Respond

Common Mistakes That Escalate emotional Abuse

It’s important to understand the motives and mindset of an emotional abuser. This will help you avoid making the following common mistakes that often contribute to more abuse.

Appeasement. Most victims try to placate an abuser to avoid or de-escalate conflict and anger. But this tactic only serves to empower your abuser, who will see it as weakness and an opportunity to exert more control. Pleading with them sends the same message.

Arguing. Verbal fights with an abuser will usually lead to more resentment on both sides. And arguing over the facts just wastes and drains your energy. Most abusers aren’t interested in the facts, but only in justifying their position and being right. As the anger escalates, so does abuse. Nothing is gained from it. You end up losing and feeling more victimized, hurt, and hopeless.

Complaining. Discussing the abusive behavior or event by complaining just forces the brain to re-live the negative emotional response. This often increases the influence of the episode without addressing or resolving the behavior. It allows the abuser to think you are weak because you really aren’t offering or demanding a solution to their toxic behavior.  Instead of helping you to move on from the incident, complaining often causes the negative feelings to bleed over into other areas of your life. 

Criticizing. Abusers are basically extremely insecure people. They often talk tough to hide how fragile they are inside and they are very sensitive to criticism. It is far more effective to simply be assertively communicate your needs and feelings. Criticizing can often provoke more anger, rage, bitterness and abusive behavior.

Defending. When your abuser wrongly blames, criticizes, or attacks you the last thing you want to do is defend yourself. Because this just leaves you open to more emotional abuse and sends the message to your abuser that they have the right to judge, approve and disapprove you.

Denial. Denying your abusers toxic behavior by excusing, minimizing, or rationalizing the abuse creates a trap you don’t want to fall into to. It most likely won’t go away or improve at some mystical time in the future. The longer it goes on and you allow it, the worse it will get, and the weaker you become.

Explaining. This behavior is often based on a desire to seek the abuser’s approval. However, the motive of the abuser is to have power over you. When you spend your time explaining yourself, you send the message that your abuser has power over your self-esteem.

Pleading. This really shows weakness, which Cluster B’s despise in themselves and others. Your abuser will probably react dismissively with contempt, disgust or even less respect. This just wreaks of desperation and will actually contribute to damaging your self-esteem.

Seeking understanding. This is a futile objective of victims who desperately want to be understood. They mistakenly believe or hope that the abuser is interested in understanding them, while the abuser is only interested in winning a conflict and having a superior position over you. Most abusers aren’t interested in the facts or your feelings, only in justifying their position, being right and maintaining control over you.

Self–Blame. It can be really damaging to blame yourself for your abuser’s actions or by trying harder to be perfect. You can never get there, especially in an abuser’s eyes. You can’t cause anyone to abuse you. You’re only responsible for your own behavior. You will never be perfect enough for an abuser to stop their behavior, which stems from their own insecurities, not you.

Threats. Making threats is not productive because it can lead to retaliation or backfire if you don’t carry them out. You absolutely should never make a threat you can’t or are not ready to enforce. Every boundary you set must come with a direct consequence to be effective.

Withdrawal. This is might seem like a good temporary tactic to collect your thoughts and emotions, and also allow you to get away from the conflict. And there’s nothing wrong with that if used on occasion. But if this is your primary go-to response, it really just becomes another form of avoidance and is really not an effective strategy to deal with abuse.