Psychological Abuse: The 3 layers of manipulation
Loving someone else can become impossibly difficult. Full of inescapable challenges and heart-wrenching moments, love involves plenty of trade-offs. Sacrificing your time and effort for another person requires a high level of trust.
Unfortunately, trusting someone else with your entire being can pave a one-way road to deception. Once you’re under another’s spell, it’s easy to be taken advantage of. Many of us have been hypnotized by love in the past.
I’m one of those people.
I’ve been asked to shut out my friends. I’ve been reminded how easily I can be replaced. I’ve been lied to time and again. I hope to never experience that level of betrayal ever again, but I also realize how lucky I am that I haven’t experienced worse.
For someone like myself, love is easier to give than hate. I’ve met several people throughout my life who fail to think the same way.
To fully comprehend the severity of manipulation, it’s necessary to infiltrate the mind of a manipulator.
“Nearly half of all women and men in the United States have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime (48.4% and 48.8%, respectively).” –The National Domestic Violence Hotline
Layer I: Self-Deception
The best salespeople believe in the products they sell. If you manage to convince yourself that something’s worth buying, you can do the same for other people.
The same concept applies to manipulation. Once you convince yourself that your lies are the truth, forcing someone else to believe them is child’s play. Of course, there is a difference between truly believing in these lies and deceiving yourself to achieve some kind of ulterior motive.
Say you just married John, the man of your dreams, but you find yourself wanting more. He satisfies you emotionally, but not physically. As a result, you go out bar-hopping one night and you take notice of one especially attractive gentleman and walk over to him and use your best pick-up line.
An hour later, the seductive stranger ends up coming over to your place while your husband is at work. Things escalate and you end up sleeping together. Afterwards, you feel somewhat ashamed, but you assuage your guilt by telling yourself how much better you are than your husband.
Not only are you more attractive, but you also make more money than him. In turn, you are saving John from a more miserable life. You’re his guardian angel.
You have effectively deceived yourself into believing that your actions are excusable and because of this you keep lying to your spouse and make love to more fellow bar-hoppers.
Congratulations, you’ve successfully completed the first layer of manipulation.
Layer II: Deceit and Destruction
“For women the [second] most common forms of psychological aggression by an intimate partner are ‘insulted, humiliated, made fun of” (58.0%), ‘acted very angry in a way that seemed dangerous’ (57.9%), ‘told they were a loser, not good enough’ (48.9%) and ‘made threats to physical harm’ (45.5%).” –National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
Lucky for you, the hard part is over. You’re certain of your savior-status and there’s no more guilt weighing you down. Everything is splendid and you’re happier than ever.
A year has passed since you first started your bar-hopping adventures and you decide to take a risk tonight by going out a bit later than usual. Two hours later, you end up cuddling with another visitor after one of your steamy sessions.
Both of you fall asleep and stay asleep for much longer than you’d normally allow for. The next morning, you wake up late afternoon and find yourself lying next to an unfamiliar face. Less than a minute later, you hear a knock on the door and footsteps.
Paralyzed with fear, you shift your eyes over to the door to find John standing over you with a look of disbelief hanging over his face. He knows, do something. After listening to him yell at you for five minutes, you explain yourself.
Instead of being honest and telling your husband he could no longer satisfy you, you start talking about your first date and how amazing John looked in his blue button-up shirt and Levi’s jacket. He starts asking how that’s relevant and you remind him of all the things that made you fall in love.
Dazed and deeply confused, John’s guard wears down and you know all you have to do is kiss and hold him. To make sure he’s locked in, you even tell him you love him. The next day, you worry that if he catches you again, he might not be so understanding.
There’s only one thing to do: obliterate his self-esteem. A couple weeks later, the perfect opportunity presents itself. You and John had planned a romantic getaway at a nearby resort, but on the way there, you stop at a gas station and John leaves the keys locked in the car.
Previously, you might have forgiven him, but this time around you’re on a mission to destroy. Visibly frustrated, you start cursing and telling John he’s worthless.
“Only an idiot would let something like this happen!”
He cries and apologizes but you refuse to back down.
You throw one last finishing blow.
“You’re a worthless piece of s***, you know that?”
Devastated, John calls Triple A and tries to mend the situation to no avail. This is only the beginning of a long series of humiliations for John.
Rinse, repeat, and convince him you’re the best he can do.
Layer III: Eliminating the enemy
John comes home one night after a long day at work and he starts arguing with you and informing you that after talking with his friend Paul, he has realized he deserves more from you.
Disappointment overwhelms you and your anger overcomes all other emotions. How dare he ask for more and how dare he talk to his friend about you. From this moment forward, you decide to disallow your beloved hubby from seeing his friends.
If it’s to be done correctly, you have to be patient. Gradually convince John of his friends’ flaws and start making him feel guilty whenever he mentions spending time with them rather than with you. Within a few months, a few more obstacles will have been eliminated and you can continue living freely with no unwanted strings attached.
Eventually, John will have no one to turn to apart from you. Whenever he needs a shoulder to cry on, you’ll be there, as long as you can continue seeing other people behind his back.
Men can be victims, too
“For men the [second] most common forms of psychological aggression by an intimate partner are ‘called names like fat, ugly, stupid’ (51.6%), ‘told they were a loser, not good enough’ (42.4%), ‘acted very angry in a way that seemed dangerous’ (40.4%), and ‘insulted, humiliated, made fun of’ (39.4%).” –National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
A lot of the time, men are afraid to speak up for themselves when they feel like they’ve been taken advantage of. Perhaps it’s because we think that people would just laugh and fail to consider the extent of what some of us have been through.
Regardless of the reason for it, keeping abuse a secret will never be the proper solution. Secrets lead to solitude and can even lead to suicide.
As men, we are more likely to mask our emotions and convert our feelings into anger or pride, which can be misinterpreted as arrogance. While arrogant men exist, we’re not all full of ourselves. Most importantly, the majority of us experience the same feelings women do. We simply express them differently.
Same-Sex Sellouts
According to Frontiers in Psychology, over 50% of gay men and almost 75% of lesbian women reported that they were victims of psychological intimate partner violence (IPV). Although there are different interpretations of psychological abuse, those statistics are undeniably troubling.
I would imagine that this violence is more likely to occur in the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community –these statistics don’t include the Trans community, otherwise I’d have included the T — because of the amount of hardships its members face.
Evidence proves that this is more than my imagination. The LGB population faces more difficult outcomes compared to the heterosexual population “across different life domains, including mental and physical health, subjective well-being, employment, poverty, homelessness, and social exclusion.”
Similarly, a survey conducted in 2015 found that 42% of Trans respondents reported IPV. Incidentally, 61% of Trans people who had been homeless also reported IPV.
If you’d like to learn more about homelessness, check out my article here.
Rejection by families, emotional abuse, and other childhood issues have been known to cause IPV in the LGBT community.
How to escape the cycle of abuse
In a perfect world, I’d recommend avoiding abusive relationships altogether. Regrettably, this world is far from perfect, so instead I’ll take a different approach.
One method for ending verbal abuse is to call out the abuse as soon as it happens. If your significant other belittles you for missing the first ten minutes of his friend’s baby shower because of traffic, confidently remind him to stop blaming you for something that’s out of your control.
If your S.O. demeans your worth and calls you a child, firmly ask him to stop calling you names.
In the case he continues to irrationally criticize you, leave the room or ignore him. Inevitably, this won’t work 100% of the time. In fact, it may not work most of the time. This is why I have a more permanent, reliable suggestion that is significantly more difficult.
End the relationship. Prevent any more pain or discomfort. Remove yourself from the situation entirely and seek help from your family or friends. If necessary, contact the police or file a restraining order.
With an expert manipulator, there is no magic formula to stop him from deceiving you. You can’t fix him because he doesn’t see himself as broken in the first place. In his mind, you’re the broken one.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but you don’t deserve to waste the rest of your life being the pawn on another person’s chessboard. You deserve a happier life free of insults and false illusions.
We all do.
Not all abusive relationships can be resolved with words.
Physical violence greatly complicates things, so if you feel physically threatened by your significant other, please visit https://www.thehotline.org/ or call 1–800–799-SAFE (7233).
