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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.

From The Greatest Escape. Special for Victims of Domestic Violence by the Women’s Justice Center of Santa Rosa, California (content note: female victim, male perpetrator perspective) (Wayback Machine Link)

In order to survive in domestic violence, victims usually do everything possible to avoid offending or upsetting the abuser.

While living in domestic violence, most victims avoid asserting their own power. They especially avoid a show of power that might in any way be seen as a challenge to the abuser’s power. In addition, in order to survive in domestic violence, victims usually minimize the physical and mental harm to themselves.

They bury their own resentments, needs, and pain, and stay intently focused on the needs of the abuser.

Victims trapped in domestic violence are also generally very careful not to reveal the abuse to others in order to keep others from confronting the abuser and setting him off on another round of attacks.

These survival strategies aren’t unique to victims of abuse.

These are the survival strategies practiced by prisoners of war, slaves, citizens of totalitarian states, and by all human beings who find themselves trapped living under violent, oppressive regimes.

Escaping from domestic violence, on the other hand, generally requires the exact opposite strategy as that used for living under domestic violence.

Escaping requires gathering your strengths and asserting your power against the abuser to the maximum extent possible. It requires focusing intently on your own and your children’s needs while suspending your vigilance for the needs of the abuser. And it requires repeated and open telling of the details of the abuse to others so they can best be of help.

It can be very difficult and very frightening to make this kind of a sudden shift in your behavior

…especially when you are exhausted, beaten down, and in terror. So the more you can rehearse yourself mentally for this shift, the better you’ll be able to focus your energies when you need them.

The sobering, heartbreaking, unfair truth is that no one can rescue a victim of abuse.

Even when we can remove someone from immediate danger and harm, and whisk them away to safety, they are still in jeopardy.

• Maybe it’s a violent spouse stalking their victim all over the country.
• Maybe it’s figuring out the practicalities of how to live in the world without any support system; getting a job, paying bills, getting a roof over your head.
• Maybe it’s the terror of shared custody with an abuser. Watching your sweet beloved children knowing they are being abused by the other parent, or step-parent, or grandparent, or whoever. That you can’t protect them from monsters.
• Maybe it’s realizing that even if you leave abusive parents, they can exert extraordinary power over your future by whether they provide financial information for college.
• Maybe it’s the vulnerability of being in a foster home, away from everything you’ve ever known. Being actually vulnerable to further abuse in a system that fails children so often.

It is so profoundly, stupidly unfair.

And we don’t have reliable supports in place to help victims of abuse. We have a patchwork between non-profit and legal and community resources, and it often depends on what town you are in, what basic knowledge you have.

Some people have to be convinced they need rescue in the first place.

They don’t recognize they are being abused. They question their feelings, judgments, instincts, and wonder over and over what they can do to ‘fix’ things or ‘make things better’.

Is this okay?
Is this normal?
Do people normally act this way?

They might begin to see that it isn’t a ‘communication’ or ‘relationship’ issue, and wonder

Is this abuse?
Am I being abused?
Did I do something to cause this?

Most people, after finally realizing they are being abused, try ‘rescuing’ the abuser.

Trying to communicate them into not abusing; they try to explain. They try and try and try again. The honeymoon stage (if one still exists in their abuse cycle) gives them hope that this time things will be different. That they have the power to ‘change things’, never wanting to accept that – in reality – they want to change another person, and this is, itself, an impossibility.

What should I do?

…people ask when they finally realize they can’t fix or change or make things better. They realize how stuck they are, just how much their lives are entangled. Victims (generally) want their same life, just one that’s free from abuse.

We want what we have, but better.

And we want to be rescued. We want someone to tell the abuser to stop abusing, to hold them accountable. We want the abuser to be taken away. We want someone to give us a place to go and set us up with work or school, and get us on our feet.

But this is almost never on the victim’s terms.

People set up to help victims of abuse have very specific ways they are willing to do so, who they are willing to help, and how.

So many people want to know ‘what should I do?’ and the problem is that the answer isn’t the same for everyone.

So much depends on your personal situation and even where you live. A person in a larger metropolitan city is simply going to have more options than the person in a very small town.

Sometimes a victim can’t leave…yet.

Sometimes what you can do is to bide your time while positioning yourself for success and independence. Sometimes you have to play the abuser’s game or work within the ‘rules’ they’ve set up. Sometimes you only exist in the privacy of your mind.

In order to rescue ourselves, we need a completely opposite skill set from the one we used to survive.

We need to learn assertiveness, how to stand up for ourselves, how to manage our anxiety and discomfort when someone else is mad. We have to learn that someone else’s problems and emotions are theirs. We have to learn to recognize boundary violating behaviors early on, instead of desperately looking for signs that a problem person loves us. We have to love and accept ourselves, instead of making ourselves smaller.

Sometimes we can’t do that right now.

Change is a process…any kind of change. All steps matter. Our lives are the momentum of our history and choices and chances, and it takes time to undo and re-orient and re-build our foundation. To build momentum in a healthy and positive direction.

Not only are we convincing each other to rescue ourselves, we are convincing each other that we can.

And when you are in the middle of it, it is so hard to see the other side. It’s amazing that we believe we can change abusers but that we can’t change our situation.

What can I do?

Honestly, the real honest-to-god answer on this is to build relationships outside the abuse. Even if you are dealing with non-profits or the legal system or community resources, it is relationships that will give you the strength and support and resources to rescue yourself. At minimum, they can mirror you to yourself as someone who deserves better. At maximum, they can give you the tools or space you need.

I will never cease to be amazed at how I one day needed the services of the very non-profit I had been volunteering for.

Victims of abuse are so isolated, they feel so alone in their experience and struggle, and we may have forgotten how to trust because of how badly it has been abused. Building relationships means building trust in others…and ultimately in ourselves.

We have to rescue ourselves…and we can.

We just don’t have to do it alone.

How the phrase “take responsibility” makes you feel.

When you are in the early stages of your healing process, that’s going to feel horribly invalidating. It feels like someone is ‘blaming’ you for the abuse you experienced, which is unfair.

ESPECIALLY SINCE WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S ABUSE OF US.

A lot of the self-help stuff at this point, in general, is just going to be hugely triggering:

• “You define your own self-worth!”
• “Your response determines how much something hurts you.”
• “You are choosing and creating your reality.”
• “You can decide not to live this way and experience this pain whenever you want.”
• “You don’t have to be sad, just look at everything in the world to be happy about! You’re alive, right??”

Like hot damn, NO, guys. No.

We say this shit to people who are just figuring out what’s happening to them, are in emotional crisis, and (it can feel to them) like we are telling them that they are responsible for their own pain.

Meanwhile, they are struggling with all the pain and hurt they have endured, all the confusion they’ve been dealing with, and often reconstructing their sense of reality and what happened.

This is the wrong tool for this stage of healing.

What someone in this early stage of the process needs is emotional support and validation. We really need to honor that this is a process, and that we all go through it at one point or another. Now, it is completely fair to not be able to support someone at this stage of the process. Truly this is what a good therapist is for, to support someone as they go through their emotions and thoughts and triggers, and exhaustively discusses the minutia of everything that happened.

Recognizing where we are at is so important.

ESPECIALLY since there’s a point where all of this becomes empowering. THAT’S when you know that you are farther along in your healing process. When stuff like this no longer makes you feel pain but power:

• “You define your own self-worth!”
• “Your response determines how much something hurts you.”
• “You are choosing and creating your reality.”
• “You can decide not to live this way and experience this pain whenever you want.”
• “You don’t have to be sad, just look at everything in the world to be happy about! You’re alive, right??”

Like, YES, I get to define my own self-worth! I get to be the person whose opinions matter most to me! I get to choose and create my own reality! Often starting with who else I allow in with me. I get to decide I don’t want to live this way anymore, that I am over it, and I get to walk away! I can shift my emotional state by focusing on awesome stuff! I don’t have to be sad anymore!

Suddenly it’s response-ability instead of responsibility.

It doesn’t feel fault-oriented!

I totally get why we respond to in-crisis victims with this.

Because we’ve reached this place after going through so much pain and hurt, and we so empathize with someone else who is going through it. But we have to respect that healing and recovery is a process. We go through the experience so we can make our own internal shifts. Our growth happens in stages.

Being goal-oriented doesn’t respect the process.

There is so much value in experiencing the validation of our pain experience. That, yes, we were victimized and it was not okay. And maybe we begin to allow ourselves to experience anger on our own behalf, which maybe we haven’t done until now. That’s so, so important. We need our anger. It lets us know something is wrong. And for many of us finally begins to allow us to center ourselves in our own experience.

Which is so important, because a lot of abuse is about centering the abuser at the expense of ourselves.

And then someone blithely comes along with “being angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”. Knock. it. off. self-help. people. It’s well-intentioned but comes from a lack of understanding of the healing process.

Can someone get ‘stuck’ in being a victim? Absolutely. Is that necessarily our business? Probably not. And will they ever be able to grow past that stage if their experience isn’t validated? It’s more unlikely.

Some people do use the ‘victim’ phase to meet their emotional need for attention and caregiving from others.

And they get stuck in that stage. And it’s perfectly okay to recognize that and not want to be coerced into providing that. That’s good boundaries! Recognizing where we are at and what we want to consent to participate in!

But we also don’t get to dictate to them their healing journey.

It’s hard and there are a lot of factors and nuances, definitely. But the core piece of healthy behaviors and choices and actions is recognizing that we all are living our own lives and on our own journey.

I really do feel like the process is the point.

I want to preface this by saying that this isn’t something I have seen anywhere in the literature nor have I pulled from any resource. It’s just, over time, I realized that the model of healing people have didn’t seem to line up with what I saw or experienced.

And there was also a HUGE difference in how specific resources impacted victims depending on where they are in their healing.

I have literally never seen resources identifying that they are appropriate or inappropriate for certain stages of healing.

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

Meaning that people generally recommend the results of healing as the cause of healing, and it is horribly invalidating to a victim and also doesn’t actually work. I mean, I have literally never seen someone ‘decide to forgive’ a person and then they’re healed; literally never.

There are certain things that, in my opinion, tend to facilitate healing, the main thing being time and space from the person that has harmed you.

Which makes sense – your body, for example, wouldn’t be able to heal from a knife wound if you keep stabbing the knife back in.

But in reality, not even doctors or therapists can ‘heal’ anyone.

The best a medical doctor is able to do is to remove what is impeding healing/causing harm and then facilitate the body in being able to repair itself.

A therapist is generally working with a client to help them make the choices that are best for themselves and supporting them in that.

Honestly, I wonder how many of medical or psychological issues are basically professionals trying to encourage us to do whatever we already know to do. It’s easy for a medical doctor to conduct emergency surgery from an automobile accident, but it is a whole other situation for our primary care physician to talk to us about overeating or smoking or drugs.

This doesn’t apply to children or adults in extreme abuse situations, but a lot of abuse support is helping a victim realize they need to leave a situation and that they can leave a situation.

Victims stay because they love the abuser and believe wholeheartedly that they can change or stop. So it is a sort of gentle re-programming and it almost has to be self-incepted. It’s one thing for your friend to tell you you are in an abuse dynamic, it’s another to realize it for yourself.

So if I had to distill the healing process into a ‘prescription’, it would be to:

stop the harm, validate your experience and sense of reality, start to process what happened and anything else from your history or past, work on boundaries, learn about healthy relationships and communication, and support oneself in living a life for yourself so that you can live a healthy life with others.

The model of healing that I have developed looks like this:

Crisis Phase

• harm ends/safe
• harm recognized by victim
• harm validated by others
• victims receives support

Processing Phase

• process experience
• integrate reality
• learns about/from experience
• grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression) to acceptance

Transition/Moving Forward Phase

• letting go
• forgiveness (optional!)

Integration Phase

• build/strengthen life/relationship skills
• better boundaries
• better emotional regulation/increase distress tolerance
• increase shame tolerance
• address co-dependency
• re-parent self
• change how you relate to others

The Sun Rises

• forgive/accept/celebrate self (let go of shame, self-blame)
• self-acceptance
• self-compassion
• self-worth
• gratitude/appreciation for self and life
• celebrate progress
• change how you relate to self
• weave the future you want into the present

You are the light at the end of the tunnel.

• shine your light on yourself, your life, the people in your life
• conscious choices about the life you want to build

Additionally, I sort of stumbled into another stage of healing, which is to have relationships with people that are ‘repairable’.

From a comment I made elsewhere:

So we’ve been learning that having boundaries is important and keeps us safe, but also we’re probably not always going to be perfect about it or we have those bad days or whatever, and so having a safe relationship with someone who extends you the benefit of the doubt means functionally having a relationship that is repairable, and one where even if we do a dumb thing that might hurt a person we care about, we aren’t really harming them.

It’s the first time in my life I’ve really ever experienced this type of dynamic in multiple relationships – where there is the safety, goodwill, trust, and space to allow repair attempts – that it’s kind of blowing my mind.

It just reminds me that we can focus so much on ourselves or the other person, but if we focus on the dynamic (and whether it is a safe, supporting, fun one) that might matter most?

I’m still formulating my thoughts around it, but it’s been -mind blown- level of living. Like in the best way. It’s not a binary safe/unsafe paradigm but a ‘safe to be repairable’ paradigm.

Hopefully this makes sense. Again, I want to emphasize that I am not a mental health professional and I have never read this in any resource, so it is important to take it with a boulder of salt and work with a therapist. I cannot recommend therapeutic support enough.

Blame, like forgiveness, is a completely misunderstood part of the healing process.

People are exhorted to stop blaming your parents! Move on! Let go!

“Each moment you hold onto the resentment, you keep yourself stuck in a prison of victimhood. You are not responsible for what happened to you as a child. It happened. You were young back then. But now, today, you are responsible for what you choose to do.”

It’s this ‘hurry up’ mentality toward healing because you need to be healed, recovered, better – and right now! – or you are unenlightened, deficient, creating your own misery.

Like many cases of abuse, healing is a process that occurs over time. In many cases, victims have had to live a lie for years – the lie that everything is okay, the lie that nothing is happening, the lie that their abuser is the best person in the world – so many lies for so many years. If you tell a lie for long enough, you’ll start to believe it…or, at the very least, identify with it. The lie becomes an inextricable part of your identity.

Blaming helps you claim your history, the truth of what actually happened, and rewrite your identity.

People believe that ‘victim’ is dis-empowering, but what if you have never before been able to tell the truth of your situation? To finally be able to speak the truth is empowering, to acknowledge your experience and, finally, allow yourself to feel what you’ve been suppressing to maintain the lies.

Blame is a tool that helps reinterpret those perceptions that have been skewed through attempts to cope in profoundly dysfunctional situations.

Blame is a function of the need to obtain support and validation from loved ones and the community, the need to reverse what has been pushed onto a victim by an abuser, and the need to reassert the truth.

Will blame always serve in someone’s best interests?

Of course not. But we need to fundamentally re-assess our concept of what healing entails; to expect someone to heal immediately from wounds that were inflicted over years is harmful, short sighted, and selfish.

Blame is warped in abusive relationships.

Abusers often blame the victim, the community often reinforces that blame, and victims blame themselves. The healthy, appropriate re-direction of that blame is healing for earlier stages of recovery.

It isn’t about ‘creating your own misery’, it’s about acknowledging the misery of your experiences.

The more I learn about abuse recovery, the more I think there is a law of conservation of emotions. And research shows that the brain will ‘defer’ dealing with strong emotions until it is safe to do so. You can’t wish away your emotions because healing means you’ve just decided to ‘live in the present’.

And of course, no one ever tells you to ‘get over’ and ‘move on’ from happy emotions.

What these stupid exhortations really mean is that you shouldn’t be angry, fearful, upset, frustrated, or ‘negative’. Because those emotions are ‘bad’ and being happy is ‘good’.

It’s like saying a hammer is ‘bad’.

A hammer is simply a tool.

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.

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.

…they think the abuser is just ‘troubled’ or ‘had a bad childhood’ and that the relationship ‘just has its ups and downs’.

So they misread information that is not for their situation and misapply it, making the abuse worse.

(credit u/greenlizardhands)

Healthy relationships don’t have ‘ups and downs’, generally speaking, because everyone within the relationship respects the other person’s boundaries. So even if you’re feeling sad or upset or angry, you know you don’t have the ‘right’ to take it out on someone or destroy their things, etc.

Abusive or toxic relationships end up with arguing over reality

…whether someone’s feelings are right or wrong, whether their opinion/belief/ideas are right or wrong, or their actions; and the person who has decided they are the judge, jury, and executioner is the person who has decided the other person has to change their mind or actions.

(Versus a healthy person realizing that they are not compatible with this person on a significant issue, and therefore ending the relationship.)

That person – the one acting as the arbiter of what is right and wrong – may even use tools for healthy relationships to browbeat their significant other into changing their mind: so the tool for a healthy relationship itself is even used in an unhealthy way.

Healthy relationships are relationships where each person’s natural, reasonable boundaries are respected.

Healthy relationships are not controlling, and healthy people do not want to control others. In my experience, they tend to back away from ‘messy’ situations, not try and control others or try and educate someone else that they are being controlling. They tend to honor their discomfort with the whole situation and back away, like you would from a venomous snake.

Advice for healthy relationships will never work for unhealthy ones, because that advice assumes a foundation of respect between reasonable people who are actually compatible and agree on reality.

And victims fall into the trap of mis-directing what they read: grace and compassion for the abuser instead of themselves; binding rules and credos for themselves and never the abuser.

…because they’ve unwittingly accepted the abuser’s (false) reality as real

and the image the abuser reflects back to them as their own.

This one-way idea of love is so completely unbalanced.

…and (paraphrasing Lee Hammock) trying to ‘stand by’ them and to keep giving more and more until you are drained, this person will often leave you because you are no longer the person you used to be.