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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.

Before we can even speak, we can still communicate with our caregivers, and our caregivers communicate with us.

The earliest ‘language’ is emotion. (This is the foundation of the attachment bond.)

Imagine if this language is disgust, anger, sadness, abandonment, instead of love, joy, and connection?

And how does a caregiver express this? Does a caregiver cooperate with an infant, or dictate? Is a caregiver engaging in reciprocal communication or uni-directional communication?

One reason I believe the toddler stage is considered to be so challenging, is that it is the transition between non-verbal and verbal communication.

Toddlers are learning how to articulate their needs, their wants, their emotions; they are learning the idea that everything has a name, and that name is important to connect to others, to communicate from inside themselves so that another understands.

What happens when this language, these attempts to communicate, is not nurtured, appreciated, and shut down?

Parents who physically abuse their young children are more likely to engage in non-cooperative communication. They issue commands and expect obedience, then act physically when they don’t get it. They often lack a fundamental understanding of child development, such as thinking the purpose of ‘testing’ is defiance when in fact, at the very early stages, it is actual methodical testing to determine the ‘rules’ of their environment under different permutations.

Many of these parents are ‘position oriented’.

“Because I’m your mother/father.”

But what does that mean? Our ability to conceptualize the world, to conceptualize and understand ourselves, to process our emotions is rooted in language. What is a mother? Why is ‘mother’ so important? Can you even ask these questions if you don’t have the language to do so?

How much abuse is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a child understands or is capable of?

Or a fundamental inability to communicate your expectations to them?

So much of therapy is “I feel ____ and would like ____.”

How can you set boundaries, boundaries which provide protection and self-care, if you can’t articulate your needs, if you don’t feel you have the right to speak up?

We think of love as the foundation between a parent and a child when, in fact, it is respect

…nurtured through a framework of cooperative communication, that is the foundation for the house that love builds.

Language and communication of our inner experience

• Emotions do not define us, they are a form of internal communication that help us to understand ourselves. (source)
• Emotions are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. (source)
• When we recognize improper behavior as improper communication, we can use language as the tool to correct it. (source) (parenting perspective)

Patterns in communication

• “I knew I had to get out and break the cycle.” What cycle? “The cycle of people taking their feelings out on their family.” (source)
• The parent-child coercive cycle
• Misbehaving children and their parents (and teachers) can get into a pattern where the bulk of any communication to that child is corrective. (source)
• How do I break this cycle with my son, where I am too critical of him and he then is more defensive and argues with me? (source)
• The addiction cycle of abuse
• The communicative cycle of employee emotional abuse

Abuse depends on language

• The link between child abuse and the role of communication
• The “I love you” defense

When “I love you” is deployed as a defense, an invoked reminder, it functions to communicate the idea “I can’t hurt you, because I love you.”

In refusing to apologize, and to be accountable, and to listen to someone who is articulating a boundary, and instead “reminding” them that you love them, that you have always loved them and always will, you are effectively, even if unintentionally, communicating these things:

1. That love and harm are mutually exclusive capacities.
2. That love is static, and does not require the active work of negotiating boundaries.
3. That the person is saying they don’t feel loved, rather than saying they don’t feel respected.

Skills for dealing with narcissism

Reinforcing the abuser’s perspective through language

One of the biggest sources of victim blaming is the way we talk about it; language surrounding abuse and sexual assault immediately puts our attention on the victim instead of the perpetrator. This is a demonstration developed by Julia Penelope and frequently used by Jackson Katz to show how language can be victim blaming:

• Alex beat Jordan; This sentence is written in active voice. It is clear who is committing the violence.
• Jordan was beaten by Alex; The sentence has been changed to passive voice, so Jordan comes first.
• Jordan was beaten; Notice that Alex is removed from the sentence completely.
• Jordan is a battered (wo)man; Being a battered person is now part of Jordan’s identity, and Alex is not a part of the statement.

As you can see, the focus has shifted entirely to Jordan instead of Alex, encouraging the audience to focus on the victim’s actions instead of the perpetrator’s actions. (source)

Passive voice and distancing language

• The connection between abusers and passive voice
• The Language of Gender Violence
• Josh Duggar’s apology that contains no actual apology
• PostSecret where ‘someone got shot’
• Analysis of distancing and passive language to deny responsibility in /r/TIFU
• How men who’ve murdered women ‘see themselves as acted upon, and rarely the actor’.
• Hungarian camera operator ‘apologizes’ for kicking refugees.
• Fraudulent studies contain more ‘linguistic obfuscation’.
• The Politics of Euphemism: Cop-talk for shooting a suspect
• /u/floodlitworld explains it’s extremely manipulative language to make the officer seem less responsible
• When people don’t believe their behavior is abusive: passive voice and distancing language (male perpetrators, female victims perspectives)
• Jimmy Swaggart’s heartfelt non-apology
• Passive phrases and impersonal chains of nouns are a common way to obscure relationships behind text and shirk responsibility
• Actor who “copped to being thoughtless and insensitive” insists he has “never treated women with willful, malicious intent”, goes on to offer a non-apology for sexual harrassment
• Brock Turner’s statement to the court regarding his rape/sexual assault of a woman where he admits to his actions while side-stepping responsibility for them.
• Dan Turner’s letter to the judge about how his son, a rapist, is a tragic victim of events.
• Ryan Lochte, Olympic swimmer, lies about lying
• I “get violent”
• I’m sorry if you feel hurt, but…

Verbal abuse: Verbal abuse attempts to limit or bring down your consciousness or ability to act. It defines you in a negative way, threatens you, silences you, or even defines you as non-existent by means of giving you the silent treatment. If someone tells you that you are too sensitive, crazy, stupid, or something similar, they are saying something verbally abusive. They are defining you as something other than what you are. – Patricia Evans

Healthy Communication

• Honest Communication (video) However, honest communication is dangerous in an abusive environment.
• Using conscious awareness to re-calibrate my perceptions to reality could prevent me from a negative thought feedback loop which leads to abusive behavior. -source
• What healthy communication actually looks like. (She’s responding to my comment on the bottom in context of the article.)
• Signs of maturity
• The Power of Language in Conceptualizing Reality

Abuse is strongly related to our models of reality

…and this form of stereotyping shows up in different iterations:

• An abuser has created the role for the victim to play¹ and forces or coerces the victim into playing this role. The abuser punishes the victim for stepping out of this role.
• A victim has created a role for the abuser to play and is confused and hurt when the abuser does not play this role.
• Society both creates and enforces roles for individuals to play, and reacts harshly when people act outside these social norms^2.

One social model operates as follows:

All mothers love their children.
You can’t abuse your children if you love them.
Mothers can’t be abusive.

Only recently have we come to understand that some mothers don’t love their children, you can abuse your children even if you love them, and that mothers can and do abuse. This paradigm, however, has yet to replace the previous model of “mother”, nor has it attained the cultural hegemony of the first.

Defining a person by their role or identity is a cognitive trap. These are reality-defining narratives.

There is conflict when the inner model of reality doesn’t match up with what’s actually happening.³

Anger lies at the disconnect between expectation and reality. How one reacts to this anger, what one believes they are entitled to do as a result of this anger – coupled with the ‘reasonability’ of the original expectations – determines the actions taken on behalf of this ‘moralistic emotion’ and whether that feelings and actions are justified.

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.⁴

Our models relate both to how we ‘see’ ourselves and others^5, but when what happens in reality doesn’t reflect someone’s model of reality, no level of proof will convince them otherwise because there is no proof that counters ‘reality’.⁶

This is exactly why analyzing the power dynamic and aggression is so important.

• Who has the power in the relationship?
• Who has power over in the relationship?
• Who believes they are entitled, and to what?
• Who is violating boundaries?
• Who is allowed to have or set boundaries?
• Who is using passive voice/distancing language?
• Who is attempting to define the other person?
• Who has rigid expectations and shows black-and-white thinking?
• Who shows other cognitive distortions?
• Who shows a pattern of aggression?
• Who is making all the compromises?
• Who has to be catered to?
• Who believes they are responsible for their own behavior?
• Who believes they are responsible for someone else’s behavior?
• Who believes someone else is responsible for their behavior?

I’ve always interpreted statements like this before from the perspective of being in an abusive situation.

It always seemed radically victim-blaming to me, and people do (often unintentionally) use it in that sense.

But I am seeing how much being a victim of abuse involves not being able to reconcile what you believe to be true with the reality of what you are experiencing.

We believe that the person hurting us loves us.

And we hold tight because of our beliefs about love. Because we believe love is rare and precious and special. Because we believe in the power of love. Because we think that someone who loves us can’t possibly hurt us, not really. Because we assume that the person who loves us, loves us in same way that we love them.

Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Despite any evidence to the contrary.

And sometimes we do know this in our heart of hearts.

But we want so desperately for the person we love to be the person we want them to be. Because we want so desperately for someone to love us. We want to have what we need. We want what everyone else seems to have.

The truth is that so much pain comes from the persistent desire for people to be different than they are.

And what happens if we can finally accept the person in front of us. We accept that they don’t love us, or can’t love us, or that even if they do it is still harmful, that we shouldn’t have to bear it.

• We accept that our biological maternal and paternal progenitors are not our parents. Or maybe we accept that they are when they can in the ways that they can, but they are not safe.
• We accept that our partner is actually no partner at all. That their ‘needs’/wants/feelings are always more important than ours. That they feel entitled to take and take and take from us until we are empty.

We accept that our family or our friend or whoever is not acting according to the model we have for ‘family’, for ‘friend’. We either re-structure the model or accept that this person is outside of the model.

It frees us to make informed decisions, to let go or make changes.

I think it is okay to feel sadness and pain that things are the way they are, and desire for them to be different.

I think the more profound, existential pain occurs when we refuse to accept what is in front of us.

Because we are then hurt, over and over, and it isn’t safe. Because we live in a near-constant state of confusion and disorientation. Because we are disempowered.

So much of healing and recovering from abuse comes from validation.

But that’s only a piece of the puzzle. The piece that re-contextualizes your experience in reality, that helps you understand what happened.

But the other piece is accepting what that means about the abuser.

And that is the most difficult thing, it seems.

There’s a couple of ways I typically come at this.

• someone who respects boundaries
• someone whose actions are aligned with their words
• someone who is able to (relatively) accurately interpret their own and others’ emotional states
• someone who has a consistent view of themselves and others
• someone whose life bears the fruit of the advice they are giving

Basically, you are looking for a safe, self-aware person who can accurately model reality.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there might not be flaws in their paradigm – their framework for the world – but it means that it will be someone who is more reliable than not and who will be safer than not.

Also, victims of abuse tend to get laser focused on the accusations of them by an abuser.

One thing I learned from a good friend is that the truth can take care of itself. If something is true, then we do not need to rely on an unreliable narrator to ‘learn the truth’.

It will show up somewhere else, from someone else.

You can also approach it from a numbers perspective. If a number of people are reflecting something to you, then the likelihood of it being accurate goes up.

One place where victims of abuse get stymied is that the process of abuse undermines their trust in themselves.

So then they don’t know if they can trust their analysis or the conclusions they are running. I’ve been there before and it was existentially horrifying because it grapples with the base question of “what is reality?”

In that instance, I rebuilt my concept of reality (and my trust in myself) by starting with what was provable.

If I could accurately process objective or provable information, I could let that be a foundation for what was subjective and ‘less provable’. It can conceptually look like a sting of if-then statements: If A, then B. If B, then C. And so on. If I would get confused, I would go back again to A.

Also, documentation is very helpful because it helps establish ‘provable’ facts, especially if your memory is bad due to trauma and abuse.

Another mental experiment I like to use is to take someone’s statements at face value.

So if an abuser or unsafe or unreliable person says something, it can be illuminating to think “well, if this is true, what does that mean?” Often with an unreliable narrator, even if you take their premise as true, it doesn’t support their conclusion.

The reason an unreliable narrator is an unreliable narrator is that the way they model reality is compromised or incomplete in some way.

Many unsafe people operate from a ‘feelings in search of a fact’, and so it warps how they process information. One thing that can help flag for this is whether their conclusions are always based on what they want or what they think is right. If someone isn’t ever self-correcting, then they likely aren’t being objective in how they process information.

Another way to tell if someone is accurately modeling reality is if they can fully explain an issue

Can they explain both sides or all sides of a discussion or debate? Do they understand the thinking process for why someone holds a different opinion? That’s huge. A lot of people hold strong opinions on topics they don’t actually have a lot of knowledge on. I see this ALL the time in my line of work.

Which leads me to the next point which is: do they know where their knowledge ends?

The people I know who most accurately model reality are very clear about what they do and do not know. They are careful about their assumptions and assertion of fact. I knew a guy who relayed a UFO encounter like this: “I saw something in the sky that looked like X. Its movement was Y. I can’t explain how it could move like that. I don’t know what it was. I was not drunk or on any drugs or in any way cognitively impaired. It is an unidentified flying object to me, but I can’t tell you whether it was aliens or an inter-dimensional being or what.”

Like, the level of specificity on that is -chef’s kiss-

In the legal field, that shit is pretty bullet proof. You aren’t making a claim to know what you saw, you aren’t drawing conclusions; it’s perfect witness testimony, I love it. That person is going to do better in cross-examination than someone who has made a bunch of claims based off their assumptions.

And, in life, I would strongly trust that person simply because of how they handle information.

I came across this Instagram post:

“People don’t just get addicted to the drugs, sex, drinking, gambling, video games, or social media. People also get addicted to escaping their reality.”

And this really does undergird the issue in romantic abuse dynamics:

That both the victim and the perpetrator do not have an accurate model of reality and who the other person is.

• and that model is static; they don’t ‘update’ it with additional information
• a ‘role’ that they expect of the other person to enact
• attempt to reinforce specific relationship dynamics and expectations for that role
• though victims and abusers have different mechanisms: victims often attempt to communicate a partner into reinforcing their belief in who that partner is and how they should be while abusers attempt to do so via control

What makes it tricky is that a victim’s expectations are often reasonable and based on what healthy and safe people do in relationships.

That’s why we see a lot of victims attempt relationship and communication strategies. Of course that never works (even though we keep trying, because we believe we ‘love’ this person…even if we aren’t actually seeing them for who they are) and then victims can resort to engaging in abusive behaviors of their own to protect themselves, which creates a moral injury to the victim who can then come to believe they are the abuser in the relationship dynamic.

Magical thinking, in particular, is a big feature for both a victim and abuser.

This is even harder to see in ourselves if we are emotionally co-dependent on others and are looking for someone to ‘complete’ us. A lot of child victims of abuse (who can then potentially go on to be either victims, abusers, or both in their adult relationships) ‘fall in love quickly’ and are deeply attached to ‘soulmates’ because of the subconscious expectation that a soulmate will love them no matter what and never leave them.

True love is both more prosaic and more beautiful.

But if someone is bringing these kinds of expectations into their dating, they are creating a role for another person to fill that is impossible. And if someone comes along who lights up our limbic system and attachment anxiety from childhood, who subconsciously embodies similar traits to a parent or caregiver? The intensity sure feels like The Most Epic Love That Ever Did Exist.

Love, real love, is based on knowing who someone is.

If we are feeling intensity and passion, but we don’t know them yet? Then ipso facto it can’t be love. If we or our partner are not patient, kind, etc., then it isn’t love. The relationship is not reciprocal? Not love.

It’s like someone slid into the parent-shaped size hole in our heart and soul.

We ‘recognize’ a person we don’t know because they pattern-match to what we have learned we need to survive, and we will do anything to maintain that attachment. We will trade ourselves away piece by piece because subconsciously this other person reminds us of an unsafe or abusive or neglectful parent that we had to trade ourselves away in an effort to be ‘loved’ by them and not abandoned.

Once we realize that we – either as the victim or abuser or both – don’t have realistic expectations of others

…and that we don’t update our expectations of who those people are, we can begin to see the people in front of us exactly as they are. Not as a way to escape reality. Not as a way to escape the anxiety of making romantic choices for ourselves. Not as a soulmate, not as a way to feel the unconditional love we should have gotten from a parent and haven’t learned yet to give ourselves, not as a way to complete ourselves.

When we are whole people, we can love wholly.

And that love is safe because it is real.

See also:

• When you believe one thing and reality tells you another, to self-correct, you have to first see the contradiction that has shown up
• The truth is that so much pain comes from the persistent desire for people to be different than they are
• “What happens when your ‘soul mate’ doesn’t turn out to be the person who you think they are?” – Magical Thinking in Relationships
• Abuse is strongly related to our models of reality
• The benefit of the doubt, and our internal models of reality
• What tests do you use to determine what you let in and what you don’t? How can you determine from whom you can accept feedback?
• What victims of abuse and racists have in common (video) <—– static models of reality
• “Conspiracy theorists believe in their own distorted, non-fact based version of reality- just like abusers. And both conspiracy theorists and abusers ‘believe’ that their beliefs represent universal truths. ” – u/blac-mamba, (comment)
• “For a long time, I saw what I wanted to see and not what was in front of me.” – Love is an extraordinary thing
• “Linde is careful with language. He distinguishes between reality, which we can never know, and our models and inferences about reality.” – Alan Lightman
• “Don’t waste your time saying, “I deserve better” to a toxic partner. They are not listening. But, then, neither are you. Otherwise you would have already left by now.” – Annie Kaszina, (note)

Someone can leave a relationship any time they want, for any reason they want.

It is entitled and controlling to seek to prevent someone from leaving a relationship they no longer want to be in.

Relationships are not a binding contract.

It is abusive to attempt to make them one.

Human beings have autonomy and freedom of choice, and that includes ending relationships.

Someone else feeling sad about that is not ‘undue distress’, it’s a normal response, and it is not the responsibility of the person ending the relationship.

This is what happens when people rush the dating (vetting) stage to get to the relationship phase.

People need to establish intrinsic compatibility, and therefore the negotiations made in a relationship aren’t ones that compromise someone’s free will or autonomy.

If people are not compatible, then they shouldn’t be dating.

Relationships are not arenas for control, and those who control in relationships are abusive.

Trying to change someone else’s clothes is often an early harbinger of someone who feels entitled to control.

Controlling what someone wears – other than your children or elderly dementia parents, in certain specific contexts – is abusive, and is often the first sign of coming abuse. That’s why it is on the list. And doesn’t stop there.

Just because you might be right does not entitle you to control another adult human being.

Determining who you will and will not have in your life, what relationships you will or will not have, is one of the most fundamental boundaries we have.

And people make that choice all the time, regardless of whether abuse has been a factor in the relationship dynamic or not.

Anyone at any time can decide to withdraw from an adult relationship, for any reason.

There’s a quote in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” that talks about the line a (specific) woman must walk between sexuality and innocence for “as long as the powers of her youth endure”, holding these attributes in tension.

And that when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, is now a well-spring of wisdom and resourcefulness.

I’ve always considered this in terms of how young women don’t ‘own’ their sexual attractiveness; how it is thrust upon them by others as a result of genetics, youth, and culture. How innocence and youth itself is often fetishized, again by others, so that there isn’t even refuge or protection in innocence.

The demanding, coveting gazes of those who want to possess you, your body, without any regard for the person.

Who feel entitled to push their desire on you, make you responsible somehow for their emotions and feelings, when all you’ve done is have the temerity to exist and meet their standard of attractiveness.

I spent a lifetime erasing my sexual attractiveness after the horror that was developing Cs in middle school. I did it by hiding myself – behind baggy clothes, behind fat, behind hostile resting face.

And I discovered that it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter what I did, there was always someone who coveted, who found me attractive, who desired me. I had no control over it, I couldn’t erase it.

And even if you make yourself physically repulsive, there are those that are attracted to having power over another, or who simply don’t care, or whatever.

I subconsciously thought if I stayed overweight, that anyone I dated would be dating me for myself.

That their love and regard would be ‘real’, that I could trust them. What I actually ended up with was someone who found me to be their ideal body type. I unintentionally self-selected for someone who wanted the body I hated.

I cannot express to you how much your body feels like a prison.

How great the space between what others believed me to be, wanted from me, projected on to me, and my sense of self and self-awareness.

The space between feeling and acting was created by my father

…the space that analyzed his mood, how he was likely to respond, what was safe – and was honed by the disconnect between what men wanted from me as a ‘woman’ and my still-sense of myself as a girl. (I. was. 12.)

I wondered at the un-selfconscious joy of those around me

…marveled at how they seemed to lack any self-awareness that they might be wrong; they just…responded. They weren’t constantly thinking and analyzing and wondering. Those (usually popular) people were just doing and being as if they belonged completely to the world.

While I felt distant, disconnected. Alien and alone.

As I get older, as I married, as I become a mother, the deluge has lessened, affording me a kind of psychic space. Not from my (now ex-)husband – I’ve written before about his constant, physical harassment of me; his seeming entitlement to my body – but from society at large. For the 5 years I was a stay-at-home parent, I largely spent my days with other women, all of us focused on figuring out how to endure this time in our lives.

I went from a goth-adjacent “I don’t know you, I don’t know what you want from me, I don’t trust you, don’t even step to me” to someone my friends consider to be ‘charming’ and a people-person ‘who can talk to anyone’.

Being a woman in the world with a baby was like having a shield.

And I was so without my own support system, that I was having to cobble one from the random people in my life, and my need was so acute that I overwrote the programming of decades. I also wanted for my son that experience of utter belonging to and in the world, of being accepted by everyone, of positive engagement and interaction that is every child’s birthright.

And I discovered in my transition to this charismatic ‘people-person’, that the sense of separateness was still there: that this was the space of self-awareness.

The pain and adversity of my early life, the need to protect myself, accelerated a natural process. Because we all experience pain and adversity, we all will need to cope or protect ourselves, we all feel anguish and deep sorrow. We all will lose what is dear to us. We will all fail.

We are all alone.

And yet. We are created through our relationships with others. We live in a society, and that means we have obligations to and for each other. We love and are loved. We give and we also receive. How else could it be so?

The nature of humanity is reciprocity.

To give and never receive, to receive and never give, these are actions that erode the humanity of our selves and others.

It is more than interesting that the forbidden apple of the Bible is the knowledge of good and evil.

And Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden. Just as the tension of self-awareness can steal from us our sense of belonging.

In the story, they eat the apple and gain the knowledge of good and evil, and are cast out. In our lives, however, we experience evil…thus gaining the knowledge of it. We then feel cast out from a ‘normal’ society where most people living happy, unreflecting lives.

While we are left.
Feeling broken and alone.

The agony of this is almost unendurable. It is a core, existential pain. From it flowers the certainty of our unworthiness and failure. And even moreso our undeservingness, because we don’t or can’t immediately pick ourselves up, fueled by an endless inner resolve to overcome.

The truth is that we are not alone.

We exist as a part of the tapestry of the human experience, in context of our culture and society, as a part of our community, within which we have created our own families.

There are things that we owe to each other as human beings.

Things that we are in fact entitled to: dignity, respect, agency, love, support. The problem we run into is that we are not necessarily owed this by any one person. No one person, aside from our parents in our childhood, is responsible. Just as we are not responsible to any one person…unless we have made ourselves responsible for them, such as our children.

The process of society is the process of creating relationships.

And within the context of those relationships, we mutually determine what we owe each other and to what we are owed. It is the social contract.

And we have agency in creating these relationships.

We can choose who we want in their lives, we don’t have to wait to be chosen. We can choose who we do not want in our lives, and we don’t have to wait for a ‘good reason’.

Where victims of trauma run into issues is believing that certain relationships will meet their needs.

And so they rush to create these relationships – these friendships, these partnerships, these marriages – believing that the form of the relationship itself will be healing. They don’t realize that the form of the relationship creates a structure for an existing relationship between people, it simply formalizes it and their commitment to each other.

They open themselves wide in an attempt to jump-start intimacy

…without understanding that trust, the currency of relationships, has to be built, it cannot be given. (This includes our relationship with our self.)

We know this.

We know that someone can have a child, and not meet the needs of that child. Their dynamic exists in the form of the parent-child relationship, without having the relationship. Not only is that ‘relationship’ not healing for the child, it is tremendously damaging.

And yet we go out into the world, attempting to re-create the relationship we were denied.

Adult child victims of abuse go out into the world still desperately needing unconditional love; we go with a deep emptiness, and inconsistent or non-existent self-concept. And that space. That tension between stimulus and action, where we seem to perpetually exist.

No one else can validate us into self-worth, self-love, self-respect.

At most, they can provide a mirror. But what happens is that victims of abuse need so much that they inevitably exhaust people with healthy boundaries. Adults have boundaries for a reason.

It gives others the opportunity to build trust and show us who they are.

People with healthy boundaries and self-concept will naturally not be attracted to those who need a parent-proxy. Parenting, by its very nature, at the stage where our self-concept and self-worth is most created, is a relationship with no boundaries and the parent has total power over the child.

That’s why abusive relationships, cults, toxic authoritarian organizations, model an unhealthy version of this dynamic.

And yet. We need people. People need us. As automated and independent and self-sustaining as society believes itself to be, we see the reality of our existence and interdependence as soon as the machine breaks down. A hurricane, a tornado, a strike, having a child, getting sick or injured or in an accident.

We are connected to each other by roads and bridges, powerlines and data lines…and by relationships and our obligations to each other.

We are connected by both the forms and structures of our relationships, our lives, our society; as well as by the innate humanity of being human.

There’s another line from “Dune” that has stayed with me – respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality; this is profound thinking if you understand how unstable ‘the truth’ really is’ – and it is here that we transform.

Because it is the fruit of evil that catalyzes the tension-space within us, the separateness, the processing-self. It is here that we become our most human selves, it is here that we synthesize and re-synthesize truth.

It is here that we become wise

…and, ultimately, it is here that we begin to understand the true nature of ourselves and the world, that we are truly connected to each other.

That our separateness is the beginning of belonging.