An emotionally abusive person doesn’t just diss you or call you names. An emotionally abusive person is much more subtle and has three specific ways that make you feel bad in return for feeling powerful and good. It’s important to have their back story to understand what made them into abusers, what the reward is for them, and why some people put up with it.
That said, this article is not an excuse for emotional abuse or a criticism of those who endure it, but rather AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE DYNAMICS BETWEEN THE TWO.
An Emotionally Abusive Person Attempts to Cover Up a Lack of Self-Worth by Unloading it on the Recipient Who Takes on the Badness and Shame
An emotionally abusive person hates themselves, probably because they were made to feel hateful in their childhoods, just like Raphael a 35-year-old documentary film producer. He grew up with a father who always found fault with him and his achievements, never praised him and made his mother the butt of all his angst. She took it, lived in a depressed state, and failed to nurture Raphael. He had no chance to feel good about himself, and took on the badness his father threw at him and that his mother didn’t detoxify or oppose. Above all he was primed to expect others to see his badness, threatened by loved ones who have the power to destroy him.
Fearful that he was going to be shown up, criticized, evaluated, judged, excluded, demoted, made to feel inadequate or incompetent, his defenses ramped up several hundred percent in order to protect his fragile sense of self. The best way to do that was to attack – by inserting all his bad feelings of inadequacy and unattractiveness into Sita, his 36-year-old wife, whom he met when she was a makeup artist in the entertainment industry – who then became the abused. And she bought it, because she wanted so badly to be seen as good and kind and unselfish that she hung on his every word.
An Emotionally Abusive Person is immersed in Insecurity and Feelings of Persecution
Raphael was emotionally neglected and abused as a child, living in an unstable and insecure world. Insecurity makes it hard to trust, form safe relationships and believe in them. He had to survive by trying to manage the badness he was made to feel. The only way he could do it was to insert it into another person who was vulnerable and could be impacted so that he could feel lighter and more acceptable to himself.
Raphael believed that everyone was out to get him – to make him feel bad, and he learned to compensate by using a pre-emptive strike – shove the bad stuff into them before they do it to you. Unfortunately that turned him into an emotionally abusive person.
An Emotionally Abusive Person Longs to Feel Special and Preserve it
Raphael had always been short with Sita, but made up for it by making her feel special when he went all in to spoil her and show her off to his friends and colleagues. Sita tried and failed to stand up to Raphael’s attempts to diminish and devalue her when he didn’t want to engage and account for his behavior. Each time she was squashed by his curt and dehumanizing words, she felt disempowered and would withdraw – making herself the ‘small’ person that Raphael had described. He behaved like an emotionally abusive person and she acted as a wounded person needing to protect herself from further abuse.
Sita was seduced by Raphael’s attempts to make her feel special. He was good at it. He knew exactly what he would have wanted to make him feel special and he made sure he gave Sita the full works. He got vicarious pleasure out of it, but for Sita is was a transcendent experience. During her childhood she was the ignored sibling. All the attention was on her younger brother who was hemophiliac, wrapped in emotional cotton wool. Sita got used to being the receptacle for her parent’s frustration and absorbed it quietly to earn her place in the family.
Sita and Raphael were the perfect match. Raphael imbued her with the specialness he longed wished for. She bloomed, reflected it back at him so he could feel it too, until it faded. Raphael would then be left with his bad feelings and evacuate them into her, turning himself into an emotionally abusive person. When he felt clean and better, he started the cycle all over again, using the temporary good feelings (once all the bad stuff had been thrown out) to make Sita feel special, bathing in the reflection until it wore off and the cycle started again.
The Three D’s of an Emotionally Abusive Person
1. Denial
An emotionally abusive person’s first order of priority is to protect themselves from any hint of being ‘bad.’ So, in Raphael’s case, when Sita reserved a table at a new restaurant that he had been wanting to try, he denied that he had ever spoke about it, talking to Sita as if she was crazy and inattentive because she wasn’t in tune with him. Raphael became an emotionally abusive person in this instant by using denial as a means of feeling strong and impenetrable. Denial is a powerful way of Raphael escaping his own past wishes like going to the restaurant, and his current wish to feel unneedy. By turning on the emotionally abusive person inside him, screens off his past which is either embarrassing or makes him feel vulnerable to becoming dependent on Sita to make him happy.
2. Deflection
Whenever Raphael felt cornered, accused or blamed, he immediately went into his emotionally abusive person mode by deflecting the blame onto Sita. If Sita told him that he hadn’t locked the car when they were at a parking lot, he said, “You forgot to remind me. Why didn’t you do it? Remeber when you left the window open in our house letting in a ton of bugs?”
This is the perfect deflection of an emotionally abusive person, again in the pursuit of avoiding the shame of owning up to mistakes. An emotionally abusive person has no idea how they hurt others, just as Raphael was clueless as to how humiliated and demeaned Sita felt when he turned the blame and shame on her because she would swallow it and save him from having to deal with the destruction of his self-esteem. And, when Sita told him later that she felt hurt and wasn’t inclined to try to engage with him, Raphael denied that he had said or did anything to hurt her, and that it was her problem if she was hurt – nothing to do with him – deflection. This is the pattern of denial- deflection-denial deflection.
Raphael was an emotionally abusive person when he was in survival mode. Sita became an enemy if she showed him the mirror of how he acted and it’s impact on her. He disowned that part of him and made Sita into the bad one for trying to make him feel bad!
3. Delay
Sita often tried to talk through issues with Raphael so that they would make joint inclusive decisions, but invariably Raphael would say, “not now,” or “I don’t have time,” or “I’m too tired.” Sita felt snubbed, pushed aside, a nuisance and or devalued. But later, when Raphael would bring up the same subjects and accuse her of not addressing it, he put his costume of an emotionally abusive person back on, and tried to make it her fault – gaslighting her.
Using delaying tactics provided Raphael the necessary space to NOT have to face the fact that he needed to be responsible and take the consequences of participating in decision making. The emotionally abusive person inside him sacrificed Sita’s wish to work with him on their life plans, making her feel like she was the one creating tensions, that she was the one at fault – the classic emotional abuse strategy.
The Emotionally Abusive Person Chooses Victimhood Rather than Self-Empowerment
Raphael was a victim of his father’s abuse and his mother’s neglect. He learned both how to be an abuser to feel powerful and kill of the fear of inadequacy from his father, and the sense of being wronged and persecuted from his mother. He became a champion victim when he made Sita feel that everything was her fault and he was the innocent wronged party.
He became a champion abuser when he demeaned and devalued her. What he chose not to do was to get the care, nurturing and faith in him that he needed from a parental alternate – a good therapist who could undo the traumas and give him space to develop a sense of self that he could live happily with. Individual therapy that re-parents him so he can find his authentic self would remove the persecutory fears and fill him up with good feelings – making it unnecessary for him to throw out bad feelings in an abusive way.
Sita too would benefit from Intimacy counseling to build up relational muscle so that she doesn’t have to play second fiddle to Raphael (just as she did with her brother) and abide the emotional abuse just to stay a member of the family. She wouldn’t need to go through these upswings of being made to feel special (a false sense of it because it was brief) and downswings of paying the price of absorbing emotional abuse.
Copyright, Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D. 2023
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