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Compliance testing can look like giving someone an instruction (that they do not have to follow, and that the abuser is not entitled to give) and seeing if they will follow it.

And the more the target complies, they more authority they are giving to the person they are obeying, even if unintentionally. They are ceding their own authority over themselves to this other person.

And victims are often conditioned to do so by the abuser or those who enable the abuser because they experience backlash and punishment if they don’t.

Or if they have low distress tolerance, the tension alone is difficult to bear. They may not see the abuser as breaking the peace (which is what is true), they may see themselves ‘going with the flow’ as keeping it.

with someone who betrays that trust and responsibility, and misuses their power.

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 –

• someone who is hiding who they are,
• hiding their beliefs about what ‘role’ a victim should perform
• that they feel entitled to control/coerce/force a victim into performing that role and to their standard, and
• locking the victim into the relationship

– 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

• Focusing on actions versus intent.
• Focusing on boundaries.
• Emphasizing that feelings are okay but actions are not.
• The idea that you can understand why something happened without accepting what happened.
• Put the abuse in its proper context; it’s the behavior of a child: tantrums, outlandish rules and requirements, ridiculous expectations. And, as with a child, an abuser needs boundaries.
• The idea that if the abuser were in their right mind – healthy and functional – that he or she would never want to hurt the victim. And that they would choose to have this stopped by someone else if they couldn’t stop it on their own.
• That people deserve to learn from their experiences and actions, and to take that away from them is to deny them their very self.

It took me a long time in life to learn that toxic/abusive/unsafe people think ‘upside down’.

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)

Most people want to divide others into ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’, and in the past I have used a safe/unsafe instead.

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.

And you can see them for what they are if you pay attention to how they respond to goodness.

1. their feelings (‘needs’/wants) always take priority
2. they feel that being right is more important than anything else
3. they justify their (problematic/abusive) actions because ‘they’re right’
4. image management (controlling the narrative and how others see them) because of how they acted in ‘being right’
5. trying to control/change your thoughts/feelings/beliefs/actions
6. antagonistic relational paradigm (it’s always them v. you, you v. them, them v. others, others v. them – even if you don’t know about it until they are angry)
7. inability see anything from someone else’s perspective (they don’t have to agree, but they should still be able to understand their perspective) this means they don’t have a model of other people as fully realized human beings
8. they believe they have the right to punish you and/or others, and are punitive-oriented (versus growth-oriented, problem-solving oriented, boundaries-oriented, or safety-oriented)

These are all the ingredients for abuse to occur.