by Thimo Meni ~
If you’ve never been through emotional abuse, you might look at the title of this article and scoff, “Oh come on. Of course there are scarier things. Like diseases, plane crashes, wars.”
Granted, emotional cruelty seems like an easier ordeal to survive than many other catastrophes. But if you have gone through it, you know that it can cause a frightful catastrophe indeed. That’s because usually it is intended to frighten, and aimed at wrecking your life. More on that part in a minute.
For now, let me mention that it’s because of the horror and emotional gore produced by abusive relationships that I chose Halloween as the day on which to begin writing for “Abuse and Violence,” Sass101.com’s new collection of articles about survivors’ experiences.
Sass101.com editor Katerina Lorenzatos Makris feels that terms like emotional abuse, emotional violence, emotional exploitation, and emotional terrorism can be used almost interchangeably, because what predatory people inflict on us can have many faces. It can be any of those, and more.
In this first article of my section of the collection, which I’m calling “Love Thy Abuser?” I hope to begin making the case for why emotional abuse can be just as spooky as a night in a graveyard, why emotional abusers can be just as malevolent as vampires, and why, speaking of those bloodsuckers, this Halloween season I’ve been warbling along endlessly with Olivia Rodrigo’s hauntingly beautiful and piercingly honest hit song “Vampire.”
You might be prey
Probably you have been a victim of at least some amount of emotional battery in your life. It’s so rampant that few completely avoid it. You may or may not have recognized what was happening. But if you’ve ever encountered someone who, with their words and/or actions, seemed to want to make you feel weak, helpless, worthless, stupid, or afraid, well, there it was.
You might be moseying along, enjoying what you think is a normal, reasonable conversation or relationship with someone, when suddenly they say something that is at best inappropriate, or at worst malicious. They can be a spouse, relative, friend, coworker, or anyone else in your life.
According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, “Emotional abuse includes non-physical behaviors that are meant to control, isolate, or frighten you. This may present in romantic relationships as threats, insults, constant monitoring, excessive jealousy, manipulation, humiliation, intimidation, dismissiveness, among others. Sometimes emotional abuse is more obvious, like a partner yelling at you or calling you names. Other times it can be more subtle, like your partner acting jealous of your friends or not wanting you to hang out with someone of another gender. While these emotionally abusive behaviors do not leave physical marks, they do hurt, disempower, and traumatize the partner who is experiencing the abuse.”
It can start subtly, with a mildly critical remark that at first you think you might have misinterpreted. You tell yourself you’re overreacting. The abuser might say as much to you too: “You got it all wrong.” Or they might try to pass it off as a joke. If you dare to protest that you didn’t find it funny, the whole thing becomes about you. How you take things too seriously. How you’re too sensitive. A snowflake. Or even a self-appointed martyr.
Their hunger to hurt
The malice might stay at a low, somewhat tolerable level for ages, depending on the abusers’ assessment of your acceptance, and on their own complex needs. (Yes, they do make such assessments of us. Whether they do it consciously or not is another question, but either way it’s creepy.) They sense that if they go too far you might end the relationship, which would leave them at least temporarily without a source for the type of nourishment they need.
Yet their hunger to hurt might compel them to hurt you harder, to some degree or other, until your level of pain is enough to properly feed them.
To me that’s the scariest abuse scheme–the measured drain. The pain can stay so low, for such an extended time, that you might not even be sure it’s happening, especially when it’s interspersed with happiness. Abusers can be quite skilled at knowing exactly how much candy to dole out to you, in between the poison, to keep you unsure.
Are their mean moments really all that mean, you ask yourself, since their nice ones are so very, very nice?
So maybe you don’t call it abuse. You call it “misunderstandings.” You call it “not getting along.” You call it a problem that needs to be “worked on.” Given enough time and dedication from you, it can be “fixed.”
Meanwhile the fangs remain firmly attached, sucking your life blood at the rate of a slow but steady drip.
The ‘mesmerizing, paralyzing f*****-up little thrill’
The candy you’re fed—their on-again, off-again loving kindness—is essentially laced with the neurotransmitter dopamine, also known as the “love drug.” That’s what gushes out of your midbrain’s enraptured striatum area during the nice moments, deliciously bathing your body and your psyche with wide-open bliss.
Simultaneously the poison—in the form of their criticism, unpredictable fits of rage, rejection, infidelity, sabotage of your career and life goals, or other controlling manipulations—doses you with toxic amounts of the stress hormone cortisol. That’s what your freaked-out adrenal glands frantically pump to keep you ready for “fight or flight.”
So some of the time you’re euphoric and dreamy, and the rest of the time crushed and jittery.
It’s what Rodrigo calls the “mesmerizing, paralyzing, f*****-up little thrill” in her song “Vampire.” Gosh, how I love that line. So accurate. And so therapeutic to hear I’m not the only one who has fallen prey.
As an emotional abuser’s target, you become exhausted by the dopamine vs. cortisol battle, combined with your mental struggle to make sense of the “vampire’s” bewildering behaviors.
Your life is in disarray. Your body is a mess. Your brain is a fog. Your heart is a jumble.
Their perfect prey
With enough time and severity, an astonishing metamorphosis occurs. You begin to feel you are no longer you. When you look in the mirror, there’s the you who the abuser has described time after time: incompetent, clumsy, dumb, ugly, too skinny, too fat, too quiet, too loud, too negative, too cheerful… whatever.
You are now their creation. You might have started out confident, energetic, optimistic, and ambitious. You might have had your life well-organized, and were moving forward with your dreams. Those are some of the reasons why they chose you. They craved the taste of breaking all those down. After devouring the smashed pieces, they have reshaped the bits that were left into their perfect prey.
No matter that the new you is only a figment of their twisted imagination. Once that figment transfers into your own head, the real you might as well be dead.
I can’t think of many things scarier than that.
Wishing you all a predator-free Halloween!
Please visit Sass101.com again soon for the next article in this series, and if you like our work, don’t forget to share the links.
Editor’s note: Sass101.com welcomes writer Thimo Meni’s “Love Thy Abuser?” series of articles to our collection of stories about survivors’ experiences with emotional abuse. The name “Thimo Meni” is a pseudonym that she has chosen so as to protect innocent bystanders from her honest accounts.
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