Month: March 2011

A common experience reported by individuals who are in abusive and toxic relationships is that of a strong effort by the abuser to control the communication that the victim has with their friends and family. Often disguised as a sincere attempt to protect the victim, the abuser will subtly imply that a friend or family member isn’t exactly as the victim believes they are – the suggestion of a questionable work ethic may come-up, questionable morals, or a general statement of disgust or just “not liking them”. This is great ammo for toxic people as victims in these relationships are prone to believe what the abuser says. It’s a war of attrition and over time it’s the small things that help to give an erroneous or controlling notion traction.

The abuser does have a lot to lose in that their illusion of control may hang in the balance; at the very least, the abuser will need to escalate their manipulation attempts once the victim begins to talk to other people usually starting with stronger efforts of character assassination once the victims communication with an objective outsider increase.

What is the abuser afraid of? Simply put, they KNOW there is something not entirely right about the relationship dynamics and they know that in a group of two, their influence has at least 50% of the impact and more likely much higher than that given their overbearing, controlling and manipulative nature. They are also aware that adding a third perspective into the mix can dramatically reduce the level of control they have as this will dilute their influence, particularly when the opinion goes against the abuser – check out Solomon Asch experiments on conformity – were one person agreeing with the victim is often enough for them to break free from the grip of the abuser.

Speaking to other people also affords the victim an opportunity to clearly define what is going on, and this is often very effective at helping someone see what is happening in their life. Friends and family tend to ask lots of questions about things that don’t make any sense so the practice of explaining these can help add some objectivity to an unclear situation. Objectivity is NOT what abusers want so they will often try to limit and control the communication of their partners.

People in healthy relationships do not fear their partners talking to other people because they have nothing to hide. If you find your partner, or yourself, trying to control the external communication, you should take this as a warning sign that the motives may not be as pure as they should be. Take some time to examine the reasons given for discouraging the communication and make whatever adjustments you need to in order to address the situation appropriately.

Even in healthy relationships, there will be a time when one partner needs to control the behavior of the other – usually in times of crisis when the objectivity of one is severally impacted. In a true partnership this is what needs to happen – we table the decision making process to someone who will look after our best interests when we are not able to see the world clearly. When I heard about Natalie dying, I immediately called my father to tell him because I felt that I only had a few minutes before I lost perspective and I knew my father would look out for me better than almost everyone on the planet. It was tough on him, but he held it together, he held me together and he worked with my mom and my brother to help me through it. I handed responsibility for me over to him so I could just fall to pieces. The thing is, he didn’t try to control my actions very much. He just needed to be sure I didn’t do anything rash that I would come to regret or worse, die from. I think he and the rest of my family did a great job!

So that’s the ideal, an empathetic and compassionate partner who guides you through a crisis without projecting their will on you. They help you objectively engage the world in your terms. So, in this regard, there is rarely a time when a partner should try to control your behavior.

Sadly, this isn’t the case in number of couples. Drawn to me are a lot of people who are in controlling relationships with partners who lack the awareness to objectively observe and control their own experience of the world. Given the dissonance these individuals experience between their understanding of the world and the objective reality of the world, and their inability to see that through effort they can alter their understanding, the only form of reconciliation they have is to force the world to conform to their world view. This is impossible given the size and interdependent nature of the world so they are only able to control a few things about their immediate world and most often it will be their partner and their children.

Controlling the actions of someone who loves you simply because you do not wish to put the effort into learning how to see the world objectively is immoral because it causes suffering and drastically inappropriate because it uses ones love again them. Because they love you, they give you the power to hurt them and because you have very little self awareness, you use this power to make them feel something unpleasant (hence the term toxic) that isn’t actually there.

The common scenario has the abuser (the immature control partner) feeling out of control when it comes to their partner’s actions or thoughts. Since they don’t want to put the effort into transcending their lack of understanding – or even put some time into considering that they may be able to adjust their understanding or that their understanding is based on something other than reality – they set about to create guilt within victim so they feel bad and motivated to change their actions.

Guilt is very effective only because of the compassionate love the victim feels towards the abuser. It doesn’t work with people who don’t care about them. Statements like “you are breaking up our family” or “I am going to kill myself” don’t have any impact on people who don’t care about you. But if you care about the person who says it, you are sure as hell going to feel something horrible. Toxic people are really good at making compassionate people feel badly about their benign actions.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about the cycle of abuse. There has been a shift in her thinking about a few people in her life recently and as the world changes, she is seeing things a lot more objectively. She’s seeing abuse were previously she saw herself as the cause of the actions of the abuser.

The theory isn’t entirely comprehensive but it does an effective job at describing a lot of abuse situations. There are 4 stages that those caught in abusive or conflict prone relationships will cycle through at various speeds:

1. Tension building phase – communication is starting to breakdown, the victim begins to modify their behavior in an effort to avoid triggering their partner to act abusively.
2. Acting-out phase – the abuser does or says something that hurts the victim physically or emotionally. It could be a punch in the face, the threat of violence or a manipulative technique. The goal of the abuser is to control the thoughts, emotions or actions of the victim.
3. Reconciliation or honeymoon phase – this marks the end of the abusive behavior and the start of the apologies. It is paradoxical in that the abuser is trying to control how the victim feels in order to restore the relationship back to *normal*. The abuser will often be extremely nice, apologetic and kind during this phase, or they can use psychological manipulation to win back or coerce the victim back into the relationship.
4. Calm phase – this is the phase between the acceptance of the reconciliation and the start of the tension building phase.

This isn’t entirely earth shattering, but it is a fairly good model for what happens in a number of abusive relationships.

The conversation moved towards the calm phase and how it never seemed to last very long. In fact, my friend had noticed two disturbing things about the temporal nature of the cycle.

The first is that over a period of a few years, she noticed that SHE never really entered into the calm phase or the honeymoon period either as she could never get past what had been said to her by someone who apparently loved her and she couldn’t understand how the abuser had put it behind them so quickly e.g. “how can he not still feel horrible about saying or doing that to me?”

The second was that the calm phase was getting shorter and shorter as she related her awareness of the cycle to her partner. He didn’t respond well to being made aware that the behavior was automatic, as he claimed to have no awareness that is was happening and objected to her suggestion that he was in control of his anger as it was clearly a response to something she was doing. The thing was, after the acting out phase, he always apologized and admitted that his behavior was out-of-line. She was able to circumvent the honeymoon portion and the calm phase and go directly to the tension building phase simply by letting him know which state they were in.

I’ve yet to meet someone who was caught in the cycle of abuse who was able to stop it; this isn’t to say that it can’t be stopped, just that I haven’t met an abuser who as objective enough to see the cycle for what it was and be willing to see and take on their role in putting an end to the pattern. Which does, sadly, make a lot of sense given that objectivity is needed and in partnerships of abuse, it is sadly lacking. I have met a lot of ex-abusers who are filled with remorse for throwing away relationships, children, friendship and a lot of good times because they didn’t see the cycle until it was too late.

In the end it works out though. They learn their lesson and take care of their next partner while their previous partner moves on to deal with the residue from being treated like a psychological punchbag for years.