…and finding the light
And it can be so exhausting trying to protect your boundaries all the time, especially when victims are trapped, and they may give up on setting little boundaries to conserve their energy.
The problem is that those little boundaries are often part of what keep you yourself.
Proposed construct
The outward orientation of entitlement combined with desire to assert power, irrespective of whether that power actually exists or is able to leveraged.
| Entitlement-Orientation | Power Over |
|---|---|
| actual entitlement1 , or | actual power over2 , or |
| perception or belief of entitlement, or | perception or belief of power over, or |
| perception or belief of getting away with asserting/exercising entitlement3 | perception or belief of getting away with asserting/exercising power4 |
| and | and |
| actual assertion or exercise of entitlement | assertion of willingness, desire, or determination to exercise power over |
1 reasonable? who determines?
2 reasonable? who determines?
3 often coupled with the belief that you are entitled to what you can get away with
4 often coupled with the belief that asserting power is its own qualification for the right to do so: “might makes right”
…while reinforcing their power over the victim by making the victim swallow unfairness. (And humiliating the victim, making the victim participate in their own humiliation, can bond the rest of the family together.)
Extracting value from a victim when they become adults still keeps the victim there at the bottom of the hierarchy…especially since those abusers are making demands as if they are above the victim, even though they no longer have outright power over them.
Even as an adult, the victim has low status in the family, and that status is reinforced through emotional abuse and bullying that activates the victim’s conditioning from childhood. They attempt to coerce or force the victim into acting as if they have no power, acting low status, and this maintains the existing hierarchy and power structure even as the victim technically has power as an adult.
A lot of people have a hard time recognizing their own non-optimal, abusive, or problematic behaviors…particularly if they themselves were a victim of abuse.
While there are sociopathic abusers – calculating, scheming, Machiavellian – the vast majority of abusers I have seen actually believe themselves to be victims of abuse (and often were)…while victims of abuse are very commonly paranoid that they are the abusers in a relationship dynamic.
This is a problem that occurs because we don’t fully recognize how people perceive themselves and their intentions.
Abuse literature describes calculating monsters who are intending to hurt victims (intentional abusers), while many abusers are instead reacting to their own priorities/wants/needs/emptiness at the expense of the victim (unintentional abusers).
Because of the long-term impacts of the trauma of abuse, many abusers have also been victims of abuse.
Their low distress tolerance, their childhood maladaptive coping mechanisms, their personality disorders leave them compromised, particularly in parenting.
So abusers show up in abuse support communities with their narrative of how they have been victimized and abused.
And the truth is messy. Sometimes they are both victim and abuser. But because of how black-and-white the thinking on abusers is, we are missing something vitally important.
Something that is the very reason for Abuse, Interrupted, which is stopping the cycle of abuse.
And that includes taking an honest look at ourselves, addressing any problematic behaviors and beliefs, and working toward health and healthy relationships.
Because abusers often believe their own stories.
They may even have state-specific beliefs that depend on which emotion-state they are in. Their beliefs change depending on how they feel, but the beliefs can be consistent with that feeling.
So what happens when this person shows up in an abuse support community?
Certain communities tend to be very insular and reinforce problematic beliefs and thinking structures. Problematic ‘victim’ communities include estranged parents, red pill, incel, ‘gamers’, etc. (u/Issendai has done incredible work parsing out the problematic belief structures in estranged parents communities.) They all strongly see themselves as victims, while powering over others.
But victim-abusers do show up in general abuse support communities.
Or relay their narrative of being abused to intimates and others in their lives. All while believing – wholeheartedly – that they are being abused and victimized. Telling a story of how they have been wronged.
This is different than lying.
People believe that abusers ‘know the truth’ and then intentionally misrepresent the truth, lie, and manipulate. And some abusers do. But many abusers, particularly victim-abusers, have actually manipulated themselves first. (And sometimes you get Trump, and it’s both.)
Spotting an unreliable narrator is different than spotting someone who is lying.
With a liar, you might identify inconsistencies in their statements. You can get outside information to corroborate their assertions. You pay attention to whether they lie to others.
With an unreliable narrator, however, you are looking for patterns of cognitive distortion.
Because the person they are primarily lying to is themselves, they have to fit the facts to a pre-existing narrative. They are supporting a worldview core to their identity. Someone who does this is not going to apply their thinking consistently to similar situations.
They will have different rules for themselves than others.
And they won’t even see it. Their hypocrisy doesn’t exist to them. Usually it has something to do with virtue-based ethics, e.g. “I am a good person, therefore anything bad that I do doesn’t make me a bad person.” or “I am a victim, therefore I am not an abuser and nothing I do is abusive.” If this person does something wrong, it’s a mistake, they’re human, they have been misunderstood, everyone makes mistakes, etc.
That’s if they’re even able to acknowledge they have done something wrong.
The most effective tool, however, is to take someone’s perspective as-is.
Even in their own accounting, an unreliable narrator’s actions simply do not make sense. Additionally, they can outright showcase negative characteristics that they attribute to others.
They will often also have an inconsistent worldview since abusers or people who engage in mis-thinking mix up cause and effect.
Someone’s own language can tell you the story.
…or their lack of empathy for a person they should reasonably have empathy for. (How disconnected they are from this other person, their experience, and even their emotions; someone they should care for and care about.)
Without any additional information, is how they are acting or thinking a reasonable and healthy response?
The answer is “no”.
You can determine, through the author’s own narrative, this person is an unreliable narrator.
An unreliable narrator can legitimately been abused. They can be a person who is still looking for healing and is struggling in their life. They may not be intentionally trying to misrepresent the situation.
But that doesn’t mean an unreliable narrator can see it clearly.
There is a clear link between someone’s narrative being reasonable and being reliable.
As u/ greenlizardhands has identified, so often victims of abuse apply information in the wrong direction. They learn that ‘love is patient, love is kind’, and then worry about whether they are patient or kind enough with someone – an abuser – who is being anything BUT patient or kind.
If, instead, they applied the ‘rule’ to the abuser, they could potentially see that the abuser does not love them. Because it’s not a rule, it’s a rubric – it’s a way to determine whether something is, not a prescription for how it should be. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
For the victim who is often so used to attempting to be Ultimate GoodnessTM, it’s good to look inward regarding how the relationship makes them feel and who they are becoming versus whether they are being enough, doing enough, good enough. To consider if the relationship is building them up or breaking them down.
And to think about who they are becoming with their days – in their mind, their heart, and way of being.
And the answer in every abuse dynamic is that you eventually become worse. Because a victim simply can never actually meet the abuser’s ‘needs’. The abuser’s ‘need’ is to have someone to abuse. Because it establishes in reality the fantasy the abuser wishes was real, because it reinforces an abuser’s identity to themselves, because the dynamic itself is not a means but an end.
See also:
One reason why abusers pick good people as their victims <—– laundering ‘evil’
@alexandra.lou.lou, Instagram comment about her toxic mother
“Nightmares and hypervigilance make for light, frequently interrupted sleep – and dark, quiet rooms are blank screens for intrusive trauma symptoms.” – Glenn Patrick Doyle
And some abusers will wake a sleeping victim with abuse/assault/hitting/screaming. It is incredibly disorienting and terrifying to be awoken that way…so you learn to sleep ‘light’, but you’re not getting restorative sleep either. Which makes decision-making so much harder with respect to yourself, your life, the abuser. There’s a reason that’s a form of torture/breaking down the ego or psyche.