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’.

Things I Don't Understand - Normal

I don’t understand ‘normal’.

I’m thinking of two types of ‘normal’ here, though they blur at the edges.

The first is who or what is largely still assumed to be the social norm, the ‘standard’ for others to live up to, emulate, or to be measured against. And that norm is the white, Western, middle-to-upper class, cis-heterosexual, able bodied, neurologically typical male or, as one commentator calls it, ‘Default Man’.

And yet is this really the ‘average’ person? Just looking at statistics says no. Most of the world’s population is non-white, for starters. Even if you only look at, say, Europe, in most of its countries, more than half the people are female. Even looking at just the men, setting aside those who are gay/bi/trans/gender neutral/etc, those who are not white, not middle or upper class, those who are not of the majority religions, and those who are not able-bodied and neurotypical… I’m betting that what’s left is actually only a very small proportion. (Ten percent, according to the writer of ‘Default Man’.)

So how did this minority become held up as the ‘standard’? The answer to that lies with history. Men have been dominant for millennia. Add in all those colonisers, slave-owners and plunderers of non-European countries who didn’t think non-whites were even truly human, centuries of religious and social condemnation of non-cis-heterosexuals, a power imbalance in favour of the rich, screwed-up attitudes to the disabled coupled with lack of understanding of science… And you have the perfect storm for a narrow slice of the population to be able to hold themselves up as the benchmark group for everyone else to envy, compare themselves to, and wish to belong to – or to made to feel as though they should wish to.

We can’t change history of course. But some of these attitudes are still with us. Witness the bias towards male experience in the diagnosis of autistics, for example, that sees many females not diagnosed because they don’t fit the stereotype. Or how black kids are not allowed to wear their hair in ‘black’ styles in some schools. Or how people react to Muslim women’s head-coverings. Then there’s the pressure to not be ‘obviously’ gay, or to speak ‘standard’ English, or for immigrants to speak English instead of their own language even amongst themselves, or the recent attempt of a certain Australian politician to have a motion passed that it’s ‘okay to be white’ (apparently, if it wasn’t passed, whites would be the ‘victims’ of ‘genocide’, yes, you can roll your eyes now).… You can probably think of more examples, but you get the picture.

So I understand the historical reasons for the current situation, what I don’t understand is this clinging to the old standard, when it’s so obviously not actually ‘standard’, or even ‘average’. I can only assume it’s fear – fear of ‘the other’, fear of change, fear of somehow losing white privilege (which too many of them view as their ‘rights’). They’ve been thinking of themselves as the ‘norm’ for so long, they’ve come to feel they really are it. Or the best thing to be, or however they justify it to themselves. And you can almost watch the scrambles going on in their minds, as they try to do so. The mental blocks and torturous reasonings they have to manoeuvre around, the gaping holes in their arguments and world views that they refuse to look at.

I can tell you that as a person of European ancestry, I don’t feel fearful of ‘white genocide’ any time soon. I am more concerned with the actual genocides and wars and oppressions already going on, the plight of autistics everywhere, of gays in some countries, of immigrants fleeing terrible situations, the effects of climate change, etc, etc, etc. Not to mention all my own day to day difficulties of course. You know, real problems.

So I don’t understand this insistence on a group who never have been the majority, being able to keep their power, their wealth, their privilege, at the expense of those who actually are the majority. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t understand reactionary people.

The second ‘normal’ I don’t understand, is a category of people I don’t even have a name for. They’re the ones who simply …do things. Like, they get out of bed in the morning, go off to work or school or wherever, come home, eat, relax, and then go to bed and fall asleep. Straight away. And then wake up and do the same over again the next day. Without thinking twice about any of it.

And on their weekends or days off, again, they simply get up and do things like mow lawns, catch up on housework or schoolwork, tinker with their hobbies or take themselves and their loved ones out to places like movies, shows, amusement parks, the beach, and so on. During their holiday breaks, they crowd to places where lots of others go, and don’t seem to mind that at all, or even like it.

And if you ask them, how do you just do these things, they look at you like you’re crazy, or simply say ‘I never thought about it.’ And shrug. And go on doing it.

I get that people do this, I just don’t understand how.

How they do it without stress. Or at least not the kind of overwhelming stress that us ‘not-normal’ people suffer. They never worry about things like sensory challenges, social challenges, transition challenges, executive functioning issues, mental/emotional states and triggers, stairs, wheelchair access, exhaustion, blood sugar levels, allergic reactions, pain issues, will-there-be-food-I-can-eat issues, whether-X-activity-will-make-me-dizzy issues, and all the thousand-and-one other things that those of us with ‘conditions’ stress about. Not to mention those of us who have the anxiety of possible exclusion or even threats to personal safety because of race, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion or lack thereof, etc.

These ‘normal’ people just …do things. Without a second thought. No agonising, no scattered thoughts, no intense pre-planning, no I-did-this-yesterday-so-I-have-no-spoons-to-do-anything-today, no double and triple-checking everything, no fretting over whether you’ll get a park close enough or will the accessible parking be all taken or will some dipstick give us hassles because we have an invisible disability and park in a disability space, no worrying about potential meltdowns or shutdowns, no ‘at what point does it get too much and we bail out’, no ANYTHING.

I used to read accounts of these people’s lives, only half-consciously looking for any sign of this, but it just wasn’t there. And then it finally hit me - that they don’t worry about these things because they don’t have to. So I understand that now. But I’ve been struggling with so much for so long, that I have no conception, no understanding at all, of what a life without that struggle would feel like.

But what I do understand, is that, if all of us ‘not-normal’ folks got together, we may find that, like the non-‘Default Man’ people, we’re actually the majority – and that it’s actually normal to be ‘not-normal’.

Things I Don't Understand - Conspiracy Theories

I don’t understand conspiracy theories. Or, rather, I don’t understand the people who believe in them, the theorists themselves. No matter what explanations the psych types come up with (and there are many hypotheses), none of them really explain why people are so willing to ignore common sense to believe in them.

To make myself clearer, let me define what a conspiracy theory generally consists of, according to the experts. Michael Barkun, a political scientist, defines a conspiracy theory as the belief in a “secret plot by exceptionally powerful and cunning conspirators to achieve a malevolent end.”[i] It typically has three elements in it, namely –

1) They “appear [and I stress ‘appear’] to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.”

2) They claim the world is divided “between the forces of light, and the forces of darkness… [tracing] all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.”

3)  They claim that only they “know the truth”, having unmasked the “plotters' deceptions”, unlike the “brainwashed herd” of the masses.

I would also add that most conspiracy theories seem to point the finger at ‘The Government’, especially the US one, and/or its agencies. None of them ever seem to adequately explain WHY government is supposedly doing these things. It just seems to be assumed that it’s corrupt and evil, full stop. And that they are the only ones who are ‘in the know’, so of course the government wants to silence them… Basically then, conspiracy theories are all just more sophisticated versions of “the gubmint’s out ta getcha”, and/or “we know something you don’t, nah, nah, nyah, nah…” 

Some conspiracy theories are pretty harmless. We can laugh at the flat-earthers, roll our eyes at chemtrail believers, and shake our heads at the Roswell crowd. But others are not so easily shrugged away. Holocaust deniers, for instance, must cause a lot of hurt to Jews everywhere. And more recently, parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting have been subjected to incredible verbal abuse and vitriol by those who claim the whole event was ‘faked’, that their children didn’t exist, and that the parents are liars, paid by those with an anti-gun agenda, etc. The pain this must cause those who have lost loved ones I can only imagine.

And then there’s the anti-vaccine crowd. I think they must win some kind of award for the most harmful conspiracy theory on the planet. Thanks to them, diseases once made nearly extinct or rare by high vaccination rates have returned, with devastating consequences. People have become extremely ill and even died as a result, or sustained horrible and sometimes life-long damage, with many others left in a vulnerable state, but they shrug all this off. 

Government, along with the medical establishment, they shrill, have conspired to conceal the ‘terrible harm’ that vaccines do. To believe this, they must ignore all of the evidence presented by history, statistics, the entire mainstream scientific consensus, and simple logic, and instead resort to chanting the mantra of “but toxinz… but Big Pharma…but gubmint…” (And I’m not even going to start on the whole ‘vaccines cause autism’ garbage. Suffice to say it makes even less sense than the rest of their crap, especially since Wakefield’s been thoroughly discredited.) Like other conspiracy theorists, they believe that they have somehow uncovered ‘truths’ denied to the majority of the populace.

But does any of this really make sense? Can we really be the victims of a (or any) horrendous plot/s by governments, doctors, etc?

Think on it. Just think on it, for a moment. We’re a social species. On the whole, we do not keep secrets well. We blab. We tell a friend “in strictest confidence of course”. We get drunk, and boast to the bartender, or the person next to us. We pillow talk, we gossip and chatter, natter and prattle and “have you heard……!” Even things that governments try to keep hidden, from Watergate to Abu Ghraib, have a way of working their way out of the woodwork in the end. The only secrets that seem to be (more or less) kept are those belonging to those who are disinclined by temperament to blab (e.g. spies). And such people are a rare breed.

So the idea that hundreds of thousands, millions even, of doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, politicians (an exceptionally gabby species), civil servants, other health care workers, scientists and all their ancillaries, over a very long period of time, and through umpteen changes of governments, in dozens of different countries, are all in on some giant conspiracy to - what? Get people sick, for some strange and evil end of their own? – is patently absurd. It assumes, and sometimes anti-vaxxers even outright assert, that ALL of the above professionals are either a) deluded, b) lying, or c) incompetent to recognise a health issue when it presents itself, despite all their years of training and practise and research… Plus know how to keep their mouths shut about it.

All of them. 

All the time. 

Forever.

…Yeah right.

But then logic doesn’t seem to be a strong point of any conspiracy theorist. Over the last few years, I’ve watched the hardcore anti-vax crowd repeatedly and consistently do the following – 

- present weak, incoherent, illogical or contradictory arguments

- have a poor understanding of basic science, and refuse to listen to those who have a better one

- think Google searches means that they know as much as doctors and scientists who have studied and practised for years

- scorn anyone who defends vaccines as ‘sheeple’ or ‘paid shills’ for ‘Big Pharma’, but swallow unquestioningly anything that comes from other anti-vaxxers, even when they make wildly inflamed claims, have no professional expertise in vaccines, and are pushing bizarre (and expensive) ‘cures’

 - blame vaccines for pretty much ALL human illnesses and even social problems there are, regardless of the weight of evidence that proves otherwise

- when asked to provide proof for what they allege, ALWAYS link to at least one of the following – 

                1) Reports describing shonky ‘science’, which has either been already discredited/withdrawn/redacted, or can be easily demonstrated as bad or pseudo-science;

                 2) Other anti-vax websites, who seem to be competing, in a sort of endless circle-jerk, as to who can produce the most outrageous allegations;

                3) Articles and reports that don’t actually say what the headlines and/or the anti-vaxxer are screaming – it seems that anti-vaxxers often don’t read beyond the headlines, just grabbing links off AV websites that they think ‘prove’ something.

- most especially, they ‘shift the goalposts’ – as fast you tear down one of their arguments, they switch to another. Mercury has been disproven? Oh, it must be the aluminium. Or the formaldehyde. Or green monkey cells, or aborted foetuses, or this, or that, or something else. On and on….

In short, they display an appalling lack of basic common sense, and often seem to verge on outright hysteria, and yet present a very real danger.

And I just don’t understand them. Or any other conspiracy theory, for that matter. I don’t understand why anyone would swallow such crap, how on earth anyone with an ounce of common sense can subscribe to them. It just baffles me. Yes, the world is a chaotic mess, but conspiracy theories that try to ‘explain’ it by positing some simple division between good and evil, with them as the ‘angels’, and governments, along with anyone who opposes them, as the ‘devils’, just don’t wash. Saner, you’d think, to just accept that there are no handy explanations, that the world is just totally screwed up. But sanity doesn’t seem a strong point of any conspiracy theorist either.

And after pondering all this, I’m still left with the question - is it because I’m autistic, that I can’t grasp why anyone would embrace the totally illogical, just to make themselves feel important and ‘in the know’? Are their egos really that big? Or is there something else I’m missing? I just…. don’t get it.

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[i] This, and all subsequent quotes, are from the Wikipedia entry on ‘Types of Conspiracy Theory’.