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If they lack accountability, they will shift the blame.
If they lack communication skills, they’re going to say that you are arguing.
If they lack emotional intelligence, they’re going to call you sensitive.
If they lack self-awareness, they’re going to criticize everybody else around them, and those flaws.
If they lack honesty, they are going to distort the truth to fit their narrative.
If they lack boundaries, they are going to overstep yours and make-believe they’re not even there.
If they lack integrity, they’ll justify anything wrong that they do.
If they lack empathy, they are going to dismiss your feelings.
If they lack confidence, they are going to belittle anyone to make themselves feel bigger, and that might mean you.

–@baransuserenity, via Instagram

They also demand complete authority but make everything the victim’s responsibility.

And finally, they will continue to outline all the ways you are ‘wrong’, trying to make you change and submit, but won’t leave you (unless it’s to punish or discard you).

Whenever you are in an abuse dynamic, you and the abuser are essentially competing over whose version of reality is considered real in the relationship.

Once you start to ‘accept’ the abuser’s version of reality, you will be more and more confused because the abuser’s reality is a fantasy while reality is still real.

The better thing to do is to recognize when you and another person’s experience of reality does not overlap enough.

So many victims of abuse are arguing with the abuser over what is reality, when what is actually happening is that they cannot tolerate reality. The abuser cannot control reality but they can force or coerce you into pretending their fantasy is real: it’s The Emperor Has No Clothes.

A person who is actually caring about you cares about your feelings, your perspective, and creates space for you both in the relationship.

Abusers make you ‘pledge allegiance’ to them or to ‘love’ or something, whereas healthy people understand that we are all individuals even when we are in relationship with each other.

The key thing about this ‘subtype’ of abuser is how they weaponize the healthy relationship paradigm at you.

They aren’t working together with you, they are using relationship and abuse tools as a cover to seem like the ‘healthy’ person over you. When in reality, a healthy person – when presented with an unsafe person – would distance themselves, and a healthy person doesn’t seek to dominate others.

While it’s widely believed that those who commit acts of aggression lack the ability to discern between right and wrong, in most cases, this isn’t exactly true.

This misunderstanding can make violence more difficult to predict because aggression can fail to match this “psychopath” stereotype.

The truth is that much of the time, dangerous people think like everybody else.

Most of us believe that non-violence is preferred—but we also believe some exceptions to non-violence exist. We think introducing aggression is wrong—but we also think defensive aggression is allowed. We can’t punch first, but we’re allowed to punch second.

This is where we need to pay attention to the hidden psychology of violence.

Someone who becomes aggressive usually hasn’t changed their beliefs about violence itself; instead, they believe they’re the second one demonstrating it. They’re punching back. With a reflex for feeling “targeted” or “singled out,” they consider their violence to be defensive in nature. It’s their ability to mentally move into this “punching back” position that increases their risk.

Their perceived grievance sets up the violence.

This aggrieved algorithm isn’t only observable to therapists who specialize in predicting violence. One particularly large study including nearly 500 men concluded that while certain personality traits are associated with workplace violence, it’s the perception of being persecuted that strengthens the odds of these traits turning into aggression.

What happens when grievances deepen?

For someone to justify their aggression, they must consider the offense against them to be severe. Without that perception, the moral justification for violence doesn’t add up. This is where grievance deepening plays a part.

Grievance deepening is when someone magnifies their initial complaint, making it seem much more significant.

For example, an employee doesn’t simply disagree with their performance evaluation, but instead, they insist, “You’re taking food out of my kid’s mouth!” A second employee isn’t only frustrated because they weren’t promoted; they assert, “You’re ruining my marriage by not rewarding my work.”

The greater their sense of being wronged, the closer they move towards the exceptions of non-violence.

It’s grievance deepening that provides the moral justification for the violence to come.

–David Prucha, excerpted and adapted from The Hidden Psychology of Workplace Violence

This is a kind of toxic anger that results from disordered or warped thinking patterns, processes, or misunderstanding either of the self or of the world and others.

This is why hostile attribution bias is the number one predictor for abuse:

An unsafe person’s thoughts and thought patterns are often a result of cognitive misalignment with reality.

Their pathological aggression stems from thoughts that are:

• cognitive distortion-driven
• perception-distorted
• schema-driven hostility
• thought-disordered
• perception-warped

There is a difference between anger (the emotion) and reactive aggression (the action taken as a result of the emotion)

…and the emotion itself is a result of perception distortion in the first place. So an unsafe person (1) mis-thinks, then (2) feels an extreme feeling as a result of their distorted belief, and (3) acts on that rage with aggression.

They typically feel their hostile aggression response is justified.

This is the hidden psychology of violence.

• Anger is energy, and it’s showing you that something is misaligned with your values. Use it as a motivator for change and not something that’s just going to consume you.
• Your anxiety is trying to get you to prepare, and to focus on what you can control and to release what you can’t.
• Your exhaustion is a warning sign that is telling you to prioritize your rest before your body forces you to.
• Guilt is a reminder of your values, not your worth. Acknowledge the lesson, make amends if you need to, and then move forward.
• Boredom is creative potential that’s wanting to be explored, so challenge yourself to try something new instead of staying stuck.
• Loneliness is calling for connection, so reach out to others or deepen your relationship with yourself.
• Your fear is pointing out what truly matters to you, so use it to be courageous instead of avoiding things.
• Your disappointment is a tell-tale sign of unmet expectations – use that as an adjustment, not a reason to give up.
• Your resistance is an indication of an outdated pattern, so use this as an opportunity to break the cycle and choose a different response.
• Your envy and comparison to other people is showing you what’s possible and what you want in life, so use it as inspiration and not self-criticism.
• Your overthinking is your mind searching for safety, so you’ll want to regulate yourself and bring yourself back into the present moment.
• Your insecurity is a call for self-compassion.
• Your doubt is asking for clarity, so try to ask yourself questions and get curious about yourself instead of just assuming the worst.
• Your numbness is an emotional overload: you need to give yourself space and give yourself time to regulate.
• Your need for control is a fear of uncertainty. You need to build trust with yourself to understand that you can handle whatever it is that might happen.
• Your people-pleasing is a form of self-abandonment. Try honoring and validating your own needs.
• Your procrastination is self-protection, so identify the fear of whatever it is that you’re going after and tackle it one little bit at a time.
• Your perfectionism is a protective coping mechanism that’s not allowing you to be vulnerable. You need to allow yourself to be seen and understood, not only from other people but with yourself.
• And your desire for change is proof that you’re already doing it, so give yourself a little bit more credit anyway.

–Sarah Welch, adapted from Instagram

In the beginning, an abusive partner is anything but abusive.

They are generally doting, kind, and affectionate. They often mirror your values and goals in order to reel you in. But, over time, that changes.

If your partner begins to change their opinions and values quickly during your relationship, that’s a sign your partner may be abusive.

For instance, maybe when you met, your partner told you how much they admired your hard work and devotion to your career, but now, you notice subtle digs about how you’re always working or you should stay home with your children.

This inconsistency applies to day-to-day disagreements as well.

A disagreement that may have been easily resolved a few weeks ago can easily lead to a knock down, drag out fight that continues for weeks on end the next time. After this long fight, your partner will likely shower you with love and affection or promise to change.

The cycles of confusion with intermittent positive reinforcement creates a strong chemical reaction in your brain called “trauma bonding.”

Trauma bonds cause the target to become unconsciously addicted to the abuser. The brain responds to the intense highs and lows and conditions you to crave the abuser and hold out hope that they’ll become the loving person you first met once again. Trauma bonding is one of the reasons the average victim of abuse will leave seven times before leaving an abuser for good.

Expecting more from you and others than they do themselves

Abusers often have double standards. They will look down on others for the same things that they do. For instance, abusive partners may call someone derogatory terms because they slept with their partners, but the abuser has had even more intimate partners. Or, they may tell you you spend too much money, but they buy themselves something even more expensive.

Pushing boundaries or arguing you out of your boundaries.

In order for abusers to thrive, they have to be able to break your boundaries. They will start in small, subtle ways. But, over time, they encroach more and more on your boundaries.

They may begin to text and call you constantly when you’re spending time with others. They will begin to coerce and guilt you into doing things you don’t feel comfortable doing. When you push back, they’ll lash out or try to convince you things aren’t happening the way they are.

–Sarah Stewart, excerpted from Early Warning Signs of Abuse

I think it gets confusing for people who are on the receiving end of advice because we just say “red flag” and they don’t seem to get a grasp on how serious their situation actually is. We’re saying ‘red flag’ to cover both problematic/non-optimal behavior as well as outright abusive behaviors (even if they haven’t yet escalated).

Abuse Watch: “We have all the ingredients for abuse.”

Abuse Warning: “We are having abuse. Right now. It just may not have hit you yet.”

See also:

Signs/patterns of abusive thinking that underlie abuse:

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 always 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

They have ‘so much trauma’?

That means they need to heal, they do not need to be in a romantic relationship. This means therapy and time to themselves.

This should be anti-attracting to you.

We know we’re in a healthy place to date when this (emotional ‘need’) doesn’t hook you emotionally into wanting to caretake someone but makes you go “OH, you definintely should not be dating right now”. That weeds out abusers who perform victimhood to trap their victims, as well as people who are just emotionally a hot mess.

Wanting to ‘heal someone with your love’?

That just means everybody here needs therapy. They don’t ‘need your support’, they need the support of a mental health professional. This instinct right here is what entangles (co-dependent) victims with abusers over and over.

We are not mental health professionals.

(Co-dependent) victims often put themselves in the position of a mental health professional trying to figure out the abuser’s trauma. Which is crazy because professionals are not supposed to be doing that in a non-professional capacity: doctors don’t treat their family and neither do therapists.

Their reasons for their bad behavior do not matter.

This kind of abuser fails by not being emotionally responsible for themselves and their actions, and not managing their own trauma and CPTSD.

If your default response to the idea that someone needs help is that YOU want to rush in romantically as help, then you are at-risk for abuse in relationship after relationship.

Healthy people distance themselves from people who do this because it makes them uncomfortable.

So the over-giver is like “I have so much love to give, why doesn’t anyone want me” when a healthy person intuitively understands that that isn’t love because they know that even with someone’s consent, it is taking advantage.

Relationships should be relatively balanced in terms of giving to each other and taking from each other.

Healthy people aren’t straight up ‘takers’, which is the position the over-giving person unintentionally puts them in.

The only people who feel comfortable with that (and entitled to it) are takers…which is why those relationships always end up in toxicity.

It just isn’t a sustainable model for relationships, too, because sometimes something happens that creates a situation where you can’t endlessly give, such as a having a baby.

Taking away your over-giving from a taker makes them extremely angry, and they feel like you broke some kind of promise to them and betrayed them.

A serious failing of the judicial system and child protective services, one that is completely unaddressed as far as I can tell, is the transition of a toddler from a (hopefully) supervised, functional family environment to a completely unsupervised, potentially dysfunctional family environment.

A child who has grown up in the dysfunctional family environment has a better chance, in my experience, of making it through alive than a child who is coming from a functional one to a dysfunctional one.

The child growing up in the dysfunctional or abusive family structure has already begun to learn maladaptive coping mechanisms, already begun to learn the danger signs, already learned to shut down, disengage, stand still.

This child is learning what they need to survive in their environment.

The child coming from the functional family is going to be coming from a completely different family experience

…has been treated in a completely different way, one that is respectful and honors their intrinsic self as their own person. This child has learned that assertive communication of their needs will result in those needs being met. This child has learned that their caregivers will coach them through their upsets and freak-out loops. This child is relatively free to explore their autonomy, Erikson’s second stage of child development. This child also experiences clear and consistent boundaries, where expectations are objective instead of subjectively depending on the emotional state of the caregiver.

This child is wholly and completely unprepared for the dysfunctional and proto-abusive family environment.

Dysfunctional parents experience these behaviors as dysrespectful; the dysfunctional parent in this scenario is reminded, over and over, of their shame, of having their child taken away when ‘their’ child doesn’t understand what the biological parent wants, what they are ‘supposed’ to do because there is no history and no corrective language or practices in common from the one family to the other; the dysfunctional parent may feel rage when ‘their’ child doesn’t love them, as they have not bonded, because many dysfunctional people have children for the sole purpose of feeling loved.

Not to mention that toddlerhood is full of abusive parenting triggers such as eating, potty training, and sleeping.

The child coming from the functional environment is coming from a completely different family structure and culture during a time when routine is paramount. Their attempts to maintain or re-establish that routine will be met harshly and, likely, physically.

A toddler can safely be moved from a dysfunctional family to a functional one, but it is incredibly dangerous for the toddler being moved from the functional to the dysfunctional.

The key here is that there is no transition, no ability for the toddler to learn the routine and expectations of the new environment before oversight and supervision is withdrawn.

The family court system has prioritized family unification but has not put any mechanisms in place to ensure the successful transition of the toddler from the functional environment to the dysfunctional one.

Because of their developmental stage, a toddler is uniquely endangered in a way that a baby or older child is not. The failure of the judiciary and child protective services in recognizing this, and acting appropriately and protectively, is why this happens.