joreth: (boxed in)
Joreth ([personal profile] joreth) wrote2021-09-04 07:40 pm
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Abusers Do This Thing, Except When They Do The Opposite

I just read a thing that said "abusers are good at making your anger seem worse than their abuse."  And I thought "yes! They do!"

But then I thought a little more about my last abusive ex.  See, he would do this thing, where he would try to control his partners' behaviour, and they would do a thing that resisted that control, and then he would get angry at their resistance and call it "abuse" and accuse them of hurting him, of not caring about how their actions affected him, of destroying the relationship, etc.

If anyone accused him of "overreacting" or of blowing things out of proportion or of doing anything at all that was "too much", he threw it right back at them that they weren't allowing him to have his feelings (because all feelings are "valid", yo).  He was VERY good at making it seem as though his victims were making his anger seem worse than the so-called "abuse" his victims were doing to him when they resisted his control of them.

I still remember the day one of them called me up in tears, hyperventilating, totally freaking out because she may or may not have broken some fucking rule they had, depending on how the rule was interpreted, and she was upset not because of what he might do in retaliation for breaking the rules, but because she thought she was a horrible, thoughtless person for 1) breaking the rule and 2) not knowing if the rule had been broken because she didn't get clarification on this point.

I made a blog post a while back where I used actual quotes from one of our email exchanges post-breakup where I told him that I did not want him to contact me again except to apologize for one very specific act he had done during the breakup, and he responded quite indignantly about how he didn't "consent" to me placing "limitations" on the conditions under which he was allowed to speak to me.

Dude, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

 

So, I realized that it's not so much that abusers do particular things like making your anger seem worse than their abuse.  Because someone skilled in abusive tactics will make it seem like YOU are making THEIR anger seem worse than YOUR "abuse" of them, when in reality, their anger is part of the abuse.

And also, as I've learned, we all have abusive tactics that we have learned just through exposure to it throughout our lives, from our families and our culture.  So when we are mistreated, we ALL reach into our own bags of tricks, and some of the responses we pull out can be pretty shitty too.

So sometimes (in my experience, basically all the time), it can be really difficult to tell who is the abuser and who is the victim, even if you apply the axioms "follow the lines of power and see who has the locus of control" and "the one who is trying to run away is probably not the abuser".  In this same relationship example, we all thought that the victim was the abuser at first because she was the one doing what seemed like controlling things.  You see, he was also deeply fearful of losing the relationship.  Abusers are in real pain and feeling real fear.  What makes them abusers is how they deal with that pain and fear.

So, to prevent her from ever getting up the courage to leave him, he would play on her fear of losing the family group, which would fuck her shit up, thinking that she could lose everything at any given moment, and it would trigger her anxiety about being "left out".  To relieve her feelings of being left out, she would request that no sex happen among anyone unless the door was left open in an implicit invitation for her to join, even if she didn't want to join.

To me, that seemed incredibly controlling.  But he was desperately afraid of losing his relationship with her and he desperately needed to make this a whole group thing with no individuality or independent-ness, so he made it seem like he was "acquiescing" to her demand to control the sex he was allowed to have, even though "everyone subsumes their identity into the group relationship and we are all one Borg, resistance is futile" was exactly what he was going for.

I'll be honest - the reason why I had a hard time believing that she was being abused is because I had a history with her as a metamour through another partner, and she tried to control our relationship then too.  So it seemed totally in character to me that she was being controlling, even though it was contrary to every value she *spoke* for.

But her controlling behaviour was a *reaction* to HIS controlling behaviour, just as it was the last time (she had just gotten out of a relationship with an abusive metamour and used controlling tactics as a survival technique).  Most of us develop toxic coping mechanisms to prolonged exposure to abuse.  He provoked it by preying on her fear of being alone, left out, of losing the family group.  And then, when things escalated to a level where I could more clearly see who was pushing whom, he strung her along by making it seem as though she were the one dismissing his anger to make it seem worse than her "abuse" of him.

So, it's not that abusers do any particular thing or particular tactic.  It's that abusers flip the script.  They take whatever tools you give them, whatever scripts that society gives them, whatever is available, and they flip it to make it seem like their victim is the "bad guy".  Some abusers are sophisticated about it and it can be really hard to tell that this is what they're doing.  Others, like a particular villain in a TV show I'm watching right now, are really fucking obvious about it (#ProTip - if someone says "the whole world is against you / doesn't believe in you / is holding you back, and I'm the only one who accepts you / believes in you / trusts you / encourages you / is not holding you back", then they're being abusive, just FYI).

This is why I am not a fan of Non-Violent Communication.  It's a ridiculously easy tool to convert into an abusive weapon, and we ALL have abusive tendencies - yes, even you, dear reader, you are not above this shit - so I've never seen NVC used in a healthy way.

And I don't need anyone to tell me "but I use it all the time!" 1)  I'm sure there is someone out there somewhere for whom it has never been warped into a tool of abuse - statistics guarantees that this must be true somewhere - and the fact that someone like this exists is not the point; and 2) I just got done pointing out that we all have abusive tendencies, so in this rant, I am dubious of anyone's claim that they have never misused a communication tool because I believe we all have, either knowingly or unknowingly, simply because we are all fucked up and I'm not letting you off the hook for this.

I'm digressing.  The point is not NVC specifically.  The point is that abusers flip the script.  The point is for them to make you question your reality, to question "who is the bad guy here?" and to come up with the wrong answer.  And they will use whatever script they have access to in order to flip it.

So, an abuser may make your anger at them seem worse than their abuse of you.  But they may also make it seem as though YOU are making their anger at you seem worse than your resistance to their control of you.  Sometimes anger is the correct and necessary reaction.  When someone is trying to control you, your anger is appropriate.  Anger is my primary defense mechanism, so let me tell you how hard it is for me to admit this next part...  But sometimes anger is also a weapon, and you are totally correct to resist their anger at you, because their anger *is part of their abuse* and their efforts to make it seem like you're the one minimizing their anger *is part of the abuse*.

And I don't have an answer for you.  I don't have a checklist for you.  I don't have a listicle for how to make it easier to tell which is which.  We can follow the lines of power (if they control your income, if they are your superior or supervisor in business, if they own the place where you live, if they influence who your friends are, etc.) and we can try to tease out who is running away and who is doing the chasing.

But those have limitations.  Many abuse victims do not try to run away for a long time.  Many of them are only *capable* of being abused because they're desperate to hold onto this relationship so they submit to the abuse out of fear.  Or out of grooming - where they get the victim to submit to a small violation, and then the next larger violation is excused because it's so close to the first one the victim let through, and how can you let one go and not the other, you hypocrite?

And many people gain power over a romantic partner in ways that are invisible to outsiders.  How many of you ask your friends the details of their economic situation?  How many of you know who controls the income?  When romantic partners are business partners, can you really tell, from the outside, that a division of labor based on skills doesn't have an element of power built in, such as one person controlling the money?

 How many of you have witnessed those private conversations where one person steered another away from building intimate friendships with people the first person didn't approve of, and they did so subtly, without overt threats?

How many of you can *really* tell the difference, from the outside, between "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me" vs. "that person makes me uncomfortable, so if you are friends with them, I will have to not be around them, but it's totally without expectation or obligation and your choice to be friends with them is OK with me, except I know how desperate you are to please me so that even mentioning this will make you choose the option I prefer even though I have said it was OK to choose the other option because we both know it's not really OK to choose the other option"?

In fact, how many of you can really tell the difference between those two things even from the inside, when you're right in the middle of it?  From either side?  The human brain is not logical or rational, it is a justification engine.  We are very good at justifying all kinds of things to ourselves and others.

And abusers are particularly good at this.  Which means that, since our brains are optimized for it, we are all capable of abuse.  Abusers flip the script - whichever script we have, an abuser will turn it around to justify their control of their victim.  And even they might not realize that they're doing this, because of that justification engine thing.

But they will take whatever is handed to them and use it to control.  If that means they use your desire to seem "fair" and "impartial", if that means they use the "all feelings are valid" principle, if that means they ride the coattails of the #MeToo movement, if that means they flip the gender script, if that means they *use* the gender script, if that means they use social justice language like my ex, if that means they use their social capital, if that means they use your good faith - whatever it means for them, that's what they'll do to come out looking like the "good guy", or if they can manage it, like the "victim" themselves.

Abusers flip the script.  Even if they have to use "flipping the script" to flip the script, as long as it makes you question who is the abuser and who is the victim, they're doing it right.