Today my therapist read the following advice column response to me. She wanted me to know that it's the response I deserved years ago from all the therapy I sought (and paid a lot of $$$ for) when I was in an abusive, controlling relationship and trying to understand what was going on. None of the therapists I sought help from for eight years ever identified for me that I was being abused or controlled.
After reading the column to me, my beloved now-therapist, who has helped me through years of post-abuse trauma, then tore up my payment check to her from last month and told me she chose to do so because she feels strongly about doing "reparative" work where harm has been done.
What she read to me was the second story, on the following linked page, from Carolyn Hax's advice column in The Washington Post.
Here's the text of the column:
"Ms. Hax: I have been dating a gentleman for 1½ years. He's a nice man, in my same profession, divorced and also a single parent.
Since the pandemic he has spent a lot more time with me, and every time I get on a call with a friend, he sulks, often seems upset, and storms off. He's in his mid-40s so I find this behavior peculiar. He also often gets upset with me when I agree to outdoor, distanced gatherings with a friend who needs to talk; he admonishes me for days about not being cautious.
I am feeling a bit trapped and wanting to run. I have found myself changing who I am and walking on eggshells as a result of his behavior. I have suggested therapy and tried talking to him about it, but he deflects and turns it back on me. He is otherwise lovely, but this is extra stress during an already hard time.
— M.
M.: Get out. Respect your impulse to run. It’s a healthy response to danger.
If he were putting you in a cage, then you’d have no doubt he was restricting your freedom. You say you’ve responded to his moody possessiveness by eggshell-walking, which restricts your freedom to be yourself. Just because it is psychological doesn’t mean it’s not a cage.
Pandemia teems with mental health challenges, but don’t lump in possessiveness, control or blaming. They star on lists of predictors for abuse."
"Just because it's psychological doesn't mean it's not a cage." Yes! Exactly.
Historically, psychological abuse has been roundly downplayed across society. Many victims remain in relationship or contact with their abusers (whether spouse or dating partner or parent or other family member) because they think "domestic violence" is only about physical abuse, so that if physical violence isn't happening in the relationship, too often victims don't realize that they are being abused.
The words of the column prompted me to realize in a new way, as I then told my therapist, that psychological abuse actually IS physical abuse because 1) it quite frequently or even regularly impacts the recipient's body because of the stress hormones it causes and the neurological pathways it establishes within the brain and overall neurological system, and 2) especially in intimate partner relationships, it restricts the recipient's physical freedoms, as well as agency and autonomy over choices such as when to be with friends or even how to dress or rest or even feed her own body.
Psychological abuse creates an invisible cage, similar in some respects to the invisible fence that a pet owner might use to contain a dog. If the dog crosses the invisible line of the invisible fence, the dog will receive a painful, frightening shock! The target of psychological abuse might not actually be inside a physical cage, but nevertheless is aware that there are numerous invisible lines all around, lines that dwell within the mind of their controlling and abusive partner, lines that they dare not cross or else risk being punished for in some form. Worse even than that, often the lines change or move, the rules are inconsistent or appear out of nowhere, or the bars of expectation (aka entitlement) get raised ever higher, so that there is never actually any safe pathway and the invisible bars of the cage encroach closer and closer around the victim until she can barely breathe or is terrified to even move. Living in a house of mirrors would be far easier.
The restrictions of personal freedom waged by a psychological abuser are very real. The limitations of personal and bodily - and even mental thinking or feeling - autonomy and agency are very real -- and very harmful.
From the advice column response that she shared with me, what my therapist most wanted me to have heard years ago were the simple words, "Get out." Would that I could have been gifted those words when I was 36 instead of 52!
My hope is to use this blog to start writing and verbalizing more about these and related topics.
#goodtherapy #thatwasnotlove #psychologicalabuse #autonomy #agency #entitlement #narcissism #covertnarcissism #fuckthepatriarchy #fucksexism #fuckmisogyny
