Abusers are
generally great at something called “manufacturing insecurity”. It
means, even if you’ve never been insecure about something, abuser will create
an insecurity about it, solely for the purpose of emotionally manipulating you.
Meaning, when you’re not doing, saying, or thinking what they want, they have a
go at your “insecurity”, triggering your pain, fear, guilt, shame,
everything they taught you to feel, as a way to teach you that this pain is
what you’re going to get if you fail to obey them.
It’s not exactly
hard to manufacture an insecurity (provided you are cruel and vicious), all you have to do is take a social norm and
convince a person they aren’t good enough in one or all departments. You
convince a person they’re too loud, too fat, too ugly, slow, naive, gullible, stupid, lazy,
selfish, sexual, provocative, demanding, and that this is the reason why they
will always fail, it’s a reason why they keep getting hurt, it’s a reason why
nobody will ever love or care for them. It’s utterly cruel, and an absolute
lie. Deviating from the “norm” in any way is not a reason of any of
those things, if you’re getting hurt it’s because people are hurting you, if
you’re unloved it’s because people around you refuse to show affection and
care. These things cannot be the individual’s fault, it’s always the
environment setting person up for pain. And abusers already know this. But they
make a step to convince a victim it’s all their fault, everything others do to
them, their fault. And even worse, that they deserved being hurt.
This kind of
nonsense blaming everything on unrelated trait of individual can lead to a
person getting terrified they could have somehow caused horrible things just by
being themselves, that it’s impossible to even predict what might happen to
them just because they’re “this way” or another. It creates an
atmosphere of panic and confusion, and they find themselves seeing no way
forward but to accept guidance from abuser. Abuser then pretends to know what
victim is to do in order to avoid pain and failure – of course, only up to the
point when abuser decides to inflict pain on purpose, to control and
manipulate.
You’re not stupid
if you fall for this kind of trap, it’s designed to work on people who are
self-aware, who work on getting themselves better, who are trying their
hardest. You don’t even have to lack confidence, abusers will take a confident
person and eat their confidence away. And once caught in this situation, it
might be hard to believe that someone would stoop that that kind of cruelty and
lie to you while knowing perfectly well that you are good, that there’s no
reason on earth to criticize your traits, that you have nothing to be ashamed
of. That you haven’t deserved any of it.
“if you’re getting hurt it’s because people are hurting you, if you’re unloved it’s because people around you refuse to show affection and care. These things cannot be the individual’s fault, it’s always the environment setting person up for pain. And abusers already know this. But they make a step to convince a victim it’s all their fault, everything others do to them, their fault. And even worse, that they deserved being hurt.”
“
You’re not stupid
if you fall for this kind of trap, it’s designed to work on people who are
self-aware, who work on getting themselves better, who are trying their
hardest. You don’t even have to lack confidence, abusers will take a confident
person and eat their confidence away. And once caught in this situation, it
might be hard to believe that someone would stoop that that kind of cruelty and
lie to you while knowing perfectly well that you are good, that there’s no
reason on earth to criticize your traits, that you have nothing to be ashamed
of. That you haven’t deserved any of it. “
Please, please be aware that there are people who do this from a place that they think of as LOVE! They have absolutely no idea that they are abusive!!! Please, please watch out for the symptoms and respond accordingly, but wow, it is so hard to do anything when the person is a relative who responds like this because of trauma they suffered in the past. Please, please be careful dear people. Sending so many hugs and best wishes.
here’s a hard pill to swallow: abuse does not just exclusively occur in romantic or family relationships. friends can be just as toxic to your physical and mental wellbeing as a partner or a family member. also, the aftermath of being in an abusive friendship can be just as traumatizing as any other abusive relationship. don’t boo me i’m right
for some reason people don’t know this but toxic friends can mirror all the same behaviors as seen in an abusive romantic partner. i will use my own story of my ex-high school best friend who abused me for several years. signs of abuse include but are not limited to:
Humiliating or embarrassing you – my ex-best friend LOVED to try and make me squirm in any way possible to see my reaction. once she went up to a guy and told him i had a crush on him to watch me struggle to explain myself
Unreasonable jealousy – if i so much as went to hang out with any of my other friends i would have to let my ex-best friend know beforehand. i pretty much had to get her permission to see other people or she would be convinced that i was ‘ditching her forever’
Refusing to communicate – if she was ever angry with me or upset she would never tell me that so we could talk about it. instead, she would ignore me or respond to all my texts with ‘k’ or ‘ya’ and i would have to struggle for hours to get her to tell me what was wrong
Ignoring or excluding you – she would ignore me for weeks at a time as a ‘punishment’ knowing that it would eat me up inside wondering what i did wrong. i still remember spending nights wide awake crying in bed because i didn’t know what to do
Mean jokes or constantly making fun of you – she would constantly poke fun at my appearance and personality to where my self-confidence plummeted. god help me if i ever said anything about her though
Saying things like “If you don’t _____, I will_____.” – she would constantly threaten to kill herself if i didn’t do what she wanted
Guilt trips – she never apologized once to me in our seven-plus years of being friends. not once. every time we argued i would be the one who apologized in the end. once when i stood up to her and called her out on treating me like crap she would make up a story of how her life was miserable and that i was making things worse
Isolating you from friends and family – been mentioned before but she was extremely jealous of all my other relationships and would override my plans with other people on purpose and would guilt trip me if i still went to see them
Domination and control – also mentioned before but i needed her permission on everything. if i joined any group or extracurricular activity without her knowing she would be furious
Extreme moodiness – after ignoring me for weeks she would contact me out of the blue and act as if nothing happened. she would also refuse to talk about why she ignored me for so long and did not care if my mental health suffered from it
anyway, abusive friendships need to be acknowledged more because they are not only extremely common but also very damaging to someone’s mental health. i personally had to go through years of therapy to unlearn the guilt and self-hatred that my ex-friend helped instill in me. stay safe yall
its not your fault that your abuser treats you like shit. normal fucking people dont respond to you not doing something the way they want with emotional or physical abuse. the normal response to someone not doing the dishes isn’t fucking abuse. abuse can make you feel like it’s your fault you’re abused, but remember, and its hard to keep this in mind, but it’s not normal. abuse is not the way nonabusers react with. abuse is not your fault, and it’s not normal.
the amount of
social stigma abused kids have to struggle with is just unreal. I’ve been
hearing it from day one that anyone who dares to be openly hurt
is only looking for attention.
I’ve been seeing
trauma victims stereotyped as oversensitive, needy, trouble and attention
seeking, accused of imagining things, and they’re always portrayed as a burden
on society and publicly shamed for whatever they’ve gone thru. Any kind of
pain or discomfort in children no matter how high, apparently needs to be dealt
with as a personal problem and should be kept well away from society who just
doesn’t wanna deal with such nonsense.
I’ve seen children
who tried to tell the society about abuse only to be shamed, punished and
humiliated because “they should have known better” and “they
should have taken it better” and “they should just get over
themselves”. Even the notion that their life matters and their pain means
something and that trauma is devastating their life is looked upon as them
being “immature” and “self centered”.
Thanks to all
this one big part of being abused and traumatized is the added guilt for
needing attention, for needing comfort and reassurance. Survivors are forced to
feel selfish and miserable for even considering that it should matter if
they’re in pain, that their struggle is important enough to talk about it out
loud. We’re told that we’re pathetic and stupid for even thinking we matter, not only by abusers, but by counselors, therapists, media, television, our peers and society at large. How are we supposed to fight it? How are we supposed to heal? How come there’s no path for us to walk on, and the world acts like it would be better if we didn’t exist? We never asked for this. And we don’t deserve it.
All of this, all of the stigma, shaming, apathy and hatred should fall on abusers. Not. Victims.
This is why victims and survivors are afraid to talk about their abuse. And then people ask them why they kept it a secret and didn’t talk about it sooner. It’s hard to know who is safe to talk to and who won’t judge or shame you. We need to be loving, not judging.
I just had this convo with some coworkers like… this is solid advice.
Especially necessary for women in long term relationships with men. Not only is it important to diversify your funds but you never ever want to be finacially tied up with a man
My ex stole two thirds of my monthly allotment and nearly half my back pay from the VA that we had invested in CDs when I left him after he threatened to kill me and my family. I called the bank to tell them that my money was missing and guess what?
It’s a joint account. Doesn’t matter who deposited it. It’s both your money.
Because I was foolish enough to believe this man was decent.
My sister had her entire account drained the day she informed her now ex-husband that she was leaving him on account of him beating her to a pulp in front of her children. He has been unemployed for most of their marriage. She worked so hard and succeeded in a mostly male field and in a flash, ALL of her money, gone.
My mom gave me about the same advice to sock money away just in case, after experience with my abusive biodad totally clearing her out.
This is way too common a thing, and it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Glad to see it come up.
Since my brain apparently just won’t let this go, a little more about that dig from my uncle that I talked around some a few days ago.
Relevant snippet from his message:
(Sounds pretty mild out of context, right? There’s plenty of not-so-nice context, however, and this is him trying hard to be pleasant dealing with me. Which actually makes it more exasperating, in a way.)
Almost the first thing my grandmother said, right in front of me, when my mother and I arrived at their house to move in after the split:
“I knew you were impossible to live with, but what did you do to make him leave?!”
(*proceed into histrionics with more insults along the same lines, until my grandfather yells at my mom some more for making her mother so upset*)
What my mother actually did, AFAICT: Get subjected to escalating abuse, run around on for years, and wiped out financially–and apparently feel like she had to put up with it until he left. But, she would also yell at him, and generally get baited into some iffy-looking responses in front of other people 😩
Why Bill wanted out, AFAICT: Whatever money they had was gone, the house was getting foreclosed on through his own doing, and he had a girlfriend set up to move in with.
I guess that is understandable, as to why he might be ready to leave. But, not in the way my uncle probably means.
How Bill handled it: Turned full-on “Divorce-Related Fetid Fathering Syndrome” stalker even though he was the one who left (with more details through the link; I don’t have the spoons to repeat right now). Link since the upload keeps choking when I try to add it properly: http://clatterbane.tumblr.com/post/53326481418/divorce-related-fetid-fathering-syndrome
See also: the last handful of reblogs here, which I decided to just bring back in case someone else might benefit. It was not a good situation at all.
By the time he took off, he was acting unhinged to the point that he had decided my grandfather and this uncle were both out to get him, AFAICT mostly because they were not accepting his bullshit. And he was threatening to kill them too, in front of me. In retrospect, it was probably lucky that he did take off rather than go on some kind of rampage.
They were not getting along very well at all, for years that I witnessed. I was there. And that was with people other than him trying to put on a good front and not make things harder on a kid who was stuck in the middle. I could still tell that they didn’t think much of his behavior, and no damned wonder. He started showing open contempt for people other than the Family Scapegoat. My uncle is hardly stupid. He noticed this and didn’t much like it.
Anyway, what my uncle said (and carefully left unsaid, knowing him) does not make any sense whatsoever outside the kind of terrible scapegoating family dynamics which produced “I knew you were impossible to live with, but what did you do to make him leave?!”
Everybody knows my mother was an impossible-to-live-with Crazy Bitch, and surely whatever bad behavior she wasn’t exaggerating/just making up she must have provoked in some way.
(Never mind the less slick abusive behavior you saw later, when Bill wasn’t even trying to get you on his side anymore. That can be safely edited out.)
That is also a neat setup if you’re behaving in abusive ways, and targeting said already scapegoated Crazy Bitch. Who basically married you to get out of a family situation like that in the first place.
Which is indeed kinda why I suspect she felt like she had to put up with abusive behavior in a marriage for that long.
Some unfortunately classic dynamics, yeah. Which I could only really start looking at more once I wasn’t buried in it all the time. And I was never the kind of family scapegoat she was, to bear the brunt.
It still makes me mad that my uncle is just continuing to echo this BS without any kind of critical thought. And that seems to extend to realizing he’s even doing it, as I commented more on before.
Not much is likely to change some behavior there. I realize this. I still have a right to get angry.
Including at that urge to minimize the whole earlier situation also kinda throwing me under the bus. As the other party in the middle most affected by some horrible behavior. That’s not even the main reason this went all over me the way it did, but it certainly didn’t help.
I’ve had more than enough of people trying to edit reality for others around them by now. That pisses me off Besides continuing to scapegoat a dead person, that’s probably what gets me the worst about this relatively small example of some fucked-up family dynamics.
One of the big pieces of relationship advice my mom had for me was to quietly stash some money away every pay period, just in case I might need it later. Especially ending up way more financially dependent than I ever wanted, because disability.
Not that she ever really accepted that part, but hey. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the earlier experience there helped her keep pushing to stay working when she was just in no shape to. Thoroughly fouling up her SSDI eligibility in the process. (Tip: If you’re too disabled to keep it up and might need SSDI? File as early as you feasibly can, and don’t keep stopping and starting jobs. That can mess up your work credits but good within the specified time period. My mother learned that the hard way.)
But, I can see why she might have wanted to avoid being that vulnerable to abuse in general again.
She had planned on going back to work after I was born, but decided not to once her leave was up with some encouragement. They were pretty financially stable without her income by then, and I suspect some unacknowledged disability stuff made it look more tempting.
To make a long story short: Some existing abusive behavior out of my biodad escalated, after a while she got shut totally out of the household finances that she had been managing up to that point (because culture), and he eventually started getting all important mail sent to a PO box instead of the house. Nothing suspicious there, right?
Yeah, he went through huge amounts of money nobody could quite tell where it even went–including a bunch he’d borrowed without telling her, and/or in her name. He apparently got tens of thousands in “emergency” funds off my grandparents alone within the last couple of years, and she knew nothing about it until after the divorce. (They were also hardly rich starting out.) Gambling? Coke, given the time period and just basically his personality? Doesn’t really matter. He went through all their money, plus who knows how much more, in just a few years time. And got more and more abusive acting.
The end result was that he finally got the house foreclosed on, and she left the marriage penniless and with a really unfavorable settlement because she just wanted away from my biodad’s terrible behavior. (Kinda classic in abusive relationships even without the rest, but yeah.)
Plus of course a 6-year gap in her work history and some extra layers of mental health problems.
I can understand why she wouldn’t have wanted to end up in that kind of position again. Still doesn’t make some of pressure put on me over the years right, though. Besides the ableist denial, a lot of this stuff was very victim blamey. Just makes it sadder that she did also apply most of that to herself. Not a great way to live.
At any rate, I haven’t been following the advice to stash away an emergency fund. I did start out doing that, but stopped after maybe a year–and that mini-hoard got spent on expenses. Call me stupid if you like. I probably would, if a personal emergency fund should ever start looking like a good idea. Probably would have noticed some signs of that by now, but I could always be wrong.
Every time Lori bought groceries with a check, she would write it for an extra $5 to $10 and pocket the difference. At home, when no one was watching, she would stash the money inside tampon applicators in her bathroom where she hoped her abusive husband would never look. Each time she collected $100, she took those bills to a bank in the next town and exchanged it for $100 bill so the money would be easier to hide. After two years, she saved the $2,600 needed to hire an attorney and file for divorce.
“That was the longest two years of my life,” says Lori. “I lived in fear that he would kill me.”
Her instincts were right. After Lori filed for a divorce, her husband showed up at their shared home with a gun and plans to kill her, their six children, and then himself. Lori and the children weren’t home and, because of his actions, Lori was able to get an emergency personal protection order keeping her soon-to-be ex-husband away from her, her children, and their home.
That was almost 13 years ago. After leaving her husband, Lori worked two jobs, as a secretary and waitress, and eventually went back to school, earning a master’s degree in social work from the University of Michigan.
Lori, now 51, was a victim of financial abuse. She had no access to her family’s bank account or credit cards, her husband forbid her to work outside the home, and when she wanted to spend money, she needed to ask his permission. Lori tried to leave him several times, but she always went back because she couldn’t provide for herself and her six children independently.
Her story isn’t unusual. One in four U.S. women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, according to the Center for Disease Control, and 99 percent of those victims will also experience financial abuse, according to the Center for Financial Security.
“Many people don’t recognize financial abuse right away, in part, because of historic gender roles,” says Sarah Gonzalez Bocinski, director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s Economic Security for Survivors Project.
According to Bocinski, there are relatively clear ways to identify victims of abuse.
“These are very planned, deliberate acts that abusers do to limit victims and prevent them from breaking free,” says Bocinski.
One of the most common ways abusers control their victims is to build up debt in their name, without telling them, she says, because once you have large amounts of debt in your name or a low credit score, it can be difficult to rent an apartment and, in some cases, even get a job.
The ramifications of excessive debt and a low credit score can last longer than the effects of physical violence, says Dr. Judy Postmus, associate professor director of the Center on Violence Against Women and Children at Rutgers University. If your spouse knows your social security number and your mother’s maiden name, they can easily open up credit cards, a line of credit, or even a business in your name without you knowing about it.
“If someone is racking up debt in your name, when you get a divorce that debt is split 50-50,” she says. This is true even if you don’t know about the debt.
Leaving an abusive relationship is a real challenge for victims of financial abuse, says Katie Ray-Jones, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline. When a woman reports financial abuse, it’s difficult to get the police involved, she says. There is no way for the victim to prove she didn’t open that credit card, or that isn’t her signature, or that her spouse wiped out the bank account.
And, because there aren’t any laws that focus on preventing financial abuse of an intimate partner, the topic hasn’t gained the attention of researchers, says Postmus. Most of what is known about financial abuse comes from survivor’s stories, not from large-scale national research, she adds.
Ray-Jones adds that many abuse victims report that their partners feel threatened and become more abusive when the victim begins to earn more money or gets promoted at work. In fact, victims have told her about opening a separate bank account when they get a raise and asking their employer to divert that money to a secret account. Victims have also asked their boss not to give them a raise. But there is no national research to show how widespread these tactics are or whether the violence increases as the victim gains more economic independence.
Several studies offer anecdotal evidence that abuse may increase as victims try to improve their economic status or employment prospects. For instance, a June 2016 study by Partners for a Competitive Workforce finds that intimidation and intimate partner violence can discourage enrollment and participation in education and training programs. Similarly, a National Resource Center on Domestic Violence study found that domestic violence typically escalates when a survivor enrolls in education or training.
However, Postmus says another theory is the abuse may decrease as the victim’s income goes up because the partner doesn’t want to lose the extra income. “The problem is we just don’t know,” she says.
“We often hear from women that finances are a way for partners to control, manipulate, coerce, and intimidate them,” says Ray-Jones. “A lot of women don’t leave the relationship because they fear being able to financially take care of their children.”
Both Postmus and Ray-Jones credit The Allstate Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Allstate Insurance Company, with bringing awareness to financial abuse 10 years ago with its Purple Purse program, aimed at helping financial abuse and domestic violence victims. A cornerstone of the program is an online financial curriculum,Moving Ahead Through Financial Management, which was developed specifically to help financial abuse victims leave their abusers, get out of debt, and restore their credit rating. To date, about 800,000 people have completed the course, which is available in English and Spanish.
In 2014, Allstate asked Rutgers University to conduct a study of 457 survivors who had completed the curriculum to validate the program was helping survivors, says Vicky Dinges, Allstate senior vice president of corporate relations. After completing the course, 90 percent learned to create a budget and 72 percent understood how to improve their credit rating, compared to 20 percent precurriculum. There was also an 18 percent increase in the number of survivors using a bank account after completing the course.
“It was important for us to know the curriculum was valuable for survivors,” Dinges says. “We wanted to work on a solution, not just put a Band-Aid on the problem.” The course encourages victims to take small steps towards leaving their abuser:
Postmus and Ray-Jones both agree more needs to be done to study the long-terms effects of financial abuse. For now, Ray-Jones says her organization shares anecdotal evidence with Congress, but that hasn’t been sufficient to get Congress to create laws against the financial abuse of an intimate partner.
Ideally, says Postmus, there should be a law that protects intimate partners from financial abuse. Last year, England changed its domestic violence and abuse law to recognize financial abuse, she says. Abusers in the United States should be held responsible for causing someone to jeopardize their financial status, says Postmus. As of now, one in four women is still a victim of intimate partner violence, which is more than the number of women diagnosed with breast, ovarian, and lung cancer combined.
My biodad did try to hit my mom once, a couple of months after they got married. They were arguing about something, and he swung at her. That was in the kitchen, so she pretty much reflexively picked up the closest thing: a big heavy stoneware mixing bowl. And broke it over his head.
She was also a good bit bigger than he was (as he kept getting nasty about), and she knew how to fight. He was afraid to try anything like that again.
He was also physically afraid of pretty much her whole family, for the same reasons. They just wouldn’t tolerate that shit, and he wasn’t a very popular guy after a while anyway, with the ways he would talk to people.
They stayed married for about 12 more years after that incident, until I was 6.
That didn’t mean that he wasn’t still abusive. He just had to get less blatant and sneakier with it…and save the physical abuse for people he thought he could get away with hitting.
(I didn’t get it until after the divorce, when she and other relatives who would have disapproved weren’t around. My stepbrother got a lot worse, on a regular basis, as a much safer target. I witnessed more bad stuff than I personally got there. The emotional abuse was still the huge problem. Probably for J. too.)
And that definitely doesn’t mean that the person can’t be dangerous, as discussed in one of the first links (here). They might actually be more dangerous, in a sneaky and more likely to get away with it sort of style.
In that particular case, he didn’t grow up in a household where any of that abusive behavior was treated as remotely acceptable. And his own family were shocked when they found out he was treating people that way. He still managed to pick it up somewhere. 😐
But yeah, it can be harder to recognize mainly verbal and other emotional abuse as Real Abuse. It’s a lot more obvious when somebody is beating on people they’re supposed to care about.
I also grew up hearing a lot of endorsement of the classic Iron Skillet Method of dealing with abusers. Not only does that often flip over into victim blaming, it doesn’t even necessarily work. Even if the person is afraid to lay a hand on you after that.
I really do wish it were that simple sometimes, to get abusive patterns of behavior stopped. It really isn’t.
You can bet I also learned to fight, and not to tolerate any attempts at physical violence. That doesn’t really help if you’re dealing with other types of abuse or predatory behavior.
Growing up in an abusive household is a fucking trip dude……If you’ve never had someone angrily wash a dish at you or fold a sock in your direction then how are you gonna understand why I get nervous when you quietly do the laundry, or why I ask “are you mad at me?” when you set the bag of groceries down too hard? It’s a totally different way of living and it impacts you long after you’ve left the situation.
This is so important.
Abused kids speak a language you can’t learn
I think a lot of people misinterpret this post to mean that folding a sock angrily at you is abusive, and that’s not what it means at all. The fear abused kids feel at this kind of behavior is a conditioned response because we know what comes after. Its about sitting there terrified and waiting for when they will snap.
This is actually a symptom of PTSD, which is more common among child abuse victims than modern veterans
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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