abuse – callanswall

Abusers don’t necessarily wake up in the morning and say “I want to destroy my family’s sense of safety and worth.” They see themselves as beleaguered heroes. “Things would be fine if you would just do everything I tell you to do and completely anticipate my moods. You know how I get when you’re like that.” Abusers are also experts in manipulating people and provoking people into yelling at them, which creates the situation that makes them feel justified in using force and creates a false sense of “Well, nobody’s blameless here, it’s both of our faults.”You can love someone who is abusive, who engages in abusive behaviors. You can really and truly love them. You can search their behavior and yours for proof of how you handled it badly and how it is really a little bit your fault, and “take responsibility” and “apologize” but it doesn’t change what is happening.The part where you don’t want to apologize but feel like you have to in order to keep a roof over your head and stay in school? That’s part of the cycle, right on schedule.

via CaptainAwkward.com Question #169: My Dad Hit Me (via optais-amme)

prospitianescapee:

prospitianescapee:

For several years now I’ve followed blogs about narcissists and other abusers, written by victims of abuse. They’re powerful tools for recovery, and powerful testimonials to the impact of emotional abusers on other people’s lives. What’s been missing is the abusers’ perspective on the abuse. The narcissists I see online don’t write about their relationships with their children and close friends; they hardly write about their own partners, except as props in the narcissist’s ongoing drama. I assumed that there was no way to get the abusers’ side of the story, that abusers are smart enough to not incriminate themselves in their own blogs, and like hell would they get together with other abusers to discuss abuse.

I was wrong.

The keywords to find abusers’ support communities are “estranged parents” and “grandparents’ rights.”

This part from a few pages in was kind of my manual for figuring out when a criminal defense client was guilty:

Many members truly can’t remember what their children said. Anything tinged with negative emotion, anything that makes them feel bad about themselves, shocks them so deeply that they block it out. They really can’t remember anything but screaming. This emotional amnesia shapes their entire lives, pushing them to associate only with people who won’t criticize them, training their families to shelter them from blows so thoroughly that the softest protest feels like a fist to the face.

But it runs even deeper than that. Posts in estranged parents’ forums are vague. Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don’t recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, give entire text exchanges; they paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage. Nor do the other members press them for more information.

Compare this with the forums for adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut-and-paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text conversations. They recreate scenes in detail, and if the details don’t add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member’s paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence, or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history.

The difference isn’t a matter of style, it’s a split between two ways of perceiving the world. In one worldview, emotion is king. Details exist to support emotion. If a member gives one set of details to describe how angry she is about a past event, and a few days later gives a contradictory set of details to describe how sad she is about the same event, both versions are legitimate because both emotions are legitimate.

Down the Rabbit Hole: The world of estranged parents’ forums | Issendai.com