What It Feels Like To Be Emotionally Abused

I don’t normally watch the TV ‘soapies’, but a storyline on one of them caught my eye recently. It’s about an older woman who’s been emotionally and verbally abused by her husband to the point where she breaks and lashes out at him with a wine bottle. At the point of writing this, she’s in jail, awaiting trial for attempted murder – and viewing herself as a ‘bad’ person who deserves punishment. The other characters on the soapie have mostly turned against her, as even before the wine bottle incident, he had quite expertly cast himself as the ‘victim’, and her as various bad things. Even the police don’t pick up on the clues.

As a survivor of emotional abuse myself, I find it too painful to watch, though of course I’m hoping the truth will eventually emerge. But I don’t have much hope of it, as it can be really hard for anyone who hasn’t been through this to understand what it’s like. While my situation never got as far as wine bottles, it nonetheless nearly destroyed me. So I want to explain something of what it feels like to be the recipient of emotional and verbal abuse.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that it’s essentially a betrayal. I’m not talking about sexual betrayal here, but a betrayal of the very trust that should exist between partners. When you enter into a relationship, there’s a basic assumption that they will deal with you fairly and honestly, that they truly care for you and that anything they tell you is the truth. So when they start telling you that you’re this or that Bad Thing, that you’re no good at this or that, you believe them. They must be telling you this For Your Own Good, right? Or at least that’s what they tell you, and they love you, so it must be true, right? Overwhelmed by this flood of new ‘information’ about yourself, you lose all sense of who you were before in the struggle to correct your ‘faults’, to become what they’re telling you that you ‘should’ be.

It's especially easy for them if you already have low self-esteem and are inclined to believe the worst about yourself. (Abusers hone in on such vulnerable people, of course.) Add in being autistic (as in my case), even if you don’t know it at the time, but do know that you have trouble ‘reading between the lines’ and making good judgements about yourself and others, and you’re primed to believe that they are seeing something you can’t, even if it doesn’t ‘feel right’. Under a relentless barrage of criticism, you cave. They must be right, you must be bad, bad, bad. Having been reduced to a state of helpless abasement, you don’t find much to admire in yourself anyway.

Their attitude that they’re positively saintly for putting up with you, that nobody else would, means that over time, you come to believe that others must have seen these faults too, but been too polite to tell you. You become ashamed, not wanting to inflict your flawed self on anyone else, and will probably seem withdrawn and anti-social to others. Thus it’s easy for your partner to cast your actions or words in the worst light to others in turn, subtly running you down, and further isolating you. With no other opinions to compare your partner’s to, your judgement becomes skewed, and you continue to believe the worst. I eventually came to see myself as worthless, as a partner, as a mother, as a friend, and quite possibly even as a human being.

Many people seem to think that verbal and emotional abuse is ‘not as bad’ as physical abuse. “It’s just words.” Even the victim/survivor may think this, or be reluctant to reveal it, or even to see it as abuse. Those harsh words can actually often go hand-in-hand with physical violence, but even without a blow struck, they can be devastating. Without wanting to minimise the hurt from physical abuse at all, damage from a broken limb can heal faster than damage from a broken heart. Because that’s what abusers do to you. They break you. They shatter your heart, your psyche, your very sense of self, your will. I would say they reshape you to their liking – but you’re never to their liking. They’re never satisfied, there’s always more criticism. Nothing about you is sacred.

Even after you scrape up enough shreds of self-esteem to get out of the relationship, it can take a long, long, long time to realise what’s happened to you, and what you’ve lost. To give just one small example, my partner had me convinced that I was hopeless as a ‘home handywoman’. If I even started to do a job around the house, she’d sigh impatiently, and snatch the tool off me with a contemptuous “oh, give it here!” Afterwards, it took me more than two years to remember that before her, I’d actually been moderately competent at doing stuff. Not as expert as her maybe, but I’d known what to do with a screwdriver or hammer, I’d rewired electric plugs, swapped a faulty cord on an iron, and even done up old furniture. But under the onslaught of her contempt, I’d forgotten all that. I’d forgotten the very idea of being competent – at anything.

And it can be an even longer time healing. Even now, more than twenty years later, I still find myself squirreling out damaged parts of my psyche. For instance, I still have to remind myself that if I do something that’s not ‘how others (deep down, I mean ‘her’) would do it’, it’s okay. No-one’s watching me, about to pounce and tear me apart for it, I don’t have to constantly defend my actions or words anymore. But despite my best attempts to dismantle it, the kneejerk fear-reaction is still entrenched in me, not to mention the belief that the way I do things is ‘wrong’, even if it feels right to me. That’s how deep the damage can go. This is a battle I’m still fighting. Even writing this has stirred up old, painful memories.

My wish is that people will come to understand that emotional and verbal abuse is just as devastating, just as emotionally destructive, as physical abuse. That it can wreck people, wreck their lives, wreck their relationships with others, even wreck their physical health, and leave them feeling, afterwards, like a piece of wreckage washed up on a beach, no good to themselves or anyone else.

Never underestimate the power of ‘mere words’.

MY AUTISTIC REACTION TO THE PANDEMIC

You’d have to be living in a cave in some remote spot not to know that we’re in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. There’s really no other news on TV, or my Facebook newsfeed for that matter – except the deliberate light relief kind, like cat videos or music from European balconies.

I’ve felt a wide range of emotions in response to this. A ton of sad ones - compassion for those who are or have been sick, grief for those who have died, and empathy for those who have lost loved ones. Empathy also for those who know that they or their loved ones are at risk, those who are struggling to cope, those whose anxiety is going through the roof, those who find the whole thing just too overwhelming. I’ve sometimes found myself sitting on the couch crying, for instance when my country experienced its first Covid#19 death. I didn’t know the person, or anyone who’s died anywhere, but I cried anyway.

And anger. I’m furious at the hoarders and panic buyers who’ve emptied the supermarket shelves, depriving those of us who can’t afford to do this of things we need. Seriously? Who needs three hundred toilet rolls anyway? I’m especially angry though at the profiteers. How dare you. How dare you make money on the backs of people’s pain, misery and deaths. What kind of amoral pipsqueak are you? And then there are the callous and the don’t-care-I’m-all-right-Jack crowd, who put everyone else at risk. This is not a time for partying, people!

I’m also angry at those so-called leaders who haven’t acted fast enough, and have put more people’s lives at risk as a result. My (admittedly rough) impression is that ‘left-wing’ governments, at least in Western countries, seem to be acting faster and doing more to help ordinary people, whereas right-wing leaders have tried to delay acting, or even reverse some actions too soon, in order to minimise damage to the Holy Grail of ‘The Economy’. The inadequate measures of some governments sometimes seem akin to telling the Titanic’s orchestra to play on as the boat is sinking. I’ve wanted to grab them all by their collars and shake some sense into them.

But my strongest feeling is simply fear. It’s not myself I fear for, but relatives and friends, especially those who are in the ‘high risk’ category. Will they get sick? Will anyone I know die? I fear for my loved ones, especially a close relative who is pregnant with a much-wanted and longed-for baby, as well as my more elderly relatives. Plus no-one knows how long this pandemic will last, will it be over in a few months, or by Christmas? Will we acquire herd immunity, or will the virus mutate again? Will there be further pandemics? When will there be a vaccine? How much should I be scared?

Because nobody knows what the future will hold, even if we beat this thing. Maybe the world will only change in small ways – elbow bumping replacing high-fives, or a shift to more people working at home. Everyone becoming more scrupulous about washing hands. (I can’t help wondering what you were all doing before?!?) Or maybe we’ll become a more scared world, like we did after 9/11, with ‘viral’ becoming a personal insult and cause for social rejection. One big possibility is that we’ll become more callous about allowing the vulnerable – the elderly, disabled, chronically ill and homeless – to be sacrificed in order to ‘manage’ future crises. And many of us autistic and disabled know that we will be among the culled. These are just some of the possibilities.

Alternatively, we could have some kind of social revolution, a shaking up of the world’s complacency. This crisis has made the defects of neo-liberalist capitalism patently obvious. The modern practise of ‘just-in-time’ supply-chains, for instance, with few or no reserves, doesn’t work in a crisis. The profit-at-all-costs mentality and ‘lean, mean’ health services have left many at risk. The crisis has also shown that the real ‘essential people’ of any society aren’t billionaires or politicians, but people like supermarket workers, truck drivers, and medical personnel. Perhaps people will look at our socio-economic system differently after this.

Now, I get that lots of people are having similar reactions and thoughts right now. We’re watching a horror unfolding before our very eyes. ‘Unprecedented’ is a media pop word right now – we’re all in uncharted territory. Feeling sad, angry, frightened and/or overwhelmed is an entirely appropriate set of responses to a pandemic. ‘Quiet terror’, as one commentator called it. There are so many unknowns it’s frightening. Even the scientists and doctors still don’t seem to know that much about how this virus works, and they and governments all around the world are playing catch-up, with fatal consequences. It’s already being said that mental health is going to take a big hit from this.

But I do wonder if it’s going to be even harder for us autistics, not so much because of social isolation (this will vary from one autistic to another), but because of all the uncertainty. My own feeling is that we’re less resilient emotionally, and may take it harder, and come back slower, if at all. I know that a large chunk of my own sense of security has been removed, and I don’t think it will ever return. I already have a very low level of trust in the world, due to my experiences, now I have a new mistrust of Mother Nature as well.

A big part of our trauma is surely going to be how so many of the ‘normal’ things in our lives are either gone or in abeyance. I didn’t realise till now how many of the world’s activities I simply took for granted, even if I didn’t like them much. Something as ordinary as going to the supermarket has become like taking a ticket in a lottery – I never know if what I need will be there or not. What will I go without this week? How will I cope? And of course as for many autistics, fear can lead to catastrophising, where I imagine the worst, and then double and triple it.

My own country moved pretty quickly, more than a week ago, into a complete lockdown, and while I was processing it all, I pretty much fell apart. I’ve done a lot of compulsive watching of TV news, eating junk food, irregular sleep, and much more stimming, while my dreams have been full of earthquakes, violent car accidents and wandering lost in strange places in the dark. It’s been an effort to get myself even a little bit together, to make healthy meals, get to bed earlier - and to do some of my much-neglected housework! I’ve had to cut down my hours of watching TV news, and stayed off Facebook until I felt able to cope with the onslaught.

Because I have a deeper level of fear, which I find hard to describe, but which seems to be a sense of the world fracturing right in front of my eyes. I’ve been floundering, grappling with this sensation of everything falling apart. I guess that’s what an international emergency does to you. An old W B Yeats poem keeps coming to mind, about how ‘the centre cannot hold’, and ‘anarchy is loosed upon the world’. (Yes, I know I’ve probably been reading too much dystopian sci-fi!) As a new order/reality takes shape, and I work out the new rules for it, I hope this fear might ease.

And for all we know, it won’t be like any of this. Maybe there’ll eventually be a vaccine, or life-saving treatments, and life will just go back to what it was. Or something like it. Maybe. Right now, I’m just trying to ride the wave, and take one day at a time. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. And that’s the hardest thing for any autistic.

All Autistics Are Traumatised

All autistics are traumatised.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to, after over ten years of being in the autistic community, listening to people’s stories, doing research, reading what parents of autistic kids have to say (and how they’re so often misinterpreting our behaviour), commiserating with our problems and woes, and thoroughly absorbing the general state of autistic lives and psyches.

We’re constantly being overloaded, stressed out, misunderstood, rejected, ridiculed, having our voices or our non-verbal attempts at communication ignored, having our intelligence denied or used as a putdown or an excuse not to give us services we desperately need, hearing ourselves described as ‘defective’ or ‘diseased’ or ‘damaged’, being excluded from schools, social gatherings or jobs, being bullied/beaten up/abused by family members or partners or schoolmates or so-called ‘friends’, with many of us ending up unemployed, poor, homeless, in mental health care or jail. We’re pushed to our limits and then over them. Constantly. Repeatedly. And then we’re told that “we’re not trying hard enough”, or that “we’ve brought it on ourselves”, and so on. The list is endless, you all know what we’ve had to endure, both individually and collectively.

There are undoubtedly some very young and/or lucky autistic kids with lovely, accepting parents out there, that haven’t yet been traumatised, but sooner or later, they will meet up with the circumstances that cause that trauma. They’ll be yelled at in a supermarket, encounter an unsympathetic teacher, get bullied in the playground or street, get overwhelmed in a mall and have their reaction misunderstood, (over)hear someone call them horrible things on TV or during ‘mom chats’ over coffee… and it will start.

I believe such traumas are inevitable, given the current public attitudes to autism and autistics. The only things that differ are to what *degree* we’re traumatised, and what our individual reaction to it is, at any given point in our lives.

But – and here’s the ghastly bind we’re in - too many people look at our traumatised state: the meltdowns, the fleeing, the banging our heads on walls, our extremes of emotion, our physical and sometime verbal lashing out, our problems in school or social situations or public places, or our co-occurring conditions or mental health problems, etc, etc, etc, and think/assume ‘Oh, that’s because they’re autistic, it’s an intrinsic part of their being autistic, therefore there’s nothing that can be done about it, look at them, they’re a huge problem for society, wouldn’t it be better if we could get rid of them/their autism/ensure more autistics aren’t born?’ And/or they see us only as ‘problems to be managed’ – something that tends to increase our trauma, not diminish it. With this attitude, about the best that can be expected is that they’re ‘nice’ to us, ie use us as inspiration porn.

This is so endemic, it even affects how we’re diagnosed. The indicators of our trauma are so engrained in the public and professional minds, they’ve become ‘diagnostic criteria’, so that kids or adults who don’t display such behaviours can either lose their diagnosis, or never get one in the first place. Even if our not displaying it is due to the pressures of ‘normalisation’, where we’ve been taught (or taught ourselves, in some cases) to hide our autistic traits and suppress those ‘symptoms’, at the expense of our long-term mental health. (Ie hiding the results of our trauma actually causes more trauma in the long run, which should be a no-brainer, but hey, you know, we’re not supposed to be human…)

But what if we were NOT constantly traumatised?

What if our autism was accepted from the beginning of our lives, and our families, childcare workers, teachers, etc, were educated about autism by autistics, and we were properly supported and accommodated through school, higher education, and into work? What if doctors, other professionals and autism organisations were truly educated about autism, and gave parents a positive view of autism, and referrals to autistic organisations, instead of all the doom-and-gloom stuff?

What if we were not assumed to be lacking in intelligence because we can’t use oral speech, or whatever speech we do have is limited, or ‘babyish’ sounding? What if we were taught to use sign language, cards and/or AAC systems right from when it first becomes obvious that we’re struggling with oral speech? What if we’re standardly given OT and various aids as soon as it’s seen we have trouble with movements? What if we were not laughed at because we’re adults who can’t tie our shoelaces or button our shirts? What if it was considered okay for adults to always wear polo- or t-shirts or slip-on shoes, and need help to cook/shower/whatever?

What if NT kids were taught social skills for interacting with us, while we were taught ‘this is how non-autistics think and feel and act, it’s up to you how much you want to do it’, rather than being effectively told that our way of being is ‘wrong’ or ‘defective, and forced into unnatural styles of interaction, simply to hopefully (and usually unsuccessfully) avert bullying and social rejection? What if NT adults were given awareness training too, in workplaces where autistic people work, or because they’re likely to come into contact with us in a professional situation, eg, cops, nurses, teachers, paramedics? What if it were simply a regular part of their training?

And what if supermarkets and malls and other shops had ‘quiet hours’ all the time? What if public ad campaigns about autism, similar to those about mental health, written by autistics and/or their allies, were regularly broadcast on TV? What if we had mentors to help us negotiate both social scenes and acquire practical skills, from getting our first job to getting a mortgage? For that matter, what if it became accepted practise for us to be considered for a job on our CV, references and a job trial, rather than be put through the torture of interviews, which we tend to fail?

I could go on, but you get the idea I’m sure. What if we weren’t being constantly traumatised? What if the whole public image of autism and autistics was turned around, and people actually accepted us as we are, and not only stopped abusing us, but gave us the support we really need? What kind of autistic would emerge? Who and what would we be?

I think we could be amazing. Actually, I think we already are, we just need the world to stop constantly dumping a tonne of excrement on us. Because if they did… we’d be even more amazing.