…and finding the light
It’s not just that they can’t ‘contain it’, they can’t sustain it.
So even if this person hijacks something from the victim, they ultimately can’t keep it. That’s another reason why it’s never enough for so many abusers, they are never satisfied. It’s because they are not generating the emotion, the relationships, or outcomes they want.
The abuser captures your attention, and then is so unstable and dangerous that you then have to be hypervigilant for your own safety, and walk on eggshells. They draw down your executive control. Combine that with active abuse and compromised sleep, and a victim of abuse’s ability to choose and make decisions is severely impaired.
And each “role” has rules (which abusers will always write for their benefit).
So you may have someone who is perfectly fine for a girlfriend or boyfriend to be [x], but not their spouse. Once married, they assume you will stop being [x] because you’re married now.
They may use this way of thinking about relationships to coerce or force victims into the ‘role’ they believe they should inhabit, to control how they believe the victim should be.
This is different than seeing the relationship as the result of all the actions within the relationship.
Abusers may also ‘keep the mask on’ until they have a victim ‘locked down’.
This is why abuse can start after major life events such as getting married, pregnancy, having a child, buying a house, or moving in together.
If they were behaving long enough to get the victim emotionally attached and committed, the mask comes off afterward, and with even more resentment for even having to pretend in the first place.
When you combine these elements –
– the victim is blindsided by the abuse, and the abuser’s switch-up, and the trap they’re in.
…there is fault, and they are blameshifting.
There are some common themes I’ve discovered in discussions with victims of abusive or non-optimal relationships.
First, the victim doesn’t typically self-identify as a victim.
Often the victim doesn’t even feel like a victim, particularly since the victim’s focus is on the relationship or the aggressor. The victim commonly identifies with the aggressor’s pain and past, forgiving problematic behavior out of ‘understanding’.
Second, the victim doesn’t identify the aggressor as an abuser.
In fact, the victim strenuously denies or avoids characterizing the abuser that way, and is not at all receptive when other people do. The victim works to understand why the aggressor acts the way they do, and will typically alter their own behavior in response hoping to change the relationship dynamic.
Third, the victim doesn’t identify the relationship as abusive or problematic
…they identify ‘problems in the relationship’ and work on ‘relationship issues’. They believe it can be fixed.
Fourth, victims are often trapped by the ‘virtues’ they identify with
(credit u/Issendai)
…love, loyalty, family, perseverance – and to leave the relationship would mean to go against their core sense of self or possibly violate their community’s social contract. The victim may unconsciously choose to stay in an abusive or non-optimal relationship rather than betray their identity and sense of self, or be ostracized in his or her community.
Fifth, the victim runs calculations.
The aggressor is wonderful x% of the time, things are good y% of the time, there are only problems z% of the time.
The victim doesn’t realize that he or she is accommodating or acquiescing to the aggressor’s spoken or unspoken rules almost 100% of the time. The victim doesn’t realize that he or she feels u% unhappy more than the y% of relationship ‘goodness’. The victim doesn’t realize that quality is not the same as quantity; the quality of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of the relationship, the quality of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions of the aggressor, they are independent of the quantity of those incidents.
Finally, I’ve found that people are averse to characterizing aggressors as abusers, or relationships as abusive, because they subconsciously believe that abusers are ‘bad’, that abusive relationships are ‘bad’, and (1) that doesn’t square with their perceptions or experiences, or (2) they hesitate to label the aggressor or relationship as ‘bad’.
Things that I’ve found that help in framing an abusive experience
The idea that ‘love is unconditional’, and ‘doesn’t have boundaries’
…when in reality, real love actually preserves boundaries because boundaries keep us as ourselves. If you actually love someone, you want them to be most themselves, not endlessly sacrifice who they are.
They want you to be less yourself and call it love.
Or you want to sacrifice yourself because you think love means ‘not giving up on people’ no matter what they do ‘because that’s who you are’.
The idea that since someone is kind, they are weak
…and therefore ‘deserve’ to be taken advantage of or victimized. Or that if someone is victimized, it’s okay to treat them badly because they’re ‘already broken’.
Thinking that if someone gives you something, that means they owe it to you. Or that that if you give them something, they will be nice to you.
That if someone ‘lets’ you treat them badly, it’s their fault, not yours. Or that if you are nicer to someone, they will be stop hurting you.
If they think the job of a parent is to ‘prepare their child for the real world’ by hurting their child
…instead of loving and protecting them, and teaching them how to take care of themselves and know that they always have support when things get tough.
Or that they should ‘unconditionally love’ their child ‘no matter what’
…they never enact appropriate consequences for maltreatment. They don’t teach their child to respect them, and that it is important to treat people and things that matter like they matter. (credit to u/dankoblamo)
Because many people don’t like to think of someone as a ‘bad person’, especially when they like them. It’s easier to think of them as ‘unsafe’.
And with my son, I use the idea of ‘tricky people’
…because sometimes we like someone and want to hang out with them…but it’s not a good idea to let them inside our house. Or they take advantage of his generosity.
And ultimately, I had to teach him to watch how people respond to his goodness.
Because if he is good to someone, and they don’t appreciate it? And they demand more and more? Or if he is good to someone, and they take the opportunity to steal from him?
A lot of naive adults don’t realize they need to be paying attention to how someone responds to goodness.
I think the most jarring example I can think of is when someone in my area put up one of those ‘tiny libraries’, somebody came along and destroyed it. Over and over and over, until the first well-meaning person finally gave up.
Some people hate goodness and ‘good people’.
Some people want to destroy the things that others love.
Some people are personally offended if others are happy.
Some people find ‘do-gooders’ annoying.
Some people feel like you are ‘shoving your happiness in their face’.
Those people often feel like ‘good people’ are fake.
And they respond with anger and destruction.
These people follow the same pattern because they think in the same non-optimal ways.
These are all the ingredients for abuse to occur.
The narrative has overwritten reality, and people who pledge allegiance to that narrative believe that this toxic loyalty is proof itself of love.
One thing that I’ve identified as a constant in abuse (abuse: misuse of power, often over another person) is an entitlement-orientation.
As I have been analyzing my relationship with my child’s father, I see how behavioral red flags were the foundation for later abusive behavior, however, I did not consider the problematic behavior abusive in and of itself.
Behind the proto-abusive behavior, however, was an entitlement mentality: he wanted what he wanted, and felt entitled to obtain it however possible, without regard for me or our relationship, our son, or our family.
There is a word for this
…one we’ve gotten away from culturally because it had been mis-used against people who are trying to practice self-care, and the word is “selfish”. But the thing is that an ‘entitlement-orientation’, even though inherently “me”-focused, is not inherently selfish.
What determines whether an entitlement belief is reasonable is the culture and society in which that belief exists.
It is reasonable for a child to feel entitled to their parents’ love, care, and attention. It is reasonable for that child to feel non-positively (angry or heartbroken or depressed) when their expectation is not met. It is not selfish to need or want a parent’s love, care, and attention.
These emotions are experienced at the disconnect between expectation and reality, where the expectation is not met, or subverted. Positive emotions are experienced where expectation and reality connect, where the expectation is met; or at the disconnect between expectation and reality, where the expectation is exceeded.
The ‘reasonability’ of these beliefs is what determines whether the entitlement is valid or selfish.
However, our culture does not have a uniform and rational approach to determining ‘reasonable entitlement’. Expectations and definitions around this are also changing, and are the focus of many social justice movements.
Which is why analyzing power dynamics is so important.
Power in and of itself is not abusive; power is a tool. Entitlement in and of itself is not abusive; entitlement is the belief in what you deserve. Power-over another is not abusive in and of itself; the role of parenting, and having power-over a child is not inherently abusive.
But
When what you believe you deserve is at the expense of another
When that other person is someone you are responsible for or have a duty to
When you take what you believe you deserve because you want it
When you can take it because you have power-over another
THAT is abusive: a mis-use of power
This is core of selfishness: at the expense of another (because what you want doesn’t really matter if it only affects you) and socially unreasonable.
Relationships can be a maze
…because social constructs and beliefs regarding what are reasonable expectations are overlapping between past, patriarchal expectations and present, more equality-oriented expectations.
An even when we know that an expectation is unreasonable, we may still believe it by virtue of having lived in our society, by virtue of having archaic notions of partner-responsibility modeled for us.
(Hetero-normative) expectations like:
…among others.
When a selfish, entitlement mentality exists in a power structure in which the selfish person has power-over another, and mis-uses that power to obtain their wants at the expense of the other, you have an abuse dynamic.
In my case, my husband’s pre-existing, red flag behavior didn’t become active abuse (I don’t think; I could be wrong here, though) until he had power-over me as a result of being the sole financial provider for our family. His proto-abusive behavior was unfair, but he did not have power-over me in the same way, and I had the ability, though not the foresight, to walk away.
Buying a home together, having a child with him, and being the non-working partner were all steps that impeded my ability to walk away from him.
And even though I financially ‘contributed’ to the family – my not-working allowed him to dismiss $50,000 worth of personal debt in bankruptcy – he was operating under the belief that ‘being the provider’ meant that what he makes is his money, he gets to decide what he wants to do with ‘his’ money, and he can do whatever he wants at my and our child’s expense.
My financial contributions don’t matter, my role in the “family” literally has no worth…even though our joint tax return is larger because I am not working and we have a dependent child; he considers that ‘his’ money, and my contribution invisible.
Are his expectations reasonable?
Some people believe they are because they subscribe to an iteration of “might makes right”. We have a cultural trigger regarding being taken advantage of.
The fear is not, however, being taken advantage of when you have power-under…because you can’t be taken advantage of without advantage to take. This fear is the fear of someone with power, someone who has resources, someone who has something to lose or have taken away.
We don’t worry about parents taking advantage of their children, the government taking advantage of the poor/minorities/citizens, the police taking advantage…because when someone who has power-over ‘takes advantage’, they are taking advantaging of their power-over others, and mis-using that power, e.g. abuse.
And our culture worries about being taken advantage of because our society identifies with the powerful, not the power-less.
From another article I wrote:
The underlying belief is that might makes right.
When the power-paradigm is skewed unalterably and beneficially to those in power, the actions of those in power are interpreted fundamentally differently than the actions of the powerless. We might intellectually understand that those in power garner benefits they have not earned and are not entitled to, but we act upon the belief that they are entitled to and have earned them.
It might better be described as “might makes entitled”. And when ‘might makes entitled’ intersects with a fundamentally unequal power-dynamic and our fears of being taken advantage of and our contempt for ‘social thieves’, we end up viciously invalidating victims of abuse who step forward.
Or end up abusing (mis-using) our power over others.
What is abuse?
It is important to remember that power shows up in different ways. Power-over another is not limited to money or other financial resources. Power-over can be sexual, physical, emotional.