Recognize

The Cycles of Emotional Abuse

Therapists and abuse counselors will often talk about abuse as something that happens within a clearly defined cycle of building tension, the act of abuse, reconciliation and a calm period. And while many treatment professionals and advocates still refer to it, the pattern isn’t as distinct when it comes to the area of emotional abuse. While the cycle is true in a larger sense, there are many deviating patterns that can vary the cycle somewhat. And if you’ve experienced abuse, you might find that it doesn’t feel totally accurate.

Before we take a look at those differences, lets take a closer look at the four-part cycle to illustrate the most common pattern of abusive behavior in relationships.

1. Building Tension

Most emotional abusers act out in response to external stressors such as relational stress, family issues, trouble at work, physical illness, fatigue. The frustration and dissatisfaction they start to feel intensifies over time, often prompting feelings of powerlessness, injustice, anger, and paranoia and victimization. You as the abused spouse or partner will probably sense the simmering tension, and you might try to find ways to placate your abusive partner and prevent the abuse from happening.

You may start to feel anxious, guarded, and on hyperalert to their needs, mood and potential for their next outburst. This is often referred to as walking on eggshells or pins and needles. You alternate between tiptoeing around them, trying not to set them off, and making an extra effort to provide the physical and emotional support you think they might need in order to prevent or delay what’s coming.

2. The Incident of Abuse

The abuser eventually releases their tension on you, attempting to regain power by establishing control over you. The abuse may include anger, yelling, accusations, insults, name-calling, threats, warnings, lies, glaring and other forms of emotional manipulation, often ending in giving you the silent treatment. They will often try to blame you for their anger, outlandish behavior and all of their relationship problems.

It’s important to remember though, that while the tension may explain their abuse, it never excuses it. And even if under extreme circumstances, your abuser could make a case of being provoked by something you said or did, it still wouldn’t justify their abuse or make you responsible for it. That’s because normal functioning people experience stress in their lives every day and they don’t turn their anger and frustration out against other human beings.

3. The Reconciliation Period

After the incident of abuse, the tension normally begins to fade gradually. In an attempt to move past the abuse, the abuser may use kindness, gifts, and loving gestures to usher in a “honeymoon” stage. This devoted behavior can often make you feel even more closely bonded to your abuser and helps lead you to believe that you might have your “real” relationship back.

On the other hand, many emotional abusers will just move on from the abusive incident as if it didn’t happen. Or they might downplay it as having been no big deal, or less severe than what it actually was to you. They will also often accuse you of being too sensitive or making it out to be more than it really was. The really cruel abusers will often mock their abusers for acting hurt and not being strong enough to take it. That’s what mine was often like.

4. Calm

To maintain peace and harmony again, both partners generally come up with some sort of explanation or justification for the abuse in their own minds. And usually those internal, mindful explanations are drastically different from each other. Even if they don’t accept responsibility for their behavior, some abusers will promise you it won’t happen again or seem more responsive and attuned to your needs than usual. They may even try to seduce you and act especially nice which helps you accept their excuses, and possibly even doubt your memory of the abusive incident.

This momentary reprieve or “lull” will often offer some relief from the physical and emotional tension and pain you normally feel. It may serve to reaffirm why you fell in love with them in the first place. And you will think to yourself, if we can just get beyond a week with no flare-ups, then we might have a chance to gain momentum and rebuild the marriage. And then you start to notice the little warning signs and the tension starts to build again. Rinse and repeat.

This “cycle” happens over and over within abusive relationships, though. The length of time between each repetition can vary. It often shortens over time as the abuse escalates. In my almost four-year relationship with my abuser, we rarely could go longer than a week without a major abusive episode and often they would happen for a number of days in a row, multiple times per day, until her anger and energy was finally spent and the tension started to dissipate.

Often, instead of a period of calm, there would just be periods of “lesser” or declining outbursts following a major one, and periods of increasing ones before the next. It really did vary that much depending on her triggers, state of depression, insecurities and personal stress levels. As time goes on, the calm period may become very short or even disappear from the cycle entirely. It got to the point where I would just think to myself “There she goes again.”

Although abuse often does happen in a cycle or within a larger pattern, it doesn’t happen in the same way all the time, even in the same relationship. Every emotionally abusive relationship is unique, and the different experiences told by survivors (both male and female) point to the fact that even the warning signs will look different in each relationship.

Making matters worse for men unfortunately, is that we have grown up in a society that makes men often think that abuse by a woman doesn’t exist or is even possible. Therefore, we men aren’t even looking for the warning signs until we have been pummeled for months or years on end until they ingrained in our minds, sending off alarm bells for the next episode.

The idea that emotional abuse always happens in cycles also makes it easer to encounter doubt or even dismissal by untrained friends, family members or inexperienced counselors. You might hear comments like:

·        “Couldn’t you tell that she was about to go off the cliff again?

·        “You had to have known it would happen again soon.”

·        “He/she wouldn’t have gotten so jealous and angry if you hadn’t gone out.”

·        “You should have left as soon as they calmed down.”

·        “Why did you go back, if you knew they always repeated their cycle?”

The other major problem with the standard cycle of abuse model is that with emotional abuse one can experience abuse during all phases of the cycle. This is because emotional abuse is often cleverly disguised in passive threats, milder forms of humiliation and cut-downs, lack of intimacy, silent treatment, scowling and glaring looks, or complete indifference to your existence. And all of these forms of behavior can still hurt and cause a lot of harm.