For purposes of simplicity I will be using “he” throughout this post to designate the abuser and “she” to designate the abuse victim. We can all agree that males are also abused in relationships by females.
One of the insidious (and enabling) aspects of abuse is that the abuse victim often lacks a credible witness to the abuse that is occurring (or has occurred).
“Witnessing” is the act of validating, of believing, the victim’s presentation of her trauma. It is the willingness to face, not turn away from, the victim’s experience of her experience.
The abuse victim often lacks a mature, credible witness to validate the abuse as existing as a real problem—a real problem that is called “abuse,” and not a watered-down euphemism.
Lacking this validation, she is less empowered to confront the abuse, while the abuser’s leverage is simultaneously strengthened.
One can’t confront, after all, something that isn’t identified, recognized as real.
When we speak of abuse, we are referring to the intentional use of one’s power to control, frighten, cow, shame, restrict, degrade, dismiss, humiliate, suppress, inhibit, isolate, invalidate and/or damage and destroy another person.
I routinely work cases in which abuse is occurring but has yet to be labeled “abuse.” Sometimes the euphemisms, the minimization, or the mis-identification of the abuse begin at the bureaucratic level.
For instance, I recently got a referral through an insurer who described “anger” as the presenting issue. With a little further information, I asked the referrer if “abuse” wasn’t the more relevant concern? A half-minute later, with a little more information, I suggested,“So this is about domestic violence?”
The referring agent, who probably had some mental health training, surprised me with how relieved, almost enthusiastic, she was that I’d apparently called the situation for what it was—abuse.
And so the insurance company, in seeking a provider for the client, could not “witness” for her, at this early stage of her help-seeking, the true predicament (and trauma) she was dealing with.
The culture of secrecy, shame, euphemistic language, and sometimes ignorance surrounding relationship abuse enable and sustain its subterrean status and persistence.
Abuse always is a form of exploitation. But it’s also a tactic; the tactical aim of abuse is to control, restrict, or otherwise subjugate someone. The pattern of abusive behavior defines the abuser, which shouldn’t surprise us, as the aims of abuse speak directly, and indictingly, to character.
The abusive individual chronically uses a variety of defenses—like rationalization, contempt, devaluation, denial, minimization—to support his abusive attitudes and behaviors.
The more, for instance, we devalue someone—the more contempt we feel towards someone—the more we are de-humanizing that person. And the more we de-humanize someone, the more dangerously we expand our latitude to treat (and mistreat) that person as an “object.”
A major aspect of the abuser’s mentality is an inflated sense of entitlement. The abuser feels entitled to what he wants. He doesn’t just want what he wants; he doesn’t even just want what he wants badly.
The abuser demands what he wants.
For the abusive individual, to want something is to deserve it. Anything less than the responsive delivery of what he wants (and feels entitled to) is perceived as an injustice—a personal affront.
He will then use this perceived affront as justification (rationalizing) for his punitive, destructive response.
The abusive individual sees it somewhat like this: I deserved what I wanted; I didn’t get it; now she (as the uncooperative party) deserves to be punished.
When the abuser is too cowardly to punish his real frustrator (say, a boss), he’ll bully, instead, a more vulnerable target, like his partner (or kids).
Often intense anger and abuse are assumed to be synonymous. But it’s important to remember that expressions of anger—even intense anger—aren’t always indicative of abuse, just as expressions of abuse aren’t always delivered as overt anger and rage.
Anger can nicely deliver an abusive intent; but sometimes it’s just anger, not anger as the delivery vehicle of the abuse.
Many intelligent, abusive individuals can convincingly give lip service to the wrongness of their behaviors. Some abusive individuals, who aren’t sociopaths and/or too narcissistically disturbed, can and do confront the driving factors of their abuse and make genuine amends and changes.
But many others can’t, and won’t; their narcissism or sociopathy—in any case their fundamental immaturity and pathological self-centeredness—prove insurmountable.
When I work with cases of abuse “witnessing” for the abused client is vital. Although it’s true therapists shouldn’t make a practice of diagnosing people they’ve never met, it’s also true that when clients have a story to tell of their abuse or exploitation, it would be destructive not to believe them. And if you believe their experience (and why wouldn’t you?), then failing to recognize and label it as one of abuse is to fail them.
Why would it be destructive not to believe the client? Isn’t it theoretically possible that a client could be lying, contriving, or grossly exaggerating? What about false memories? It is exceedingly rare for clients to manufacture experiences of abuse. If anything, the opposite is true: the culture (as noted) of shame, secrecy, and minimization surrounding abuse inclines clients to underreport, not exaggerate, the extent of their victimization.
Invariably, it is the abuser who is guilty of the inverse of exaggerating, which is minimizing. And from the abuser’s minimized perspective, the truth looks like an exaggeration.
In the case of the aforementioned referral, it took little time to see that abuse was prevalent. I saw this couple for a consultation. It’s always an informative, first red flag when a partner tries to take you aside before his partner has shown up to preemptively set the record straight—that is, to assure and prepare you to expect all sorts of exaggerations and misreprentations from the yet-to-arrive partner.
You know that invalidation (and gaslighting), for instance, are issues when you hear (as I did), “Trust me, Doc, what she’s gonna say, it never happened”¦at least not the way she’s gonna say it did.”
These are cases where it’s best not to trust the client.
(This article is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
DEar Kathy,
Your “deals” were more complex in nature, but the BASIC deal is still X for Y—but he didn’t keep his part of the bargain.
Yes, I agree that you made a “bad deal” (basicly, money/job for attention) but at the same time, he was NOT KEEPING EVEN THAT PART OF THE DEAL. He got what he wanted and then failed to treat you nicely.
Us keeping our word and giving them (doing for them, etc) what we say we will and then expecting them to do what they say they will do is the typical “psychopath’s deal.” We give, and they take.
IN that kind of one-sided deal, in my opinion, we have NO obligation to continue to give more and more and more while receiving less and less and less. What I am saying I guess is that if THEY don’t keep their word to us, we are NOT obligated to continue to keep ours to them.
As may “sainted” step father would have said, “Chit on me once, shame on you. Chit on me twice, shame on me.”
Or, as my “sainted” late husband would have said. “It’s bad enough when someone chits on my head, but when they slide down my nose to wipe their arse, it’s too much.” LOL
Oxy, I love your late husband.
I don’t want to go on and on with this. But I have to disagree with you.
He didn’t agree to give me attention. He only gave me a lot of attention when he was negotiating for the deal. It’s not the same thing.
If I had said, “Yes, you will do what you offer, but you will also act like a wonderful boyfriend who loves me and is faithful and tells the truth and shares his feelings and cares about mine,” that would have been a different thing. But I didn’t.
The why of this isn’t relevant. The fact is that I didn’t put what I really wanted on the table. And I learned a lesson from it, something I had only partially learned in business. If you expect something from a deal or a relationship, be honest and upfront about it. Say what you want, even if it appears to be obvious. There is no way to know what the other person thinks about that until you ask.
A few years ago, when I was trying to figure things out, I spent a lot of time lurking and sometimes writing on blogs about dating. I was really interested in how other people did relationships. And I discovered that they did this. Talked upfront about things like trust, honesty, openness, expectations in ways that I would never had done. First, because I was afraid it would have made me seem insecure (wrong!). And second because my sense of entitlement was all messed up by my background.
A primary reason why this guy was able to slip and slide so much was because he didn’t want these things discussed and I didn’t know how to bring them up. Instead of doing that, I kept whining at him that I really wanted him to consider my feelings, and he kept giving me the look of Olympian disdain and suggesting I discuss it with my therapist because it wasn’t part of his deal.
What I should have done is have a conversation with myself about what I really wanted, slapped the list down on the negotiating table, and said this is what I want. This is the price of any more attention, money, sex, travel, restaurants and whatever else you think I’m good for. I want a real relationship with someone who’s committed to me and my happiness. I don’t care why you want me to be happy. It can be driven by your usual infantile selfishness and plans for world domination. I don’t care. But if you’re not committed to that and willing to back it up by your actions, you have just disqualified yourself from this whole arrangement.
Of course, I was entirely incapable of saying or even admitting I was thinking anything like that at the time. I was too busy trying to figure out how to do the magic trick that would make him love me. But that would have solved the whole problem.
There’s a lot I can say about him in terms of criticizing his character or behavior. But except for one major breach, I can’t say he didn’t keep his side of the deals. It’s just that only one of us was going after what he really wanted, and it wasn’t me.
I want to add something to that previous post.
The fact that my ex kept his side of the deals doesn’t make him less of an abuser. He deliberately manipulated my feelings, and deliberately did whatever he could to destroy my confidence and self-esteem. He did it to get what he wanted, and because it made him feel better about himself. And he didn’t care what happened to me in the process, or what he left behind.
My point was that there was something for me to learn, and it wasn’t about keeping my promises or being fair. The sense of entitlement and asking for what they want that Donna talks about in her recent post on seeing sociopaths through normal eyes are things that, in sociopathic personalities become overblown. But in the personalities of at least some of us who become involved with them, these characteristics are underdeveloped.
For me, who lived and worked in a competitive business environment, these were attitudes and skills in which I was barely proficient when I met him. My former partner had to negotiate all the business contracts, because I simply froze when it came to demanding and holding firm for levels of payment that matched the deliverables of my company and me. Something in me was trained by my history not to ask and not even to want, without some kind of internal backlash.
One of the things I learned — both by observing him and by living with the results of dealing with him — was that this deficiency was not only making me a victim, but was warping all of my relationships. A person with a victim mentality, who also had the kind of power and responsibility that I had, doesn’t just victimize herself. Everyone walked on eggshells around me, because I was incredibly generous on one hand and dangerously aggrieved on the other. I knew this, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t understand the mechanism in me that was causing it.
Even when I could describe it, and understand it intellectually during the course of my recovery, I couldn’t change it until I did some preliminary work. I had to get through the phases of recovery that led me to believe that I was responsible for me. That I could and had to take care of myself. This was a 180-degree turn from the way I had viewed my entire life, and it took some time to get there.
Just like sociopaths have a part of their processing systems that are blocked — I call it having the lights out in part of the brain — that was true for me too. Unlike them, my pathology didn’t intrinsically block me from recovering. But it took a major trauma to do it. And as in the case of many lost skills and feelings that are recovered, there is a period of a kind of imbalance.
Releasing an unused power and capacity often initially releases a lot of backed-up energy. People who learn to say “no” after a long time of being compliant often say no loudly and to everything, until they settle down and it becomes a natural part of their responsive repertoire among all the others.
I can see from some of my writing here that I haven’t quite settled down yet. My assertiveness is very easily triggered and unnecessarily forceful.
That’s okay. It’s just part of the process. I’m not nearly as obnoxious as I was when I first started to practice with it. And while that’s settling down, I’m moving on to other things that this assertiveness supports, like better planning of my life. And getting to know and understand the new compassionate feelings that are a wonderful by-product of being kinder to myself.
But all of this began with taking responsibility for my own part in fostering the relationship with the sociopath. I know that feeling victimized was a big part of my early processing, and it was an important part in because it ultimately separated me from what happened to me. The first thing I needed to learn was that it was not about me. That he was a force of nature and I was unlucky enough to get in its way.
Later, after I understood that, I was able to look at my part in it. What made me vulnerable. How I participated in it. What I needed to learn from that.
At this point, I don’t need to demonize him anymore. He’s dangerous, and everything written here about educating people about sociopaths and teaching self-protective skills is absolutely true. But he is also an emotional cripple, a tragedy of lost human potential.
It’s hard for me to listen to the people here who talk about spawns of Satan, even though I understand why they feel that way. And in a way it’s true, but the “Satan” is the circumstances in this world that so profoundly damage the emotional systems of infants and children that was is left is narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths.
And though it may seem a little crazy for me to be giving him credit for what he did right, it seems like the fair thing to do. It is where I am in my processing. It is also how I hoped to be judged, not just by what’s wrong with me, but also by what I did right.
Reading a few of the last posts prompted this thought. Victimization happens when somewhere along the line a person becomes so heavily invested in the outcome of a relationship, any relationship from financial adviser, business associate, or something more romantic, that he/she fails to see the true character of the person selected for the role of savior, rescuer, lover, or whatever word is appropriate in the circumstance. The intensity that inevitably surrounds a ‘betrayal bond’ becomes the blinding force that fuels and propels the impending disaster.
This is where the work on oneself becomes the answer to making better and more informed choices. The other was being true to himself and for some reason he was able to use that fact to hook vulnerable victims.
It’s an old cliche’ but it makes a good point. If you are the top hen in charge of hen house security, don’t hire the handsome CEO of Fox Bros. Security to achieve the outcome you desire!
Well, I guess I’m not quite finished.
The causes of sociopathy in this world are by no means limited to parenting issues. They are poverty, racism, exploitation and abuse of all kinds, elitism and racism, all the “isms” that justify lack of compassion and judgment for circumstances that others can’t control, anything that fosters hatred and self-hatred including many religions. The list goes on and on.
Depending on circumstances and timing, some people come out broken in terms of being pathologically compliant, and some come out broken in terms of being pathologically independent.
And it’s not just childhood. Damaged people can live on the edge of pathology. Circumstances and influences can drive them over that edge. And circumstances that are certainly a factor in our culture is the glorification of winning, of owning the “spoils of war,” of viewing life as a competition.
Part of this is hard-wired in the primitive areas of our brains, as is disciminating between “us” and “them,” but these are artifacts of another time in our history. The story of human evolution has been, at least in part, the recognition of higher and higher processing potential. And the highest is the recognition of the interconnectedness of all things, and the shared energy source that at some level that we still hardly understand is the oneness of everything.
All of these damaging factors are evidence of how far we have to go as a race. But the fact that I can talk about this here, and that I am not alone in putting these ideas together, is evidence that this evolution is coming out of the ivory towers of science, philosophy and religion into real-life considerations.
Sociopaths force us to recognize these things. In our dealings with sociopaths, we come face to face with what is wrong with us, and wrong with our world.
Now I’ll get off my soapbox. I apologize for ranting or being boring. I have to work all day, so I wish you all a wonderful, productive and healing day.
Dear Kathy,
What I see happening here on LF now is that we (this group) are becoming PHILOSOPHERS. We are not only looking at ourselves no longer as “victims” but looking at the ROOT causes of humanity’s down falls, as well as the ROOT causes of our own downfalls.
My step dad use to use the fox and hen house saying, but he also used one even stronger, “Putting Hitler in charge of the Jewish welfare fund.”
In the past we (humans) have FREQUENTLY chosen the “Hitlers” of this world to be in charge of the “welfare fund” and I don’t have to go into detail with the results of that choice.
There are many different “reasons (excuses) why we (humans) choose the Hitlers, or allow them to take over, and then we get the results like we have now on Wall Street, in WAshington DC, etc.
When things HIT BOTTOM for a group, or a country, or a society, for a while at least, the group will rise up and depose the “Hitlers” from their positions, and then things will be okay for a while, until things start to deteriorate again, RINSE AND REPEAT.
If you look at the old testament story of the Jewish nation, you will see that when they became wealthy, had plenty of food and necessities, they turned to corruption, idolatry, sexual perversions, abuse of each other, actually sacrificing children to idols, etc. but then things would take a down turn and they would be scrambling for enough food to eat in a famine or whatever hit them, and BINGO they “cleansed” the corruption out of their society—for a while.
Maslov showed us the hierarchy of needs. Right now, we (western civ) are not worrying (in most cases) about feeding our children enough calories to keep them alive, or finding enough rags to cover them in winter, so we have the time and effort to devote to things such as art, philosophy, etc.
Here on LF we are still pretty high up on that hierarchy list in that we are able to devote our thoughts and energies to healing our psychological and emotional wounds, rather than worrying about SURVIVAL.
My little brush with worrying about ACTUAL survival (in retrospect) gave me a new appreciation for the blessings and the portion of this world’s wealth I do have. I realized that once the very BASIC needs of food, shelter, health, etc are met (even most homeless people in this country have those basic needs met–even if it is a cardboard box on a grate and eating out of a dumpster the needs are relatively easily met compared to literally starving or freezing to death)
But because most of us here on LF don’t have to go find the dumpster, or find a card board box for tonight’s slumber, we at least have more TIME and ENERGY to devote to “growing” because most of our needs are EASILY met.
I’ve got a whole new take too on what NEEDS are vs WANTS.
It is gratifying for me to see the great growth that is happening with the current contingent of people posting here on LF, and how people are starting to look at their own situations, and then move on to thinking about society as a whole. We are not only healing, but we are becoming activists and philosophers, CHANGE AGENTS, not just for ourselves , but for our society. I THINK THAT’S A GOOD THING.
We are a diverse group of people, from all “groups” of society, but we have a COMMON goal now, and each of us will take that mission into our every day lives. It will make our individual lives better, happier, more satisfying, but also radiate out to those that we meet and interact with.
“There is no fanatic like a convert” and we are ALL CONVERTS. We have all seen the abyss and escaped, and we are all stronger, smarter, better educated and WISER individuals. We are changing society—starting with ourselves and radiating outward!
Oxy,
Just finished a book that might interest you, and the LF community in general. It pertains to what you are saying about us as change agents. It’s “A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age,” by Daniel H. Pink.
A very hopeful book. If what the author posits turns out to be true, people like us will indeed be change agents in the future.
Elizabeth Conley said:
“What is freakishly amazing about an S’s smear campaign is how believable they are…. it just blows my mind that most people will nod along to his lies like bobble head dolls on the back deck of a pimp’s caddie. What’s up with that? If it weren’t so depressing it would be funny.”
Elizabeth, what took me by stunned shock-and-surprise, is the number of “Christians” who suck into it as well. I think in the Bible it is called, “slander” and “gossip” huh? do they read their Bibles?
In my case, by the time I realized what was happening, and tried to defend myself, then I was the one who was “gossiping and slandering”!!!
This is demonic activity for sure.
So sad.
Oxy, I enjoyed reading your comment. You must have popped awake like I did this morning.
No question that survival issues can dominate. But I think we have a great model at Lovefraud for a compassionate society.
Isn’t amazing how we can switch from angry to philosophic and back again in a split second?
Fleeced Ewe,
“In my case, by the time I realized what was happening, and tried to defend myself, then I was the one who was “gossiping and slandering”!!!”
Your problem was identical to mine in this regard. It’s like they all have the same “Standard Operating Procedures” manual.
I try to avoid telling anyone else’s story, and simply stick to my own. You say “demonic activity”. This interpretation is understandable. The behavior can be profoundly evil. I will not tell anyone else’s story, even though this story begs to be told. All I will say is that sometimes these “Christians” will target and ostracize a little child. I am personally involved in such a problem, and it shocks me to the core.
Few things rock faith like the behavior of “Christians”. There’s nothing that shames such people, and there’s absolutely no behavior so evil that they cannot find a way to justify it.