Pathological Liars, Pathological Truth-revealers
Emotional abusers often have a pathological tendency to lie. However, such individuals also have a pathological tendency to reveal the truth, in roundabout ways.
In fact, it is possible for an emotional abuser to reveal the truth by telling a lie. This is because an emotional abuser’s tendency to lie is at least partly systematic, and can be predicted by specific triggers. E.g. this is the case with the phenomenon of psychological projection. If an emotional abuser makes an unjust accusation, and you can’t see any ordinary reason for this accusation, then it’s highly likely that the accusation has been triggered by the emotional abuser’s perception of their own wrongdoing. Indeed, it is often the case that the target is being accused of precisely the wrongdoing with respect to which the emotional abuser is repressing shame. Therefore, by projecting this wrongdoing onto the target (via an unjust accusation), the emotional abuser is inadvertently revealing a hidden truth.
Emotional abusers might also reveal truths about themselves in other abnormal ways. They can express them in sanitised forms; project them onto people other than you (the person to whom they are speaking); or depersonalise them by talking about them in the abstract, or by attributing them to people in general (instead of to themselves specifically). Some concrete examples might be useful here.
E.g. at her most candid, my emotional abuser once said:
‘I always tell fibs to get out of trouble’.
I suspect that this was a sanitised version of the truth; a sanitised version of something like:
‘I routinely manipulate others, with disregard for their wellbeing, just to avoid being held to account for bad things that I’ve actually done.’
At around the same time, in the same relatively candid mood, she said:
‘I go AWOL on friendships and relationships and all this shit’
—which I suspect was a sanitised version of:
'I abuse the people in my life by stonewalling them, giving them the silent treatment, and discarding them like disposable objects.’
Finally, at around the same time, in the same relatively candid mood, she also said:
'I need to treat the people I hurt better’
—which I suspect was a sanitised version of:
'I’ve been told that I should stop verbally and emotionally abusing others when I feel bad for hurting them—that I should stop tearing them down just to make myself feel better—because it’s bad to hurt other people, it escalates problems instead of solving them, only ends up making me feel worse, and leads to an endless cycle of abusing people over and over again’.
During the idealisation phase, my emotional abuser said the following:
‘I’m yours. Completely. Not even an ego boost.’
’Not even an ego boost’ is an odd thing to say, in this context. Why would I ever think that she was saying this merely to boost my ego? Instead, I suspect that she was indirectly revealing a truth about herself. Namely, that she has a tendency to lie about love and romantic devotion, merely to boost her own ego. More specifically, that she has a tendency to romantically idealise people who are presently boosting her ego, just to amplify that boost to her own ego.
During the one reprieve in the stonewalling that followed the discard, my abuser demanded that I stop focusing on my own sadness, because it was ‘narcissistic’. I replied by noting that if anyone in that situation were behaving narcissistically, it was her: she presently seemed to be expressing narcissistic rage, and I’d been discarded as though she’d used me for narcissistic supply and the supply had run out (at the time, the idea that she was narcissistically motivated seemed far less likely to me). Obviously, assuming that she was indeed narcissistically motivated, her describing my behaviour as narcissistic would have been a textbook instance of projection. I now think that this interpretation is further reinforced by what she said next:
‘You think you’re smarter than me, don’t you? It shows.’
Why would she say this, unless she felt belittled (i.e. narcissistically injured) by the fact that I’d just inadvertently hit the nail on the head? In other words, I suspect that the above unjust accusation that I felt intellectually superior to her (note that it is also an instance of the abusive tactic called ‘mind-reading’) was another instance of projection, by which she was revealing the uncomfortable fact that she felt belittled, bested, or exposed by my having hit upon the truth about her, by projecting this uncomfortable fact onto my intentions and the thoughts that I was having about her. Accordingly, by way of an aggressive remark, she accused me of thinking the very thing that she was thinking or feeling about herself (roughly, that I was smart enough to have figured out what she didn’t want me to know), the thing that had made her feel belittled, inferior, or exposed. Indirectly, she thereby conveyed her feeling that I’d been condescending to her, or had acted arrogantly, simply because I’d unknowingly hit upon the truth. It is a ubiquitous characteristic of narcissism to shoot the messenger.
I also suspect that my abuser revealed uncomfortable truths by attributing them to people in general, and thereby depersonalising them. E.g. after an early instance of devaluation, as she was just starting to re-approach me (i.e. to ‘dose’ me), she said roughly the following:
‘I think it speaks volumes for your character that you’re honest when you feel upset or vulnerable in a relationship, and you don’t play games or try to hide it. It means I can always be sure of how you feel. I think a great deal of emotional unhealthiness and permanent unease in the world is due to people having a large gap between how they act and how they feel. Or, rather, that it’s due to people acting in a way that somehow denies what they feel.’
This is a nice thing to say (superficial charm is strongly exhibited in the idealisation, hoovering, and dosing stages of the abuse cycle). But I suspect that by saying this, she was revealing undesirable knowledge about herself—knowledge that she was either repressing at the time or simply unwilling to admit—by projecting that knowledge onto people in general, rather than attributing it to herself specifically. I.e. I suspect that the full truth would have been expressed by something more like the following:
‘I think it speaks volumes for your character that you’re honest when you feel upset or vulnerable in a relationship, and you don’t play games or try to hide it. It means I can always be sure of how you feel. But I’m afraid that I won’t be able to show you the same respect. Because I find it very difficult to be honest when I feel upset or vulnerable in a relationship, and so I do tend to play games and try to hide it. This is something that I don’t like about myself. It’s emotionally unhealthy for me and for others. I cause a great deal of permanent unease, because there’s often a large gap between how I act and how I feel. Or, rather, because I often act in a way that somehow denies what I feel.’
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