Anxiety and Abuse
There’s anxiety, and then there’s anxiety — neither one of which is fun, but there is a difference. Let me explain: the first type of anxiety is the kind where you feel worried or uneasy, usually because you are anticipating some event with an uncertain outcome. When you know what the event is, we call that stress; when that feeling is persistent and you cannot attribute it to anything specific, we call that anxiety.
Most people experience this type of anxiety at some point in their lives, especially given the modern world’s chronic state of uncertainty. As we discussed in a previous post, this type of anxiety arises when the Alarm Emotion of Worry doesn’t get shut off.
The other type of anxiety — the more nefarious type of anxiety — arises when someone is purposely kept in a permanent state of uncertainty by someone in their life: their abuser. This person is constantly uneasy because they never know what’s going to set off their abuser, a feeling often described as walking on eggshells. No matter how hard they try, victims struggle to gain their balance on an ever-shifting landscape. Over time, the person falls into feelings of helplessness and resignation because they have no ability to manage, change, or leave this volatile situation.
If you’ve studied the topic of abuse, you might recognize this as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), which develops when a person experiences trauma over a prolonged period of time, and the person perceives little or no chance to escape. Its symptoms are the same as PTSD, plus three more significant symptoms: emotional dysregulation, negative self-belief, and interpersonal difficulties. Emotional dysregulation is what we most closely relate with “feeling anxious.”
Side note: it bothers me that the word “post-” is included in C-PTSD because a lot of the time, there’s nothing “post” about it — the abuse that has led to the condition is still ongoing. Instead, we think this should be called Chronic Traumatic Stress Disorder.
As we alluded to, this second type of anxiety doesn’t stem from the same place as the first type, which is Worry. This feeling arises from the prolonged and unresolved Alarm Emotion of Fear.
Worry is the Alarm Emotion that results when something is amiss with the Earth element, which is the element of care. When we are not sure that we will be cared for, or that someone we love will receive the care they need, we worry. This is why we closely examine any broken Care Cycles in our lives to try to resolve the first type of anxiety.
Fear, on the other hand, is the Alarm Emotion of the Water element; this is the emotion we feel when our survival — whether our agency over our life or our actual life — is threatened. While having your life threatened sounds extreme (“Do I really think my partner is homicidal and could kill me? I mean, he’s awful, but he’s not murderous!”), ask someone with C-PTSD what they thought would happen if they left their abuser. “My life would be over. I didn’t know how I would continue to live.”
These are not hyperbolic expressions: approximately 75% of women who are killed by their batterers are murdered when they attempt to leave or after they have left an abusive relationship; overall, the statistics on domestic violence are chilling.
But how does an abuser — even one that we cannot imagine could actually kill anyone — make their victim feel like their life would be over? Abusers create a very special set of circumstances around their victims which we have likened to a prison being built around you, even though you have committed no crime. When you are not free to live your life on your own terms, you may be alive but you’re hardly living. You’re trapped, and there’s nothing you can do.
Here are the four walls, described as phases, abusers use to imprison their victims.
Phase 1: Isolate the Target
There’s safety in numbers, especially when it comes to being able to protect members within a community. When a person is surrounded by friends and family, who would dare to threaten their safety? This is, after all, the fundamental reason humans formed societies in the first place.
This concept is so universally accepted that Jane Austen even wrote about it in Pride and Prejudice over two centuries ago (if you haven’t read the book, you can also watch the movie; this is the best adaptation). Mr. Gardiner says about Lydia Bennett, “It appears to me so very unlikely that [Mr. Wickham] should form such a design against a girl who is by no means unprotected or friendless….” Loosely paraphrased, Mr. Gardiner is saying, “No one would be stupid enough to take advantage of a girl who has family and friends who will protect her.”
Abusers know this, which is precisely why they isolate their targets, separating them from their friends, family, and anyone else who would protect them. The methods an abuser uses can be subtle at first: He “surprises” her with plans when she’s scheduled a night out with her friends so that she ends up having to cancel them. He’s “too tired” to drive to her parents’ house for their weekly Sunday night dinner but says he doesn’t want to be without her for the evening. He’s aloof and unpleasant when they’re in group settings together, making the people around them uncomfortable in his presence.
Then the criticisms begin: “Do you always have to spend so much time with your friends? They’re boring and stupid and you sound dumber when you’re around them.” “I can’t believe your parents treat you like a child and expect you to see them so often. Don’t they know you’re an adult now and you should be independent?” “Why do you always have to call and text people all the time? Are you really so needy that you can’t be alone or think for yourself?”
It gets worse: he starts monitoring her texts, interrogating her about her interactions, making her miserable when she’s in contact with anyone but him. He undermines the value of her relationships by disparaging those near and dear to her. All the conflict that maintaining relationships with other people creates with her partner is more than she can handle, so she slowly withdraws, losing contact with the people who always had her back. Then when she has no one to rely on because they’ve all been alienated, he ices the cake: “See? I’m the only one who cares about you. No one else is here for you.”
Now the abuser has completely isolated his victim. Separating her from her support network serves multiple functions for the abuser. First, it removes the threat that someone in his victim’s life will remove her from the snares of his abuse. Second, it eliminates the possibility that his victim can even receive care from anyone else, thereby removing her safety net and making her more dependent on him. And third, because healthy Care Cycles no longer exist for her, it functions as a smoke screen that hides the fact that the abuser isn’t holding up his end of a proper Care Cycle (Phase 2).
Phase 2: Withhold Care
At this point, the only consistent person the victim has in her life is her abuser. He may say he’s the only one who cares about her, but the truth is, he doesn’t provide her with any care at all. She’s fending for herself, working all the time, coming home to take care of the house, trying to make sure her abuser is “happy” with her… or at least less unhappy with her.
Looking back, she thinks, “It didn’t used to be this way. He used to do nice things for me, make me coffee in the morning and my favorite tea before bed. He used to help around the house and we even had fun cooking together. Just last night, he acted completely put out when I asked him to boil water for the pasta while I made everything else for dinner! Sigh. At least he still takes the garbage out sometimes.”
When she’s sick with bronchitis, he doesn’t even notice except to say she can’t be that sick if she’s still able to check her work emails. He tells her she can get her own food, it’s not hard to throw something into the microwave. When she asks him if he can pick up her prescription from the pharmacy, he gets annoyed and asks why she didn’t order her medicine through a delivery service.
She has no one to rely on but herself. Her friends have drifted away, she’s afraid her family will meet her with pity or judgments of “I told you so,” and her partner consistently lets her down. She is beyond exhausted with no respite in sight, but she has to keep going because if she doesn’t help herself, no one will.
Phase 3: Steal their Attention
Not only is her partner withholding any care from her, but he demands that all of her energy and attention be focused on him and his priorities. She’s treading water, trying to keep her life afloat. She has so much to do, and she no longer has the support of her friends and family to help buoy her when she needs it. Now she’s expected to meet all of her partner’s needs as well.
To add insult to injury, whatever she does for her partner is not enough, and he minimizes her contributions. He says things like, “Why won’t you help me when you know I’ve been working so hard? I’m doing all this for you! I thought you promised to be a supportive partner, and you are not living up to your promise. You used to be so nice but you’ve totally changed. I really thought you were a better person than this, you said you were a capable person. I expected more from you.”
A major feature of abuse is when a person demands someone’s attention, even when that someone is not willing to give it to them. An abuser will insist that their victim is obligated to give them the attention they want, on their terms. Or they will make it impossible to ignore them. Sadly, the best way to get someone’s attention is to hurt them, since no one can ignore pain when it’s being inflicted on them. Our natural tendency is to turn toward the source of the pain and to figure out a way to make the pain stop; this is why victims do whatever they can to appease their abusers.
To an abuser — whether they are conscious of it or not — a victim is just another resource to be exploited, a tool to get more of what they want without deserving what they receive. The abuser has forced all of his victim’s attention to be focused on him, and her exhaustion is extreme. She will never be able to do enough to satisfy his demands, and she hasn’t got the energy to put up a fight.
Phase 4: Gaslight
Then there is the abuser’s pièce de résistance: gaslighting. Gaslighting is a colloquial term used to describe when someone manipulates you into questioning your grip on reality. This is a very sophisticated form of psychological manipulation, one that is so severely damaging that it’s downright cruel. What distinguishes gaslighting from run-of-the-mill relationship disagreement is that one person presents facts and tries to consider the other person’s perspective, while the other disregards facts and concertedly negates the other person’s perception.
Let’s see what gaslighting looks like in action. Say, for example, money goes missing from a joint bank account, and the victim asks the abuser if he knows anything about it. Their account is $10,000 short and she’s trying to figure out what happened because she noticed a check bounce.
The abuser will start by blatantly lying about his involvement and deny any knowledge of the matter. For example, the abuser might say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t withdraw any money.” Then he might trivialize the concern and try to sweep it under the rug by saying, “Who cares, it’s just a $50 overdraft fee, just pay it, it’s not like we can’t afford it.”
But the victim protests that’s not the point, and $10,000 is still unaccounted for. The abuser takes the gaslighting a step farther by diverting the victim’s attention with a counterattack. “Maybe you took it, maybe you forgot what you spent it on.” Then he follows it up with some projection. “What, did you withdraw it in cash and spend it when you were out with your girlfriends?” (He completely forgets the fact that he’s alienated her from all of her friends and she doesn’t go out anymore.) “Oh, so maybe you sent it to your parents to help them pay for their last cruise. Geez! I can’t believe you’d go behind my back like that!”
Even after defending herself against these baseless accusations, the abuser blames the victim and makes her feel inadequate. “I can’t believe you could manage to lose track of $10,000. I thought you were supposed to be responsible with money, but I guess I was wrong. You can’t even be trusted to balance a checkbook, it’s simple math!”
Here is the abuser’s list of attacks in this short example alone: lying, denying, trivializing, counterattacking, projecting, blaming, and diminishing his victim’s sense of self. Lather, rinse, and repeat dozens of times and the victim will end up so punch drunk, she won’t know which way is up and which way is down anymore.
Conclusion
It is no wonder that abuse can make someone feel not just regular-anxious, but C-PTSD levels of anxious. How can anyone feel like their life is safe and secure with these four walls of prison built around them? When a victim has been isolated, exhausted, distracted from her own wants and needs, and made to question reality itself, there’s no chance that she will have enough confidence in herself to feel like she can break away from her abuser and survive.
But there is hope for the victim. They’re not crazy, and they’re not weak; they’ve just faced horrible treatment at the hand of an abuser for a very long time, and that isn’t their fault. It may be a long road to healing from all of the damage caused by an abuser after escaping from the prison of abuse, but it is possible to feel better, less anxious and dysregulated, and know that there is a lot of joy left in life.
