Throwing Parties and Other Pick Me Dances

Not sure about Vaknin’s arguments but I agree brainwashing is the core of chronic abuse from the most petty forms to the most gruesome. One DV expert called the process “perspecticide.”
And I think the key ingredient in committing perspecticide against victims the better to take power over them is fear.

Auschwitz survivor and historian Primo Levi summed it up when he wrote about how moral compasses stutter the closer one gets to the “North Pole” of terror and horror. He also described how those most likely to survive the camps tended to be political prisoners who arrived with enough “political and philosophical armature” not to be driven into total confusion and despair by the Nazis’ campaign to drive victims into what Levi dubbed the “gray zone” of total demoralization and despair. Being able to recognize the tactics obviously didn’t stop bullets but apparently helped with psychic resistance.

Not to flout Godwin’s law but you learn a lot studying worst cases and logical extremes. I’ve become very interested in exactly how even petty domestic abusers manage to blind and bind their victims with psychological fear because I suspect fearmongering is the real trigger of learned helplessness which could also be called “learned hopelessness.” Focusing only on the “reward” aspect of operant conditioning tends to paint victims as pathetically needy weaklings whose fears are all a bit silly and garden variety. It’s a view that helps blamey bystanders pretend to themselves they’d never be that susceptible or stupid. It’s also an easy mistake to make in cases of abuse that haven’t (yet) become overtly violent, especially if the victims themselves aren’t totally clear on how the state of terror was induced. This is why I’m glad that the coercive control legislation movement is starting to get much more surgical in identifying methods of inducing psychological terror, which most survivors see as the most debilitating aspect of abuse even beyond assault. That movement might end up identifying the master list of tactics.

Like the “gray zone,” I think fear-mongering in abuse is partly about brainwashing in order to impart cynicism: whittling away at victims’ faith that human decency exists (even in themselves) to the point that victims gradually start to feel unsafe in the world, leaving the abuser as the only hope for future support or for any future at all. This protection racket dynamic is arguably what sets people up for irrational hopium huffing. The drug analogy is apt because people who aren’t already in pain and suffering chronic anxiety aren’t going to be that attracted to “narcotizing” things.

An abuser is an abuser is an abuser. They all fall on the same continuum, from the ones who never have to take their hands out of their pockets to wreck lives to the ones who kill. I think you’ll immediately recognize a pattern if you read this paper. Click download for a free read. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/2/46

God, it’s amazing how these assholes project in such a psychotic, deluded way and yet might still manage to basically function in life and even convince most people that they’re not nutjobs. I think it’s because the syndrome isn’t really so much mental illness as “criminally disordered.” There’s a big difference. Actually mentally ill people don’t have the wherewithal to manipulate on the level that abusers do nor engage in such elaborate ruses to shift blame and avoid consequences. The latter defines criminality. It reminds me of what one DV expert wrote: “Not all criminals are batterers but all batterers are criminals.”

I think your ex *needed* to cast you as his abusive dad in order to justify what he did to you all along. In an article about mother-enmeshed men (aka, victims of emotional incest), there was an argument about how these types always try to turn every partner into their mothers even if, in choosing their partners, they initially tried to steer clear of the “toxic mommy model.” The takeaway is that abusers have some kind of deep, creepy need to project their own childhood abusers onto their victims, like creating an effigy just so they can set it on fire over and over again. But though these people are originally forged by trauma, they’re not actually “survivors”– more like zombies or poltergeists who haunt the living by endlessly reenacting what was originally done to them to make them so fucked up.

What can be incredibly bamboozling about this type of person is that they may genuinely appear sympathetic at first on a level that would fool an FBI profiler, not only regular Joes and Janes. If they even admit to their requisite former traumas (many don’t. Some lie in order to cover up for the former abuser whom they emulate or to avoid waving red flags in front of potential prey), they may appear to have learned greater empathy from the experience, as if they could never abuse because they know what it’s like to be victimized. But their inner “victim self” is a bit like the light from a long dead star reaching earth after a million years. It seems “real” to the extent that it once was real. But that part of them is just a husk or a figment– it doesn’t really exist anymore and doesn’t mean they’re capable of actual empathy, at least not when it doesn’t serve them.

Something else that tends to fool people is that abusive personalities will trot out this husk of their former “victim selves” a bit like how a violent gang of thieves will throw a child into the middle of a darkened highway so that drivers will stop their cars. But the point is the same: simply to use a pity trap the better to blindside.

It’s very easy to get sucked in by this type but hell to get out. You should be as kind to yourself as someone who was a victim of violence even if this walking abortion you were partnered with never lifted a finger because most battered women cite the psychological torture and coercion aspects of battering as more devastating than the violence itself.

And none of it’s your fault. Contrary to all the usual codependency nonsense (please read Susan Faludi’s Backlash. Oldie but goodie), you didn’t “manifest” abuse nor draw it to yourself on dysfunctional voodoo tractor beams any more than people “manifest” covid to infect their cells because they “secretly wanted to be sick.” Sure there are things we can do to lower or raise risk but, let’s be honest, it’s an effing virus and it specializes in destroying its host.

If you still feel haunted by the idea that you were singled out as a target or are taking a lot of time to heal because of some personal flaw, bear in mind that DV expert Lenore Walker observed that most abused women had higher than average pre-abuse self esteem (which is then of course lowered by abuse) suggesting that many abusers actually seek out “big game” or “challenging prey.” Like vampires, they may simply be drawn to the healthiest necks. No one knows whether it’s about bagging a shinier trophy for the bragging rights or because batterers dementedly think a healthy person might make them healthy through osmosis or “inspire” them to be better people. Maybe it’s all the above.

In other words, it may be in your nature to shine but, on a gut level, you may now be afraid to because you were targeted for it– a bit like a Porsche driver who experienced a carjacking might end up driving an old Dodge to avoid trouble. Just consider how every country needs a department of defense, especially if that country is rich in resources and constantly being invaded for oil and minerals. The more you polish up your defense mechanisms– whether it’s studying psych to identify red flags and dangerous traits or taking a self defense course, gathering strong allies and friends who understand all of the above and will have your back if you’re ever in trouble– the safer you will feel and the more you’ll be able to reclaim yourself again.

I heard a psychologist arguing that, contrary to the usual view that DV victims go from relationship to relationship, it’s actually batterers who do this. And that, every time, these abusers tell themselves that the next target will never “provoke” or “make” the abuser abuse like the last ones did. I think it’s a natural result of abusers’ victim-blaming “neutralization” tendencies where they convince themselves that they were only abusive because the victims were bad people.

It’s like every abuser assumes the next target is Cindy Lou-Who who will inspire the expansion of their shrunken Grinchy hearts.