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.