If you were ever in an abusive relationship, or if you think you might be in an abusive relationship right now, there are two things that you need to understand.
1. Being exposed to abuse for a long period of time will change the way you think, feel and behave. Over time, you’ll start to experience mental health problems and behavioral changes as a result of being abused.
2. Developing behavioral and emotional problems as a result of being abused does not make you an abuser yourself.
What am I talking about? If you’ve ever been in an unhealthy relationship, you might be familiar with one of the following scenarios:
Your partner is holding on to your arms and wrists to prevent you from leaving the room during an argument. You try to shove them off you, and they stumble and hurt themselves. Afterward, they claim that you are the physically abusive one in the relationship, because “you hurt them” and they’ve never hit you.
Your partner has a history of cheating on you, or of having inappropriate boundaries with others. Recently, they’ve begun getting very close with a “friend” of their preferred gender, spending lots of one-on-one time with that person and constantly texting them. You tell your partner that this friendship is making you uncomfortable, and they accuse you of being controlling and jealous.
Your partner constantly criticizes you, puts you down, mocks you, belittles you or picks fights with you, but always maintains a calm, collected demeanor. One day, after months of enduring this, the criticism finally becomes too much for you and you snap - you start yelling and crying. Your partner tells you that you are the emotionally abusive one, because they’ve never raised their voice at you.
Your partner has made you feel so worthless and unattractive that you no longer feel like having sex, or engaging in any sexual activities. Your partner accuses you of intentionally withholding sex and affection to “punish” them.
You tell one of your mutual friends about something that your partner did, and they respond with concern, telling you that your partner mistreated you. When your partner finds out, they accuse you of being manipulative and making up stories to intentionally turn their friends against them, to leave them isolated.
When your partner is angry with you, they tend to “punish” you by giving you the silent treatment, avoiding you, withholding affection, blocking you on social media, locking you out of the house, or behaving coldly to you. The dozenth time they try it, you become overwhelmed at the thought of being ignored for days, and you panic; you start to beg and plead with your partner not to do this, blowing up their phone and becoming increasingly desperate. They tell you that you are emotionally abusive and manipulative, because you won’t respect their “reasonable” request for space.
Being constantly mistreated by your partner eventually causes you to sink into a deep depression, and you struggle to keep your job or do basic household tasks. Your partner calls you lazy, and implies that you are intentionally leeching off them financially.
Your partner is an expert at being calm and charming whenever other people are around, even though they mistreat you in private. When your friends notice that you don’t seem like yourself lately and that you’re behaving strangely toward your partner, your partner tells them that you are paranoid and hysterical, and that you are trying to ruin their reputation on purpose.
There’s been a lot more awareness of abusive relationships in recent years, and a lot less tolerance for abusive behaviour, which is a great thing. But it’s not just victims, survivors and concerned friends who are listening - abusers are listening too. And many of them have figured out that “making you feel like the abusive one” is the best tactic they could ever use to keep you from questioning their behaviour.
Convincing a victim that they’re actually an aggressor is something that plays to an abuser’s greatest strengths - abusers excel at destroying their victims’ self-esteem, and twisting situations to make sure other people are always at fault. Telling someone “you’re an abusive person and no one else would ever put up with you” is a relatively easy way to make them believe that they have no other options outside the relationship; it makes them feel like they’re at fault for all the problems in the relationship, and even that they “owe” their abuser gratitude for dealing with them. Being abused completely tanks your self-esteem, and people with low self-esteem are very willing to believe that they are bad people who burden the ones they love.
It doesn’t help that the media has painted a very specific image of what abused victims - particularly abused women - should look like. People who have been abused are expected to be frail, timid and weepy; anyone who doesn’t match that description may start to have serious doubts about whether they are a “real” victim or not. But in reality, being abused causes mental illness, and mental illness isn’t always pretty. People involved in long-term abuse situations may start having extreme mood swings, paranoia, random bouts of anger or crying, irritability, anxiety, issues concentrating, insomnia, chronic physical pains with no biological cause, and severe social withdrawal. That does not make them abusers themselves - it makes them people with serious side effects of their partner’s abuse.
The idea that abuse is usually mutual, or that both parties tend to be at fault for abuse is a myth. Although there may be extremely rare instances where both people went into the relationship as abusers, in the vast majority of cases, even if no one in the relationship has great relationship skills, there is one abuser, and one person responding to the abuse. Saying “we abused each other” or “we both played a role” is a common tactic for abusers to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, and to make victims feel responsible for their own abuse.
If you’re really in deep in the relationship and you’re not sure whether your partner is right when they call you an abuser, the best thing to do is to think about how you were before the relationship, and how you were in previous relationships. In abusive relationships, victims feel less and less like themselves over time; they transform from a relatively happy, content person into a moody, anxious person that they barely even recognize. Abusers, on the other hand, feel more and more like themselves as the relationship goes on; once the initial honeymoon period is over, they feel increasingly comfortable busting out their cruel, controlling and entitled tendencies whenever they see fit. Victims may have had happy, healthy relationships before and after being with an abuser. Abusers, however, will have all of their relationships follow the exact same pattern over and over again.
If you are turning into a person you don’t want to be because of an abusive relationship, the only way to fix it is to leave. There is no “dealing with it”, “sucking it up” or “trying to be better”. It’s a profoundly unhealthy situation to be in, and you will only become more unrecognizable as it goes on. Therapy is a good solution if you’re looking for someone to help you gather the strength to leave, but therapy to help you “be a better partner” or “react less” is not going to be helpful; trying to repair the effects of an abusive relationship while you’re still in it is like trying to treat someone’s peanut allergy while they keep putting Reese’s cups in their mouth. Reacting to someone else’s prolonged abuse does not make you a bad person, and you deserve better.
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