The Emotionally Abusive Relationship_How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing

by Beverly Engel

  Since you probably know your pattern, be on guard when you meet your type. If you become enormously attracted to someone right away, beware! This person is probably a replica of your original abuser. If you feel as though you've known someone all your life, it may be because you have!

  Have Equal Relationships

  Another important way of preventing future abuse is to make sure you have equal relationships. An equal relationship is one in which each is seen as an equal in the other's eyes. Victims of emotional abuse tend to choose partners who they consider to be more powerful, more accomplished, more intelligent, and so on. Those who tend to become abusive, on the other hand, tend to choose partners who they view as less powerful, less accomplished, less intelligent, and so on.

  When you enter a relationship with someone to whom you feel "less than," you essentially give away your power to that person, which sets the tone for the entire relationship. You'll tend to bend over backwards to please him, to give in to him, to keep quiet when you should speak up, to tolerate unacceptable behavior, or to generally allow him to control the relationship.

  If you become involved with someone who perceives himself or herself as being more powerful or better than you, she will take advantage by pushing limits, taking you for granted, or trying to dominate you.

  If, on the other hand, you are the one who tends to become involved with those who have less power than you, or who you perceive as being "less than" you, you are making a clear statement that you are unwilling to have an equal relationship or that you are afraid to be involved with someone who is your equal. You are making it clear that you need to be the one who is the dominant one in the relationship and that you intend to control the relationship and your partner. This is a clear setup for abuse.

  In order to break your pattern-whether it be to choose someone who has more personal power or less-you will need to aim for relationships in which both you and your partner view each other as equals. This doesn't mean you are equal in all respects, but that overall, your strengths and qualities balance each other out.

  QUESTIONNAIRE: Equal or Unequal?

  The following questions will help you decide whether a current or potential relationship is an equal one.

  1.Who has more personal power in the relationship? Who do you feel is the stronger of the two in terms of being able to ask for what you want and being able to take care of yourself emotionally?

  2.Which of you has the stronger need to be in control? Who usually gets his or her way when choosing what you will do at any given time?

  3.Who is more in control of your sexual relationship?

  4.Which of you has more self-confidence? Which one feels better about himself/herself?

  5.Which of you is more successful in your career?

  6.Who makes more money?

  7.Would you say one of you feels superior to the other? If so, who?

  8.Who would you say loves the other more?

  9.Who is more emotionally dependent on the other? Which of you would have a more difficult time going on without the other?

  10.Who is more invested in maintaining the relationship?

  If you answered "my partner" to most of questions 1 to 7 and "me" to questions 8, 9, and 10, your partner has more power in the relationship. If you answered "me" to questions 1 to 7 and "my partner" to questions 8, 9 and 10, you have more power.

  Preventing Your Children from Being Emotionally Abused

  Unfortunately, another way victims of both childhood and adult abuse repeat the cycle of violence is by becoming emotionally abusive toward their own children. If you were emotionally abused as a child or if you have either been the victim or perpetrator of emotional abuse in an intimate adult relationship, you are far more likely to emotionally abuse your children than any other group of people. This is true for all the following reasons:

  •It is a natural progression for victims of abuse to take the anger they still inevitably feel toward their abusers out on those less powerful than themselves. This is probably the most potent reason why you must continue to work on your unfinished business with your original abusers and, if appropriate, any unfinished business you have with your previous or current partner. The more you work on releasing your anger in constructive ways, the less likely you will be to abuse your own children.

  Wetend to treat our children the way we were treated ourselves. Many survivors of emotional abuse have told me how shocked they were to hear the very words their parents said to them coming out of their own mouths. As my client Morgan told me, "When I was a kid, my father constantly put me down for being a little overweight. He'd call me names like "lard ass," and "buffalo bottom." I hated it and hated him for talking to me like that. His words stayed with me all my life, and because of them, I still feel self-conscious about my body. So when I heard myself calling my daughter those same names, I shuddered in disbelief. I never wanted to hurt my daughter the way I'd been hurt, but somehow the words just tumbled out of my mouth."

  Otherparents have found themselves punishing their children with the silent treatment just the way their parents had done with them, becoming overly controlling or possessive the way their parents were, or becoming overly critical of their children just as their parents had done with them.

  If you catch yourself repeating your parents' abusive behavior, immediately apologize to your child. Tell him or her that you are sorry, that you didn't mean it, and that you are going to work on never doing it again. And then do just that. Continue working on clearing up your unfinished business and on releasing your anger in constructive ways. If you find that you continue emotionally abusing your children, seek professional help. You don't want your children to suffer as you did, and you don't want them to become either a victim or an abuser.

  •Those who are emotionally abusive to their partner tend to also emotionally abuse their children because the same dynamics are at play. They abuse because they are angry, insecure, and full of shame. When these feelings get triggered, they lash out at whoever is closest to them-whether it is their partner or their child. Our children also remind us of ourselves and can act as a trigger, bringing back painful memories. We see ourselves in our children, and if we are full of self-hate and loathing, those feelings will be projected onto our children.

  •Those who have been victims of emotional abuse in an adult relationship can also take their anger out on their children, especially if a child reminds you of an abusive partner. This is often the case when an emotionally abused woman has a son or when an emotionally abused man has a daughter.

  Your children also need you to protect them from other people who may become abusive toward them. For this reason, you must continue to work on coming out of denial about your own childhood abuse, as well as how much you have been negatively damaged by your partner's abuse. Otherwise, you won't recognize that these same people are abusing your children, even if it happens right in front of your eyes. If you are able to admit the truth about the way your parents or other caretakers treated you when you were a child, you will not be as likely to expose your children to these same people. Unless you have reason to believe that those who abused you have changed (because they have had professional counseling, because they have admitted they were wrong and have apologized to you), don't be foolish enough to think they will not abuse your children in the very same way they abused you.

  Strategies to Help You Avoid Emotionally Abusing Your Children

  1.Try to accept your children for who they are. Don't set unreasonable expectations for how they should act in public or how they should perform in school or in extracurricular activities. Allow your children to make mistakes and to be kids.

  2.Don't look to your children for needs that you should meet elsewhere. Your child should not be your confidante or your best friend.

  3.Respect your children and they will respect you. Abusive parents often demand total obedience and demand that their children show them respect at all times. But a parent needs to earn respec
t, just like everyone else.

  4.Maintain appropriate boundaries. Respect your child's privacy by knocking before entering his or her room, by not listening to his telephone conversations, and by not opening his mail. Close the door when you go to the bathroom, and don't barge into the bathroom when your child is in there.

  5.Set appropriate limits and administer proper discipline. Don't be afraid to say no to your children or to punish them when they do something wrong (the most effective punishments are time-outs and taking away privileges, not physical punishment). Children who are allowed to walk all over their parents grow up feeling entitled to special treatment from others, disrespecting authority, and lacking proper limits and boundaries.

  6.Learn appropriate ways of being affectionate with your children. Physical touch is vital to a child's development. Children need to be held, nurtured, and comforted. If you were deprived of this kind of nurturing, you may have difficulty giving it to your children, but it is very important that you work through your reticence.

  7.Continue working on yourself and on being a good parent. There are numerous parenting classes available and many fine books on parenting. If you find you are becoming abusive, I recommend individual therapy, family therapy, and a group called Parents Anonymous. There you will meet other parents who have been abusive to their children, learn how they were able to stop, and learn effective parenting skills.

  8.If you are undecided as to whether you should become a parent given your abusive background, I suggest you read my book The Parenthood Decision. It includes questionnaires and information that will help you determine whether you should wait to become a parent or not become a parent at all.

  What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  This chapter is for both the survivor of emotional abuse and the abusive partner. In it you will each find strategies and information that will help you continue to recover from both the childhood abuse that you each suffered and the repercussions of having been in an emotionally abusive relationship with someone you cared about as an adult. If you choose to remain in your present relationship, I advise you each to read the entire chapter, including those sections that pertain to your partner. This will enable you to continue to deepen your understanding of one another and to help one another in the recovery process.

  Many of you will undoubtedly want to know how long recovery will take. Generally speaking, the longer the abuse occurred-either in childhood or adulthood-and the more intense the abuse was, the longer the process of recovery. The same holds true if you have been emotionally abused by more than one person. The sooner you start on the recovery process, the firmer you are about not allowing abuse to continue, the faster the recovery process will be. This is because each time you allow yourself to be abused, you are re-experiencing the abuse you suffered as a child and are, in essence, being re-abused. For abusive partners, the longer you allow yourself to focus outside yourself and to be abusive, the more shame you pile on yourself and the more you avoid working on your own issues.

  True Power Comes from Knowing You Have Choices

  The recovery process begins with the first recognition that you have been abused in the past or are currently being abused. In order to continue recovering-either from being abused or from abusingyou must realize that true power comes from knowing you have choices.

  If you are the previously abused partner, you must come to the realization that you always have the choice to continue a conversation or to end it. You always have the choice to confront your partner on his or her behavior. You have the choice whether or not you want to do something. And you always have the choice whether to continue or end a relationship.

  If you have a history of being abusive, you, too, must remember you have choices. No matter how much you were abused or neglected as a child, no matter how hurt or angry you become, you can choose not to repeat the cycle of abuse. You can choose to take a walk and get away from the situation, you can choose to release your anger in constructive ways, or you can choose to write about your feelings. You can take a deep breath, count to ten, and calmly tell your partner what is upsetting you. Or best of all, you can choose to take your focus off your partner and go inside yourself in order to discover what is really bothering you and why.

  Key Issues for Victims and Abusers

  There are two key issues that both victim and abuser must address if you are to recover from your abusive patterns: raise your self esteem, and continue to identify and honor your emotions.

  Raise Your Self-esteem

  Those who were emotionally abused, neglected, or abandoned in childhood will inevitably suffer from low self-esteem. The same is true of those who were physically or sexually abused. We've heard a lot about self-esteem in the past ten to fifteen years, so much so that we often don't take it very seriously. But in order for you to recover from childhood or adult abuse, you must work on raising your self-esteem. There is absolutely nothing as important to our psychological well-being as our self-esteem. It affects virtually every aspect of our lives, including how we perceive ourselves and others, how others perceive us, our choices in life, our ability to give and receive love, and our ability and willingness to take action when things need to be changed.

  Our self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves; it is our overall judgment of ourselves. If we have high self-esteem, we like and approve of ourselves and we accept ourselves for who we are, including our socalled bad qualities. If we have high self-esteem, it can be assumed that we also have self-love, self-respect, and feelings of self-worth.

  Unfortunately, most victims of childhood abuse do not have high self-esteem and therefore do not love or respect themselves, nor can they imagine that anyone else can truly love or respect them. They don't think they deserve to be loved or respected, nor do they feel they deserve to be treated with kindness and consideration. When someone treats them with respect or kindness, they often become uncomfortable and proceed to push the person away, instead becoming attracted to partners who treat them with the disdain, cruelty, or indifference they are more accustomed to and feel they deserve. Those who tend to be abusive may initially become attracted to a partner who treats them with kindness and respect, but once they "have" them they grow increasingly disdainful of such a partner. Although it is an unconscious motivation, they believe that any partner who wants to be with them must have something seriously wrong with her and therefore does not deserve their respect. It's also often the case that loving kindness can become just too painful to either the victim or the abuser because it reminds them so much of what they didn't receive as a child.

  How Do You BEGIN TO RAISE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM?

  The following strategies are applicable for both men and women, victimized partners and abusive ones:

  1. Notice how often you are self-critical. When you are self-critical, you are essentially doing the same thing to yourself that your parents or other original abusers did to you-you are re-abusing yourself and damaging your self-esteem. Self-criticism is partly the reason why you allowed your partner to abuse you or why you abused your partner. Pay attention to your self-talk or inner dialogues. Catch yourself whenever you engage in a critical, negative thought about yourself and stop it! Ask yourself, "Whose voice am I hearing?" Are you saying the same things to yourself that were said to you by your parents or by a previous abuser? Counter the critical message with something like, "That's not true; I'm not stupid. I just made a mistake." Then replace the negative self-talk with positive, encouraging statements, such as "I'm doing the best I can," or "I'm getting better."

  2. Focus on your positive attributes instead of your faults. Selfcriticism is damaging enough, but when coupled with a lack of self-praise, it can be devastating to your self-esteem. In addition to being overly criticized as a child, you were also probably seldom praised. The same holds true for those of you who have been emotionally abused as an adult. Now you must begin t
o turn this around by talking to yourself in ways that are reassuring, approving, and loving. You won't be able to stop your self-criticism right away, but you can balance it with self-praise.

  EXERCISE: Your Weaknesses and Your Strengths

  •Make two lists-one of your weaknesses and one of your strengths.

  •If your strengths list isn't at least as long as your weaknesses list, work on thinking of more positive attributes to add to the list.

  •Ask a supportive friend to help you if you get stuck.

  3. Set reachable goals. Both survivors and abusers tend to set impossibly high standards for themselves. They expect themselves to be perfect, and they are extremely self-critical when they make mistakes or don't meet their own unreasonably high expectations. The only difference is that survivors blame themselves for their perceived failures and abusers tend to blame others.

  The experience of success does wonders for our self-esteem. But in order to feel successful, we need to set goals that are reachable. Set small goals instead of big ones. With each small success, you will build your self-confidence and raise your self-esteem.

  4. Stop comparing yourself with others. The problem with comparing yourself with others is that you will either end up feeling less than or better than others. If you feel less than, your self-esteem will be lowered. Those who have been mistreated in the past often allowed abuse to continue because they felt so bad about themselves that they believed no one else would want them or because their low self-esteem caused them to believe an abuser's accusations or put-downs. Many abusers feel less than others, and this adds to their shame.