How Abusive People Wield Control by Fusing Mistreatment with Identity
What insights can be gained by looking at the world through the viewpoint of the oppressors?
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a cruel and oppressive human being. You want to deprive people of their autonomy. You want to make them docile and obedient.
How do you achieve that goal?
How do you establish a mechanism of control?
How do you prevent your victims from realizing they're being lied to and exploited?
There's actually a pretty simple mechanism you can put in place. I know it because I lived through it from the other side.
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My father was an abusive person who only cared about his own needs. In many ways, I pity him even now. He was so afraid of being left alone and unloved that he virtually guaranteed that would be his fate.
I suppose this is a tale as old as humanity. Jealousy rears its ugly head and compels people to destroy the things that matter most to them. It’s of no consequence that their motivation was to protect these things. The result is what counts.
When it comes to wielding control over the people in your life, you're talking about manipulation.
In a healthy relationship, there aren't any lies. In a manipulative relationship, there are justifications for an endless series of lies.
Lies are inevitable when you live with an abusive person. If not outright lies, you practice daily deceit, deception, and misdirection. Even when I was a very young child, I hid things from my father. When he told me what he expected of me, my instinctive response was, “Well, I’m not going to do that.”
In this way I was trained to be deceitful myself.
I expect this is one of the hardest elements of being in an abusive relationship. What inevitably happens is that deceit becomes fused with your identity. Over the course of time, you might wish to get away from your abuser, only to find you're stuck with them because nobody else can stand you.
The simple fact is that had my parents not gotten divorced, I might not have been able to shake free of this ideology. But when my father left, that set me on a new path.
Prior to that, I'd believed the lies he'd told about our family. He assured us that our life was perfect because he was the world's greatest patriarch and everything he said and did was the best possible action a person could take.
That was his brand.
We all had to be loyal to the family. We were lectured that our family was the best. We were warned it would result in endless misery to settle for anything less than the best.
We deserved the best.
Naturally, as a kid I lacked context. I wanted the best, but I didn’t know what that meant. So, I believed the lies my father told me. I believed them even as I kept secrets from him because I knew what made him terrifying or unreasonable.
The most challenging part was that it brought me joy to think of my family as the best. I took pride in that. Also, family abuses are mixed in with life abuses. So, when I was beset by other challenges in life, I drew comfort from my faith in my family.
That's how abused people are trained.
We're conditioned to always go running back to our abusers.
My father lectured how the rest of the world hated us. During car trips together, he'd stare forward and go through the list of grievances. He discussed the people that had mistreated him, he went into great detail about their flaws, then he stewed in rage.
These were bonding moments. I stewed in rage with him. I hated these people too.
He hated anyone more educated than he was. He hated people who wore fashionable clothing. He hated people who excelled at athletic events. He hated people that had somehow managed to best him in any undertaking.
You see, he was the best. Therefore, if somebody had managed to provide a fleeting impression of greater skill, they must be cheating.
When our family perceived anything that contradicted my father's personal brand, he sprung into action. The things we saw needed to be erased. He denied them. He made light of them. He engaged in criticism. He did anything he could to undermine reality.
“You didn’t see what you thought you did. You couldn’t have because I’m the best.”
As a kid, all I did was try to love him. Nobody had warned me about duplicitous people. I had to learn the hard way.
The foundation of my identity was my place in the family. We were the best. That meant other groups had to be bad. Those groups hated us. They refused to recognize our greatness. They resented us because of our greatness. They tried to deceive us and convince us we weren’t as good as we knew ourselves to be.
They told lies with the intent of weakening my relationship with my father.
“Your father is hurting you. He doesn't have your best interests at heart. He's stealing from you. He's manipulating you.”
“Ha! Well, at least he doesn't hate me like you do! You with all your lies! What's wrong with you? You claim to be tolerant, but where's your tolerance for my dad?”
Then my dad left the family.
He left, and it was as if a massive burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Right then I realized I didn't have to waste energy maintaining my conditioned justifications for all the things I instinctively knew were wrong.
I think about this a lot.
From my experience, I can tell you that it is possible to undergo an awakening. What I went through was close to a physical transformation.
One moment the lights were off.
The next moment the lights came on.
The lies had been removed and I was granted an unobstructed view of the truth.
But even so, it took me years to find my way. Even then I knew I had a long journey in front of me, but I also knew I'd been relieved of a great burden.
I'm not sure how many of the lies I'd been indoctrinated with evaporated in that first instant, but many still remained. From my birth, lies had been fused with my sense of self. Lies were fused with my model of how relationships should be. Lies formed the skeleton of how I believed a father should behave.
I slowly came to realize that there were many cases where I couldn't observe things through a clear and unmanipulated lens.
I had to sit down and polish the distortion from my worldview, and then I had to look at everything again. Furthermore, all the ideas and memories that were stored in my mind had been tainted. Those too I had to experience again. I had to reassess both the good and the bad, with the benefit of an enlightened perspective.
I'd been pressured into believing an external narrative about who I was. The time had come for me to settle on my own definition of identity.
I've been on this new path for about thirty years. Even now I'm still finding examples of how things I've long held to be true are, in reality, completely different than how I imagined them.
It takes work to reevaluate your experiences. It's much easier to fall into the passive response of assuming you've resolved a problem already. It's easier to run away rather than confront your questions and seek the answers.
My process is to write stories about my memories and then comb them for inconsistencies.
I have learned a lot.
I have a lot to learn.
This is why I write.
When I suffered a defeat growing up, I was never allowed to say, “Hey, great job! Can you teach me how to do better?” Saying those words equated to an admission that I wasn’t as perfect as I believed. Delusions of greatness make it impossible to be a good sportsman because you only recognize victory or cheating.
In the fullness of time, this attitude ensures everyone will surpass you.
Before my dad left, I’d already begun to compete with him. I’d already begun to beat him. Maybe the realization that he couldn’t maintain his illusion any longer is part of what drove him away.
People like my dad can only make friends with those they don’t see as a threat. Then they’re resentful of the accomplished individuals who don't want to share their company.
“Something is wrong with those uppity folks,” they lie to themselves. “Why are they excluding me? I guess they're intimidated.”
They drive everyone away and they die alone.
The trick to reversing this trend is simple.
You've got to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
You have to recognize you're not as great as you think you are. Your self-worth doesn’t have to be derived from your ability to exploit every person you meet.
Calling everything you do “great” doesn't stop you from being a loser.
Greatness isn’t derived from holding people down.
Greatness is measured by your ability to help lift others up.
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Thank you for all your words. I had to find my own way after getting out of the house and the controlling influence of my father and realizing who I am and being accepting of that. You have achieved much wisdom.
Very insightful! I haven't seen it in a while but reading this reminds me of the movie 🍿 "The Godfather". It's as if you lived in the house of a mob boss. Everyone got slapped around, called names and waited for the next Valentine's Day massacre. Maybe, he lived a secret life of a hit man, wanting to get promoted to the Boss! Honestly though, I was married to a brute who delighted in gangster movies. 🎥 I blame movies, boxing, football and card games,party folks... Playboy magazine, high-in liquor 🥃 and red meat 🍖.