How Stonewalling Turns Victims into Abusers & Makes Real Victims “Toxic”

Whether it’s a toxic friend, abusive ex, or even the current sociopolitical climate, the narcissistic mindset always ends up projecting the harm that they’re causing and portraying it as the actions of their victims. Additionally, they manage to convince others to listen to them, while the victims stay shut down, silenced, & trapped. What makes this happen, how does it happen, why is it so convincing & difficult to overcome, how can you talk about it, and what to look for?

What makes this happen?

At its core, this has to do with how stonewalling is a pseudo form of gaslighting that’s often a defensive mechanism learned by people who are genuinely victims, in order to protect themselves from situations where they’re being manipulated and abused. This then unintentionally becomes their way of self-soothing when faced with stressful conflict, while having the effect of gaslighting the other party involved. This ultimately ends up generating pursuit-withdrawl dynamics in relationships, because this type of communicative isolation is a universal torture technique for forcing compliance out of the recipient, not for achieving mutual understanding.

This comes down to 3 issues of what stonewalling does simultaneously:

• Allows them to emotionally relax & take up an objective viewpoint
• Frames the other as “emotional” and/or “unreasonable”
• Allows them to manipulate the situation to get their way

Essentially, stonewalling is forcing procrastination onto another individual… and procrastination is psychologically a form of self-harm. This means that not only is the stonewalling party engaging in self-harm, but they’re also forcing self-harming behaviours onto the other party, while also being actively emotionally neglectful at the same time. That’s just flat-out emotional abuse — but it’s usually coming from someone who’s a victim who’s attempting to protect themselves while being ignorant of their connection to the other. This is because they had to learn to cut off their emotional attachment from a relationship that was critically important for them for their own health.

This is why that party’s emotionally abusive struggles are silently dealt with by the victim who knows it’s part of their deep-rooted trauma survival response. This is because their victims are used to focusing on both of their shared collective freedoms in the long term, despite immediate pain in the short term. However, the person who’s stonewalling is focused on their immediate pain in the short term being a clear sign that things in the long-term are impossible, like they learned in early development. This disconnect is what flips the victim into the role of the abuser in a way that they’re repetitively reinforced (both positively & negatively) to never see or even acknowledge, and with a mountain of pain & cognitive dissonance to permanently hide it away.

How does it happen?

The abuser is acting on what they feel & experience personally and immediately. They retreat & get to feel good in the short term by forcibly enacting procrastination that they control by stonewalling the other party in order to prioritize their basic needs. This not only immediately creates stress on the victim from being emotionally abused by the stonewalling itself, but it also places all of the stonewalling abuser’s stress & anxiety as the responsibility of the victim… while the abuser gets to relax.

So, now the abuser is calm & collected and feels that they’re finally capable of viewing the situation clearly & objectively. They also expect that since time has passed, and they have been able to rely on the other party to struggle through these damaging issues before, that the same is now true of their victim — while ignoring that their actions are having an abusive effect on the person they’re forcing them upon. However, their victim has had less than no time to relax. Instead, the victim has now absorbed 200% of the stress from the situation itself in the immediate time while the abuser was relaxing, and are desperate to stop procrastinating and fix the future things that are still uncertain. This makes the stonewalling abuser only able to see the victim as irrationally emotional, overly codependent on them, completely unreasonable, that calm communication is impossible, and that their victim is too overwhelming to deal with — which means that the abuser now feels victimized, needs to self-soothe, and then continues stonewalling in order to control the situation on their behalf. They are removing themselves from the stresses of even having any awareness of the damage that their abuse is causing on their victims, and also that it continues to grow. From their perspective, things are staying the same, but the other party is getting increasingly irrational, angry, and unstable for no reason.

If the victim tries to bring up that the abuser is trapping them both in a pattern of self-destructive behaviour, the abuser’s history will make them feel like this accusation is victim-blaming & that the other person doesn’t truly understand them. This pushes them even further into their defensive survival strategies — all of which reinforce depending on themselves & the critical importance of ensuring their immediate personal individual freedoms at the expense of any collective freedoms that don’t offer instant relief. They will stay focused only on the immediate, and force their victims to ignore all of the abuse by keeping them focused on the long-term benefits of collective freedoms once the situation is finally resolved…

…but the stonewalling abuser is never going to take the steps to resolve it, because they believe that they’re the victim again, and they’ve fallen in to another abusive pattern like they did in the past. They don’t recognize that they’re creating the situation that they need to escape from, they feel that the other person has to change & finally give them what they need before things can work out. When this doesn’t happen, they start to just forcibly ensure their own safety & knowingly ignore the costs of doing so. They’re soothed when doing this, because they correctly know that they’re not supposed to worry about an abuser’s feelings or needs. They’ve always been told that the other abusive person they loved doesn’t care about their needs & it was incredibly hard for them to believe but they can’t face the idea of being wrong about something that mattered so much to them. The immediate pain they always feel from forcing their own self-harming techniques on both parties ensures that this perspective is always true to how they view the situation that they’re in, no matter what is actually occurring.

Why is it so convincing & difficult to overcome?

At this point, they are now actively emotionally abusing & manipulating their victims, but literally don’t ever see any of that, and almost always refuse to acknowledge it when they do because of the emotional pain & cognitive dissonance that it ignites. In any brief moments when they do recognize this in themselves, they almost always break into tears of apology & helplessness — because they really are victims — but now they’re victims of their own design & they don’t have the tools to escape that. So, they absorb all of the comfort from their victims until they feel better, while never offering the same in reciprocation to the people that they’re abusing, because they disconnect from the pain as soon as it’s relieved. As soon as they feel “normal” again, they forget everything and push themselves away from feeling that discomfort at all costs. They continue to only perceive their own personal stress & victimization because it’s the history they know best and identify with, because it offers the protections that they’re convinced that they need. This is why they prioritize their personal self-care above everything else, and anyone who knows them and their history will rightly encourage them to do so.

Unfortunately, this “healing” strategy allows them to feel empowered by saying, “No.” and being the one to set hard boundaries that are non-negotiable, which are used to deny all requests of their victims to ever be listened to or treated as equals. Communication is conditionally withheld until their victims can calm down… but their victims are only not calm because the abuser is cutting off the communication tools needed to resolve the ongoing issue. The victims’ stress is increasing exponentially, while the abuser is holding even the possibility of a resolution hostage until the victim magically heals themselves first — which literally can’t ever happen, and which the abuser doesn’t believe is impossible. However, because the abuser gets calm by not communicating, they become convinced that just they’re being lied to & trapped in a toxic situation where they’re being manipulated that they can’t escape from. It’s true, but they only can’t escape it because they don’t acknowledge that they’re the ones causing it, and are only waiting for their victim to finally reveal that they’re an abuser — which isn’t true… so now the abuser is going to start to make it true, so that they can escape.

At this point, the abuser starts getting more strict with stonewalling, forcibly taking space, ignoring their own hypocritical actions, & emotionally detaching from any loss of integrity. They’ll utilize defense mechanisms to control their victim’s behaviour, but call those things “boundaries” so that any time their victim demands that critical issues finally be addressed, sets mutual deadlines, forcibly speaks up about all of the harm that the abuser is constantly causing, or in any way makes the abuser uncomfortable — they immediately turn the situation around at their victims. The abuser frames their victim as being disrespectful, invasive, toxic, unreasonable, codependent, needy, clingy, helpless, & unsafe to be around. This now means that any attempt by the victim to clarify the reality of those circumstances with their abuser — or anyone the abuser has spoken to — gets treated as “evidence” that it’s the victim who’s gaslighting the abuser.

This immediately flips into the stage where the abuser makes more overt accusations & starts projecting all of their pain & discomfort as being an active pathological behaviour of their victims that they need to escape. Now the abuser’s stonewalling has been transformed into full-blown gaslighting their victim & emotional abuse. Because procrastination is a form of self-harm, this means that this accelerated and more severe gaslighting & emotional abuse also still impacts the abuser — which is why even if their victims can hold back from lashing out over their ongoing trauma & remain completely benign — the stonewalling abuser perceives their situation as one with themselves being a victim who is forced to speak up & shut down an abuser while prioritizing finally giving themselves the self-care that they’ve always deserved. However, they’re now forcibly silencing the actual victim from doing that exact same thing against them. The abuser now controls the narrative, but they are convinced that it’s the truth because they’re a victim of their own gaslighting. Since everyone else knows that they’ve got a history of genuinely being a victim, everyone believes them immediately, and any contradiction of the victim’s reality is immediately attacked as manipulation and gaslighting.

The only thing that can break this cycle is if the abuser actually listens to their victim. However, because the abuser sees any exposure of the truth as an act of the victim’s “gaslighting” that they’ve been repetitively defensively programmed to literally never do this, because it goes against every single one of their core attachment & survival skills that caused them to learn to stonewall in the first place. On top of that, because stonewalling has been their central form of self-soothing and they’ve been psychologically rewarded for using it, anything that even attempts to hold them accountable for their abuse will feel like an unjustified personal attack against them. This growing, obsessive self-focus means that what would normally be typical ruptures in a relationship interaction will now transform into full-blown narcissistic wounds, and make them retreat back to themselves even more severely. This creates what is known as vulnerable narcissism, and makes them cling even more tightly to all of these types of behaviours for what they believe is their own safety.

In fact, as covert narcissists go to therapy because they feel so deeply victimized by close attachments, this usually just increases the effectiveness of their abusive behaviours on victims. This cycle of knowing that there are others readily supporting them enables the abuser to frame their stonewalling as a healthy form of refusing to enable their victim’s inappropriate behaviour, solidifying and justifying their abusive actions to themselves & to everyone else as not only completely normal — but something that’s commendable & in the best interests of the person who they’re still actively abusing through constant dehumanizing neglect, rejection, isolation, & abandonment. This means that the abuser continues to create helplessness & ongoing trauma in their victims by seemingly doing nothing at all. They’ve got all of the space that they need to relax and compose themselves any time things start to get out of hand, while knowing that it’s also destabilizing their victim — both of which keeps them safe. There is positive and negative reinforcement keeping them locked in this mindset & convinced that they know what’s real, and that what the other party talks about going through are just lies and manipulation, that they’re safe to ignore.

Now that they feel secure in their independent & personal freedoms, their stonewalling & active total neglect towards their victims will now shift to being peppered with seemingly normal, but completely inconsistent attention and communication to their victim. This is because inconsistent praise is the most effective form of neural programming for them to maintain control of their victim’s behaviour. They’ll freely violate any previously self-imposed boundaries, without consequences — because the victims don’t have any leverage that’s meaningful. This serves to help keep their victims destabilized & ensure that they can interact freely, as they’ll frame anything that makes them uncomfortable as a sign that the other party is being abusive.

The victim constantly suffers even more from this crazy-making behaviour because it’s designed to destabilize after a long period of isolation forces them to be more susceptible to coercion. This means that it’s possible that the abuser feels like they’re still being kind, but will always see their victim as too unhealthy & codependent to genuinely interact with. They might use others to push the victim to admit that they’re toxic & abusive, because it’s impossible for the abuser to feel safe until the victim openly states that the abuser was right to treat them so terribly. They’re not interested in their victim healing, they’re worried about the pain that they’ll suffer if things go the other way after all this time, so they need their own self-directed gaslighting to become a shared reality between themselves and their victims.

This means that the abuser convinces others that the victim only deserves help on others’ terms — never on the terms that the victim requests, by framing the victim as being emotionally manipulative, obsessed with pity, refusing to being accountable for their own abuse, & only projecting their pain as the neglectful actions of others. This ensures two things. One is that their victim’s emotionally overwhelming desperation & need to share their conflicting perspective will be present any time they finally have the strength to reach out. The other is that the people around them who the victim might reach out to are on guard, so that they don’t ever have enough mental energy to give to someone who’s been emotionally starved & abused for so long.

This creates the perfect scenario for the abuser to frame their victim as the toxic friend, who’s needs to be treated like an addict. The victim is “obsessed” with the abuser & refuses to get over them, and they make sure that others are primed to tire of those conversations, and never to believe their perspective, while masking any impact that the abuser ever had on the situation — as well as any that they still have. Others will attempt to use isolation and intervention tactics, which will all just make the victim’s situation worse. Any attempt that the victim makes during this confrontation to try to prioritize their own needs gets attacked as narcissism, furthering the effects of their abuser’s gaslighting. Now, not only are they perceived as too overwhelming to deal with, but the conversations are now always squarely focused on the victim displaying toxic, inappropriate, abusive, & unacceptable behaviour — never on the long history of the abuse that lead to them acting this way.

The history of their circumstances isn’t seen as something for others to assist with, but as a deep-rooted psychological issue that the victim doesn’t understand, and that they need to seek help for. If the victim tries to explain that the attempts at forced intervention & being cut off are literally enabling ongoing abuse, they’re seen at attacking others around them for trying to help, and not being interested in actually healing. The victim is stuck being forced to accept the gaslighting, treat their abuser like a saviour, and be punished as the cause of their own abuse — or permanently be treated like a member of an outgroup, psychologically destabilized, and increasingly overwhelmed by the abuser’s growing support group surrounding the victim with a crowd of people to deliver ongoing neglect, rejection, isolation, & abandonment — by simply doing nothing at all & refusing to listen.

How can you talk about it?

It’s best to take an example on a macro scale to start the conversation. When the victims do actually silently follow the stonewalling of their abusers — the abuser will never address the victim’s concerns, because that is seen as “the new normal” and it’s left alone. Then if the victims find an effective way to shift attention towards forcing a conversation on the issue, the abuser’s argument becomes about how disrespectful it is. Attacking football players for kneeling during the national anthem, never addresses anything about the systemic exploitations & abuses that are occurring with minorities being murdered in the streets by police. Everyone is controlled to focus on the messaging, not on the message itself, because this a way to continue to control the victims and push them back into silence. Conversation then centers on wanting to, “go back to normal” while ignoring that the normal that they’re talking about never actually existed — that’s just when the abuse was still happening, but the victims weren’t allowed to discuss it, and the abusers were comfortable being ignorant of it.

That’s a prime example of help only being offered on the terms of the person who’s in power, not help offered on the terms of the victim in need. That occurs when the underlying issues aren’t addressed, only the current problem. It pushes the victim to have to act out in increasingly more noticeable in order to even start to get acknowledged, but then the behaviour is attacked for being toxic… Arguments become about how dangerous looters are & how unreasonable it is for rioters to resort to violence — but the riot is the language of the unheard which we’ve seen this on a global stage with the BLM protests. Victims using stonewalling is like giving police military equipment — they’re critical tools when you’re dealing with someone who’s very dangerous. However, using those tools will escalate any situation unnecessarily until you finally feel justified using them. Then at the height of feeling that they’re absolutely life-or-death necessary, you have to convince them that they were always wrong to have & use and that they need to be removed immediately.

Likewise, we’ve seen projection & gaslighting with quotes like, “The real modern-day nazis are actually anti-fascists.” We live in a world where there’s been a relentless push towards people feeling like there is no objective truth & everyone’s personal feelings are treated as equally valid. This is why the people who forcibly speak up to try to clarify that that’s not true like journalists and scientists are being treated as if they’re a collective of dangerous individuals trying to attack & manipulate you, not well-informed, thoughtful, concerned people trying to reach a shared understanding for the betterment of everyone. This is because there is an obsession that values the immediate gratification of prioritizing individual freedom over the unknown future benefits of prioritizing collective freedoms. It has taught people that this is not just ok but that it’s also completely normal. They’re taught that it’s actually safer to ignore any time when a sacrifice to individual freedom is significantly harmful to everyone’s collective freedoms, despite the fact that humans are tribal animals, and this literally goes against our biological survival mechanisms.

There’s a reason that bipartisan politics are so vulnerable to falling into an impossibly entrenched “Us vs. Them” “pursuit-withdrawl” dynamic, like the one that’s currently shredding the United States to pieces. This is exactly what it’s like when you’re dependent on silently waiting for your narcissistic abuser to admit that they’re not the real victim, while they control the entire social environment, and split people into diametrically opposed groups. It’s why when there are protests over wearing masks — those aren’t aggressively shut down, because the abusive narcissistic view embraces individual freedoms at all costs, and they know that it’s supporting an invisible act of violence against collective freedoms. They know that it will make the victims feel threatened for their lives by just, “doing nothing at all.” There’s a reason why the BLM movement had to reach a point of rioting before it was taken seriously — but at the initial stages, many of those gatherings were used as a way for the police and others to freely & invisibly incite violence upon the oppressed groups, to attempt to frame any retaliation as a reason that offering the BLM movement any collective freedoms at the expense of the police’s individual freedoms were unreasonable demands. This is exactly how narcissists who are convinced that they’re the victims constantly frame their actual victim as “toxic” and muddy the motivations of any message that they try to send.

We’ve also seen & experienced the psychologically crippling effects of prolonged isolation from the COVID-19 lockdowns. We’ve seen the difference in people who have to isolate and are afraid of their lives & care about those around them, vs. the people who don’t care or refuse to acknowledge that their actions are responsible for the destruction of others’ lives. We’ve seen that authority has to forcibly prioritize the safety of the community, because when left to their own devices, the people who act selfishly damage not only their own lives, but everyone else’s as well. We’ve seen people who live alone and haven’t had physical contact with others in months suffer in multiple ways from how mental & physical health are closely interconnected. We’ve been forced to understand that we’re a tribal species — operating alone and being forced into isolation against your will is deeply damaging if you don’t have support from others around you, let alone when you’re vulnerable and they’re actively neglecting your safety, and saying that it’s not their problem to take responsibility for.

Literally the entire world of 2020 is putting this topic on an international stage with more examples than we could ever have hoped for about the real consequences of these behaviours, how they spiral out of control, and how they twist the narratives against anyone who threatens their individual safety. Most importantly, we’ve seen how they when they’re operating from some sort of a de-facto position of power, but constantly portraying themselves as the victim. It’s past time to address that these behaviours aren’t just things that exist as global sociopolitical & socioeconomic current events, but that all of these macro scale issues are influenced by, and simultaneously creating a feedback loop into galvanizing & normalizing the micro scale personal issues of those exact same struggles. Narcissistic coping mechanisms being treated as normal behaviours and/or acceptable forms of self-care, while their emotionally abusive damage is being rendered invisible & their victims continue to be both traumatized is literally never acceptable.

What to look for?

Not every situation is cut & dry with a single abuser & single victim — but vulnerable narcissists want to ensure that the dynamic is always played in their favor. It’s important to remember that in this dynamic, not every act of abuse is intentional, not every act of abuse is recognized, not every act of abuse is spoken about, and there are reasons for who both parties speak to & when they choose to do so, based on their proximity of the individuals to the abuser & victim. With vulnerable narcissists — how they speak to you, how they speak to others, and how they act towards their victim in private is very different.

Vulnerable narcissists’ trauma causes them to be stuck in a stage of emotional immaturity, so they have to rise above serious conflicts as the victor & not the victim — at literally any cost. This is why any sort of emotional relationship-based confrontation where they might be held responsible or made vulnerable will stress them out until they can succeed in controlling their circumstances as the victor — because otherwise they’re the loser, and they don’t have the capability to let go of those feelings of hurt, pain, & anger with themselves, so they have to ensure that they’re placed on others. This counterintuitively allows them to prey on individuals who are emotionally mature, because those people expect that all difficult relationship-based arguments will lead to shared clarity — because one side is right & the other side learns. This means that to their victims no matter what, both sides have a greater understanding of the situation and of one another, everyone is better for it, and it’s always a win-win situation. Even when it’s painful, everyone knows that the right call is being made about the circumstances. For emotionally mature individuals, there is never damage here only growth, so they don’t ever fear that confrontation in any scope whatsoever…

…But a narcissist never learns in order to grow, they only learn to win as a way to protect themselves — and if they feel threatened or at risk, vulnerable narcissists win by ensuring that their side is the only side that will be accepted. They start stacking the odds in their favor & then refusing to allow the other side a chance by shifting to never listening to understand — only ever listening to respond & adapt in order to maintain their own safety and position of victory. They want everyone to know how hard they’re working to overcome their struggles, how much they’re growing from it, and for everyone to see how healthy, capable, and independent they are now — and they really do feel that way. This is so that when their victims speak up, it’s easy to see how much the confrontations destabilize the narcissist & how emotionally unstable their victims are, so that everyone will see things from the narcissist’s point of view right from the start.

Vulnerable narcissistic abusers are constantly creating comfort in the reassurance that others around them share their views & are united in passively or actively enabling their behaviour — because that gives them greater leverage against their victims. They want their victims to know that they have normal relationships with everyone else, and they want their victims to see how stable they are & crave those interactions again, just incase the narcissist remembers something that they need or they grow nostalgic for the validation that they used to get from their victims. This support group provides them with the sense of personal security that they need, and a myriad of equally accountable scapegoats if things ever start to go poorly, so that they’re not left carrying the burden of blame for their horrid abuse, and they can shield themselves as merely the poor, exploited victim of others’ bad advice tainting their constant best intentions, and regain their victim’s trust again. They want a situation that they can’t lose, but where others see them as always just barely rising above their struggles.

Victims of narcissistic abuse & manipulation are not looking for your advice unless they very explicitly ask for it. They are looking to be listened to in order to be understood, so only speak to clarify your shared understanding of their situation, or to let them know that you need a bit of a mental break & when you can come back to the subject with them. They are usually emotionally mature, but have been stuck in a state of constant hypervigilance, traumatized, broken down, and are utterly exhausted by the combination of constant instability, lack of understanding, gaslighting from multiple sources, lack of normal social contact, & being trapped in a situation they never even conceived of — where their abuser literally controls everything by doing nothing & being constantly praised for it.

The don’t want others to see their situation, because they don’t want anyone to worry about them, as no one else can offer them any additional control over their situation. They don’t want pity, because they don’t usually see themselves as victims — they only want to finally have the clarity they need to start overcoming the damage and trauma that they have sustained. They don’t want to be broadly seen as overly emotionally intelligent or aware of their situation, because then it will be easier for the narcissist to portray the victim as being the manipulator. They often have an obsessively compiled amount of context & information, because their top priority is not being misunderstood, and they often also come to grasp the scope of the game that’s being played with them as the victim — even if the narcissist that’s abusing them doesn’t fully understand their actions. This means that they also know it’s likely that no one will listen to them, because they understand that the power dynamic looks completely backwards. They don’t want others to attempt to act on their behalf, because they know that this will galvanize the narcissist to see them as a threat & make things even worse than the ongoing passive abuse that they’re still experiencing. They don’t want the narcissist to be seen as an abuser either, because they know that its origins exist as a result of trauma that they experienced as a victim, and they’re not willing to reciprocate the treatment they’ve received — they only want the end result to show who’s right, and for everyone else to learn from the experience, so that no one ever experiences it again.