learning and internalizing a functional model of reality and others.

Their entitlement to ‘know’ in the first place (and therefore to decide if violating someone’s boundaries or abusing them will result in consequences they don’t want) is a giant red flag about what kind of person they are. And it’s completely unreasonable.

Someone who puts themselves in a position to be the judge of whether another person’s reason is ‘good enough’ to set boundaries is someone who thinks they are above you.

And it can be so exhausting trying to protect your boundaries all the time, especially when victims are trapped, and they may give up on setting little boundaries to conserve their energy.

The problem is that those little boundaries are often part of what keep you yourself.

Definition

• rule; control; authority; ascendancy
• the condition of being dominant
• the disposition of an individual to assert control in dealing with others

Proposed construct

The outward orientation of entitlement combined with desire to assert power, irrespective of whether that power actually exists or is able to leveraged.

Entitlement-Orientation	Power Over
actual entitlement1 , or	actual power over2 , or
perception or belief of entitlement, or	perception or belief of power over, or
perception or belief of getting away with asserting/exercising entitlement3	perception or belief of getting away with asserting/exercising power4
and	and
actual assertion or exercise of entitlement	assertion of willingness, desire, or determination to exercise power over

1 reasonable? who determines?
2 reasonable? who determines?
3 often coupled with the belief that you are entitled to what you can get away with
4 often coupled with the belief that asserting power is its own qualification for the right to do so: “might makes right”