"who benefits from the imbalance and who suffers most? and what if one of the reasons things haven't resolved, despite all the effort that you've put into it, is because the person you're with knows they benefit from you being in an imbalanced relationship"
take this in, digest it.....
now apply this to anti-transmasc discourse
and tbh trans discourse overall
transcript:
Don't be fooled. Someone can abuse you in very covert ways that don't show up physically. There are some people whose best way to control you is to actually wear you down.
And one of the tools that they will use is employing a tool that will effectively turn you into your own self monitoring system.
Take, for example, the person that you're with does or says something that impacts you negatively, and you wanna bring it up with them like, "Hey, you know, when I heard you say this, here is how I felt afterwards. You know, moving forward, can we try and find a different way of expressing ourselves that [...] Is there a different way that we can express ourselves?"
It's a very normal thing to do.
But, if someone's reaction to that is, "Oh, you know, you don't think that I can do anything right?" or "You know, I'm super stressed" or "I mean, I hear you, but like, you know, you do X, Y, and Z"
If you're not careful and you don't know what's really happening here, you will adjust yourself and adapt how you show up in hopes that y'all can get to the objective of what you originally brought up and how you originally said it. Like that you can still continue to meet that objective, which is repair.
But if someone is an abusive person, they're not looking for repair.
They're looking for control.
They exploit the instability in the relationship as a way to gain a more advantageous position over you, to reduce any kind of potential vulnerability or weakness or lack of control that they would otherwise perceive.
But if you take what they're sharing at face value, and you're like, "Okay, well, maybe they are stressed. Let me be more mindful. Maybe I didn't express myself the way I needed to. Like, let me be more considerate. I can see how those words trigger them, so let me be empathetic and readjust how I might phrase something."
What this person might inadvertently be doing with you is training you to continually be off balance, off kilter, constantly monitoring,
thinking, before you ever go and have a conversation with them,
"Okay, well, how do I have this conversation? Which words do I use?"
You might be spending all this time researching, going to therapy, doing all these things, investing a lot of time, a lot of emotional energy, a lot of psychological calories, again, in hopes that things will improve.
But what's really happening here is your life force is being drained. Your mind is being exhausted. You're starting to become incredibly overwhelmed. Even if you mask it really well, and you're still very high functioning in all areas of your life.
Over time you start to feel like, "Oh, I'm really burnt out." And you can't really point to what exactly it is. "Maybe it's because I'm unfulfilled at work." "Maybe it's because I haven't caught up with my friends." "Maybe I need to go and do some self care."
There's this energy that goes now into overcompensating to make up for the deficiency in your relationship. Because the person that you're with is not investing equally and you have to do more, be more, carry more. That is a symptom of an imbalanced relationship.
So you have to ask yourself the question, who benefits from the imbalance and who suffers most? And what if, one of the reasons things haven't resolved, despite all the effort that you've put into it, is because the person that you're with knows they benefit from you being in an imbalanced relationship.
Source: the.god.led on tiktok
if your abusive behavior makes you feel like immediately lashing out at the person putting the mirror in front of you, consider that maybe you're the bad one in this situation. :)
