Unmasking the Abuser Episode 13 - Widening the Scope

Here we are at Lucky Episode 13 of the Unmasking the Appuser Podcast Series. If you've listened before, you know I'm Dr. Dina McMillan. I'm a social psychologist and a domestic violence expert. I'm also the author of the book, called Buddy Says He Loves Me. In each of these podcast episodes, I've been sharing key information from my domestic violence prevention program, also called Unmasking the Appuser. This includes insights gained from copious amounts of research, listening to the people at my seminars and workshops, and continuing to learn as new research on abuse, the brain, and human interaction become available. In the last episode, I talked about female abusers who target teen boys or men. Those women will also be included today, along with male abusers, because this episode is about abusive relationships that aren't romantic. This means abusive family relationships, friendships, issues with your neighbors, and work relationships. That work, the abuser may be a colleague, or perhaps even more painfully, a boss. I want to be able to talk about this in a way that provides you with real tools you can use. So, today we're going to cover some general info about abusers in non-romantic contexts, and also include their selection process. The next episode, and I promise to bring it to you soon, will show you how abusers adapt the same tactics they used to find romantic partners. If you have any questions or comments about this episode or any other episode, please email me. My email address is [email protected]. That's unmaskingpodcast, all one word, at gmail.com. We have a lot to talk about today, so let's get started. You're listening to the unmasking the abuser podcast with Dr. Dena McMillan. Abusive relationships can be overwhelming, whatever their type. One challenge faced by victims in romantic relationships is that people often hold them at least partially responsible for choosing an abuser as a partner. Not fair at all, since most abusers work hard to disguise their toxic traits and personality when they're seeking a new partner. But that's one of the big hurdles victims face in romantic relationships. But what about abusers you don't choose? What about abusers in your family, or your neighbor, or among your work colleagues, or your boss? And even if you do have some choice, what about abusive friends? Few people would seek out these poisonous individuals if they were aware of how broken they truly are. But we know abusers can deceive you if you haven't been taught how to identify their warning signs. I called my program "unmasking the abuser" because it's rare for an abuser not to have a disguise, a persona that allows them to realistically pretend to be emotionally healthy and even appealing. Most put real effort into drawing a strong emotional bond from their new romantic partner or their new friend. Once that bond is sealed, the abuser will make it tough for that person to get away. Usually there's a significant cost for freedom paid for by their victims. That's why recognizing abusers early and accurately is crucial, whatever role that abuser plays in your life. We're going to explore all that in these two episodes. By the way, before we start, you'll notice most of these are basically variations on the tactics abusers use with their romantic targets. I gave you a heads up at the beginning of this series that once you accept your superpower and you can recognize abusive tactics, you'll be able to use it for more than just deciding who to spend time with on a Friday night. You can use it everywhere. If you haven't listened to those previous podcasts, it's worth it for you to do so. Pay special attention to episode 10, where I give you tips to make it easier to remember the key features of each tactic. Now, let's start looking behind that curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz. How do you recognize an abuser when it's not about romance? And importantly, how can you protect yourself? Let's begin by looking at some of the issues you're going to have to deal with when the abuser is a family member, a neighbor, a new or old friend, or someone at work. And by the way, when I say work, that includes volunteer work for good causes. I never cease to be amazed at how many abusers are drawn to community causes that strive to make the world a better place. It's smart, though. They get to enjoy that halo effect we spoke about when we discussed abuser selection criteria. Working in anti-bullying or domestic violence or child protection, people are very disinclined to evaluate their abusive behavior accurately, because people want to believe someone who would do this type of work must be a good person. Not at all. So pay attention. Dealing with an abuser in any context can make your life a misery, whether that person you're dealing with is a family member, someone who just moved in next door, or a work colleague who's targeted you for their mistreatment. The first thing you'll notice is how assertive they are. They want to take control of the group, whether that's a family group, a bunch of friends, a neighborhood association, or the committees, or union leadership at your job. They want to be in charge, and will be so determined, most people will back away and leave them to it. Now that doesn't mean they'll do a bad job of it. We'll talk in a few minutes about the fact that abusers often have skills that people appreciate, as long as those people aren't the ones being bullied by them. The next thing you'll notice how they're easily angered or annoyed. Their IR isn't always directed at you, or even at anyone in your group. Sometimes they'll turn their anger outwards at first, as someone they see is hindering the success of the group, or impeding the group, getting what it deserves. When their aggression leads to a win for the group, that cements the abusers' authority and leadership position to the other group members. Then, you may begin to notice abusers seem to be upset about someone, or something, almost every day. If they feel free to do so, they'll rage and rant about whatever or whomever it is. They'll resist attempts to move on. The reactions of others when they do this is usually relief, as long as they're not the focus of their anger. That's what happens with bullies of all kinds. People often don't intervene because they're just happy that this time, at least, they're not the one being picked on. The abusers will also keep bringing up whatever is annoying them, not allowing it to drop. They're terrible at self-soothing, or allowing someone else to calm them down. Even when circumstances mean they have to repress their rage for a while, as soon as they can, they'll explode again, turning the issues over and over like a child, picking at a scab. That unwillingness to let go of their anger or discomfort can be seen in all areas of their lives. If you've ever made an abuser angry or done something they interpret as a betrayal, the abusers' favorite term, they'll bring it up repeatedly. If anything occurs that triggers their memory of that event, they'll be hopping mad all over again, even if the event was years ago, and you've both moved on since then. Abusers are also incredibly moody. Some of them can periodically be fun and funny, generous and thoughtful. When they're in a good mood, they can almost make you forget how scary they can be at other times. Well, almost. When they're in a bad mood, it's like dealing with a tornado, wreaking havoc and destruction in a wide circle all around themselves. Since an abusers' moods can't be predicted, and their destructive moods can be incited by something that has nothing to do with you personally, you'll probably find Find yourself on pins and needles, always expecting the next crisis or the next explosion. Your smiles during the sunny times will become fake. After all, your stomach is still clenched from the last time he or she rained down their cruelty on your head. You'll be afraid to show your unease though, just in case your reaction brings it all back in response. The resulting anxiety and hyper-vigilance now becomes a standard response to being in the same room with the abuser or even having their name mentioned. If the other people around you haven't seen that side of the abuser, or they're in denial about how bad it is for you, or perhaps to be frank, they just don't care as long as it doesn't directly affect them, that can make it much worse for you. While not only feel hurt, you'll feel isolated. You'll lose respect and closeness to the people who are enabling the abuser because they've obviously chosen a side and it wasn't yours. Any talk about abusers has to mention manipulation. Abusers often maneuver to turn the people around them against each other. They certainly try to turn everyone against the person they've chosen for the main focus of their mistreatment. This takes us to another aspect of the abuser's behavior, scapegoating. Abusers are strongly inclined to find someone in their personal sphere to be the main focus of their cruelty and blame. In a romantic relationship, this includes their partner, but can also include one or more of their children, or perhaps a close relative that their partner loves the most. In a neighborhood, it's usually the person who's the most different, perhaps a different ethnicity, or they have a different job type than most of their neighbors. Abusers are usually racist, misogynist, and very prejudiced against anyone not like themselves. At work, an abuser will often pick on either someone they believe is their greatest competition, or the person with the fewest number of allies in the organization. In families, abusers also scapegoat the person they perceive as their greatest competition for the love and attention of the other family members. So siblings are especially sought out for their malicious maltreatment. Abusers will quickly become nasty and mean if anyone dares to take their victim's side, or tries to get them to be more balanced in their reactions. That defender will risk being emotionally brutalized, shunned, or neglected in retaliation. Or perhaps the abuser will do really nice things for everyone except the person they've decided to pick on and anyone who's recently taken that person's side. The gratitude felt by the recipients of their largess get the message. Stay on the abuser's good side and allow them to pick on whomever they choose or else. The fact abusers lie and well and without guilt should also be mentioned here. If they don't have a powerful, genuine story about how horrible their targeted person is, they'll make it up and sound convincing. Often this involves the abusers blaming their victim for something the abusers done. Keep in mind, lies are best if they can be remembered. Projection is also an abuser favorite. Claim your victim is guilty of your crime. Along with telling lies, abusers bring up and weaponize any mistakes, problems, or transgressions in their victims' past as a way of distracting attention from their own recent behavior. Even if their victims' issues occurred years ago or even in childhood. To prepare their defenses, the flying monkeys is another abuser favorite, though whisper words in the family kitchen or around the coffee machine at work or before the victim arrives at the pub where the group of friends are meeting. As told is supposedly something terrible their targeted victim has done. Along with this disclosure, they'll make an emotional request. Please don't say anything I wasn't supposed to tell. Anyone who spends time with an abuser quickly discovers they have a severe double standard as well as magical thinking. When abusers get caught doing something awful, they demand and expect immediate forgiveness with their crimes never mentioned again. At the same time, they'll regurgitate and use anything done by others at every opportunity even when it's not appropriate or relevant. They demand unquestioned and unending respect, accommodation, attention, and forgiveness while they offer little or none of this in return. This has to be accepted without complaint or punishment ensues. So how does magical thinking fit into the scenario? When held accountable because they've gone too far and their victim is seeking to leave the relationship or because others have been made aware of the exploitation and the high level of harm, abusers will often announce they've changed in a fundamental way. They'll swear they're no longer aggressive or hyper-selfish or in some other way they profoundly altered. At this point the abuser fully expects everyone around them to behave as though the abuser's declaration is the absolute truth even with no evidence to back up their words. In the abuser's mind, just saying it makes it so. Like when Dorothy clicked her heels together three times and said there's no place like home and was magically returned to Kansas. Once again, to question or to doubt or to deny is to risk incredible rage and vindictiveness, even if it has to be suppressed until sometime in the future when the abuser has fewer witnesses. Speaking of vindictiveness, this is another cornerstone of the abuser's behavior whatever their relationship to you. Never forgive, never forget, could be tattooed on their foreheads. Not only will any infraction, real or imagined, never be forgiven, they'll lie in weight like a snake in the grass, priming themselves to strike whenever their victim is unprotected. They don't care if it takes days, weeks or years. Whenever they can, they'll attack in retaliation for what they perceive as a terrible wrong that was done to them. A betrayal. Unfortunately for you, if you're the abuser's targeted victim, the behavior that provokes their retaliation could be something you had nothing to do with. Like being born first or being born last. It could be due to envy over your well-deserved promotion that goes to you instead of the abuser. It could be because you've fixed up your house and it's getting admiring comments from other neighbors. It could be due to the fact you found a spouse before the abuser did and you're asking family members or mutual friends to be in your wedding. What's considered worthy of brutal retribution in the abuser's mind could be as simple as living your life and attaining something the abuser envies or resents. There's not really much you can do about it except to limit the choices you make so the abuser can look down on you with pity and mock you without your complaint. Here's something I hinted at earlier. A lot of abusers I know who've been able to successfully maintain jobs, careers or relationships are also highly skilled in a number of ways. I'm not talking here about the abusers whose only response is to scowl and bark and are barely tolerated by anyone around them. Sometimes the more cunning types are hardworking and skilled or professionally accomplished and become quite successful or even prominent. These individuals end up with both money and some degree of influence. Or perhaps they're really good at practical things that can make the lives of their chosen recipients easier. What I mean by this, if they're male they're Mr. Fixit and can put all sorts of things together flawlessly including IKEA flat pack furniture. They can mow and grow and drill like someone on a TV reality series. If they're female, they're amazing cooks who bring the best desserts and salads to the family barbecue. They so do amazing needlework and can decorate both cakes and houses. And before you email me in complaint, abusers' skills don't have to fall along traditional gender lines. There's nothing keeping a female abuser from being adapted fixing things or a male abuser from being a highly skilled chef. Some abusers who can't be bothered with learning and honing their practical skills may be willing to hire people to do these things for those they favor, or perhaps they're incredibly charming or really funny. Wherever they decide to turn their spotlight, abusers always know where to focus their attention. At work, it's used to impress the bosses in the family. They shine their attention on the patriarch or the matriarch. If it's a neighbor, they look to see who has the most influence and do things to make that person or that family's life easier. If it's a friend, they'll assess the most popular person in their friendship group and do things for that person. Or again, maybe they do things for everyone, except the person they're competing with armed with a set of feasible excuses for why they left that person out. This single tactic, their usefulness, can be the difference between abusers getting away with really bad behavior for a long time and someone holding their feet to the fire. Lazy abusers get caught, get avoided, go to jail. While cunning abusers put in the work to travel smoothly like a clear stream ruining lives as they splash through. Abusers don't want to change. They want to do what they like, unimpeded. If it requires kissing up to certain people or pretending to be someone they're not sometimes, that's a fair exchange in their minds. Most abusers are very crafty. They learn early how to conceal their overwhelming rage, cruelty, and need for power when necessary. They're also skilled at assessing who they can mistreat and who they cannot. If someone is astute and will push back, they often recognize they have to behave around that individual. They'll wait to express their spite and cruelty until that person isn't around. If they can, they'll set their flying monkeys to work to destroy that person's influence and eliminate their authority returning it to the abuser. Abusers always do the maximum they can get away with and whatever will give them the most power and control that they crave like the rest of us long for fresh air. This is the Unmasking the Abuser podcast with Dr. Dena McMillan. If you're listening to this episode because you suspect someone in your family, a neighbor, someone at your workplace, or perhaps you're questioning whether one of your friends may be an abuser, you may have started by researching their actions online. If you did, you'll see lots of links and references to various personality disorders, psychological issues, emotional problems, and yes, abusers suffer from a host of these along with other psychological and emotional conditions. Don't bother trying for an amateur diagnosis. It's too easy to get it wrong if you haven't been trained. That's the bad news. The good news is that you don't need a label to know these people are troubled and to recognize the enormous havoc they can play in your life. Their behavior alone is usually more than sufficient to send up bright warning lights alerting you to danger ahead. As for the people themselves, most abusers are highly resistant to gaining a professional diagnosis or seeking individual therapy. Sometimes they'll do so for a short while as a gesture to calm a victim who's threatening to leave or to reassure law enforcement. Once their relationship is firmly reestablished, they'll find an excuse not to continue. None of the almost 700 abusers I've interviewed were really seeking to heal that broken part of themselves. They enjoyed the control and power they had in their relationships. They got pleasure from manipulating other people like puppets on strings. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? But they were open and honest with me. After all, I wasn't able to make any decisions about their lives and nothing they told me could be repeated. It's why I wrote the book, but he says he loves me. Without revealing any individual secrets, I wanted to share with women how these men really think and feel when they're telling the truth because it won't cost them anything. Let's peek under that rock, shall we? That means we start with the selection process. This is how abusers choose their victims. Whether their victim is a romantic partner, a new friend, or the criteria they use to hire someone to work for them, or what they do to get a work colleague to be part of their team. You can also see some of this at work in families where abusers select some people to favor and others to pick on and blame. Next episode will continue going through all the tactics one-by-one and look at how they're used in non-romantic relationships. I'm going to share something I call the "circles of intimacy" to help you gauge how the painful person, whether they qualify as an abuser or not, really feels about you and how in your heart you really feel about that person. Then we'll talk about how to shift things to reduce your exposure and lessen your pain. Now let's get back to the selection process. Selection one, ready and set. In romantic relationships, this category includes women who've been raised to submit to their male partner, or women who've had previous abusive relationships requiring total compliance. In patriarchal families, this dynamic will be evident among all the members of all generations not just between the parents. It can mean an abusive male family member will still be catered to, cared for, and forgiven easily by the female members of that family. When women from this background work outside of the home, male abusers who are bosses or colleagues may also try to take advantage of the woman's social training to create a dominant position for themselves that far outreaches the woman's job description. This particular dynamic is less likely to be part of a platonic friendship between males and females as most traditional women have few male friends once they're no longer in school. The exception I've seen most often is a longstanding mix sex friendship group where the abuser in the group exploits his position. But what if the abuser is female? The dominant submissive dynamic can still be established if the female abuser mimics the attitudes and behaviors usually associated with males acting with complete assertiveness, making frequent demands, holding expectations of being cared for and catered to by the target. This can trigger a traditional target's social conditioning and she'll be more likely to accommodate the female abuser in a similar way she would a male relative. What if the targeted victim is male? When teen boys and men come from families with a very dominant parent they can still be drawn to replicate that dynamic in their friendships or work relationships. Compliance even if they hate it is normal for them. This will easily be spotted and exploited by an abuser in a non-romantic context, whatever the sex of the abuser. So please don't think the boys or men you care about are immune from this selection process and the manipulation that goes with it because it's something that only happens to women. Selection process too, advantages. Again, we see the dynamic we've come to associate with romance replicated in a family setting, in a neighborhood, in a platonic friendship, or a work relationship. The abuser will select someone for special attention and a closer relationship within the family or makes a move to establish a friendship or seeks out someone at work although the abuser has multiple advantages over their target. The abuser may be more established in the neighborhood or perhaps has the most expensive property. Whatever the situation, the abuser has the edge. [BLANK_AUDIO] perhaps being significantly older, or more attractive, more financially well-off, more sophisticated and savvy, perhaps has a better social connection, has a much higher position in the company, is more popular and liked by the bosses, or perhaps is more liked by the other members of the family. Whatever the advantages the abuser holds, both parties understand the terms and conditions. The abuser will always remain at the forefront in the dominant position as the focus of attention as the one in charge. The target is to always feel flattered and grateful and be loyal. The relatively disadvantaged target knows what's expected, do what you're told, be attentive, respectful, compliant, or get rejected and lose all the advantages offered by the abuser. Selection process three - the challenge. To be honest, I expect this category to have fewer audience members who are nodding along. Abusers get fewer rewards in a family relationship, friendship, a neighborhood association, or work relationship if the target is highly resistant to establishing a bond, especially one where submission is demanded. The effort expended may not seem like a fair trade to the abuser. The exception that comes to mind, though, is when the abuser is a work colleague at a lower position than the target. Then the abuser may work hard to make him or herself useful and then irreplaceable to the target. They'll often use the ploys I called "Harry Helpful" or on your side in romantic relationships. Even if the target initially resists, the abuser gains significant power if he or she is able to become invaluable to someone with more authority in the organization. I've seen this move used by abusers who enjoy controlling and bullying their colleagues and those at a lower position in the organization. By becoming invaluable to someone in charge, they can offset any criticism and minimize the likelihood they'll be held fully accountable. If and when the abuser's terrible behavior is brought to their victim's attention, often they will be disinclined to interfere. Because they know if they do, they'll lose the considerable favors offered by the abuser. And before you can ask, yes, sexual favors may be part of this. I've seen situations where the abusers offer sexual favors directly to their victims or in other cases they may set the target up with the abuser's attractive friends. When this situation does occur in families, it's often an outside carer or even someone who marries into the family and turns their attention onto the powerful patriarch or matriarch. The abuser will warm their way in by being upbeat and fun and always incredibly useful. They'll take the target side fully in all disputes and will be busy sending out the flying monkeys, whispering lies, terrible things, and half-truths about the other family members to create and then maximize emotional distance between their victim and their victims loved ones. In this way, they gain enormous power and control over everyone. In the case of older but powerful or well-off family members, it's not unusual for the abuser to be a beneficiary in the will or to highly profit in some other way. So did this episode get you thinking about the way an abuser can warm their way into your life or a loved one's life without it being romantic? I hope you'll be more careful. I'm sure some of you were listening to this and saying to yourself, "I knew it!" As your suspicions about someone you know were confirmed. If you have any interesting examples you'd like to share with me or with all of us, please email me and let me know. The email address is easy, it's just unmasking [email protected]. Now next episode, we're going to continue discussing abuse in non-romantic relationships. We're going to look specifically at how abusers tactics and maneuvers are reshaped to gain ground in relationships that don't involve physical intimacy or marriage or having children together. We're still highly dangerous, though, and deserve to be held under the light. I hope you'll join me then. Thank you for listening. I'm Dr. Dina McMillan.