Broken souls: causes and effects of psychological abuse

April 10, 2024

Although inevitably in my vision of abuse appear the image of the battered woman, since socially speaking more about mistreatment towards women (its incidence is undeniably greater) than towards men, that I am a woman and, in addition, due to both my life and career path, I tend to list, to get excited and to resonate with that.

And although there are many, too many, women who are subject to their partners, I want to talk about the situation of psychological abuse per se, since I understand it as a type of relationship that can affect both men and women . I am referring to a couple relationship with a marked inequality of power and submission in the deal.

Living the psychological abuse

What makes a person decide (because it does not stop being a decision) to be in a kind of relationship like this, in which the other is on a higher plane, has the supreme truth, moves the strings of "my" personal reality ? What experiences "I" have had to go through to accept humiliating treatment as something normal, to accept that "intimidates me," "reifies me," "degrades me," "overloads me with responsibilities, that" me " deprive me in my social and family relationships, subjectively distort reality, that only worth "his" vision of the facts, creating "me" constant confusion and doubt, pointing to me as the source of conflicts ..., to accept even the possibility of death as an alternative or natural resolution and sometimes even attractive to the reality that "I am" living?

Because the certain thing is that there is a moment in the vital trajectory of this type of relations in which the subjected part senses, intuits and knows that if the other one "goes the head" it can end his life and, depending on the moment in the who is, can interpret and live it with complete naturalness, even to a certain liking, due to the poetic peace that that image evokes ... until he is aware that that is not not what he wants to live , that does not maintain a relationship of respect and love, that there are limits that should not be crossed and that it does not have to die for it.

The paradox is that when you gather forces to withdraw and denounce, in many cases your life is really in danger.

Victim and victimizer

As I mentioned before, in my career I have found that those who seek relationships of submission have generally experienced situations of abuse and abuse in childhood, mostly executed by members of their own family or by people very close to her.

But the same goes for who ends up becoming an abuser. We find that both people have their roots in a childhood marked by abuse in any of its manifestations and intensities, but that the basic personality of each one makes the outcome and development practically opposed. They are the two sides of the same coin, of the same problem, of the same reality, resolved in opposite ways.

The fault goes in the opposite direction

In the case of the person submitted, she feels in the depths of her being an extreme need to please and please the other , to feel accepted, loved, taken into account, to feel worthy, to feel person, to feel complete. For this he even disappears as an individual, his tastes become those of the other, his inclinations, preferences and reasoning are those of the other, just as his feeling and his interpretation of reality, is dependence in its maximum degree; however, in case of not being able to assume them, then the subject is silenced, silenced, reserved, withdraws ... with the purpose of, precisely, not generating conflict, so as not to feel rejected, judged, criticized or vilified. , neither attacked nor degraded.

It can not defend itself, it can not justify its discrepancy, it does not have tools or discourse for it . His heart is shattered, his whole being is plunged in suffering, in a silent cry, in a heartbreaking and mute bellow ... because he can not even express it openly, he eats it, he swallows it, longing to disappear, many times longing to die. During all the time, the long and eternal lapse in which the "supreme being" decides not to speak to him, nor to touch him, nor to look at him, nor to hear him ... keeping in his distant and cold sphere like an ice floe, with his airs of "wounded wolf", of "suffering victim", of "abandoned child" ... until, after a few days, and after the constant, meticulous, maternal and complacent care of the subject, decides that the damage has already been repaired, returning to approach in a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, indulgence and apparent compassion.

This scene is maintained until after a certain time another event occurs that forces him to repeat that gesture, due to his low tolerance for frustration, his mental rigidity, his need for control, his narcissism, his insecurity extreme ... manifested from a position of real victim as the inability of the other to understand, to put you in the position of having to react in that way, to feel "forced" to be so sharp, so distant, so empty, so rude ... breaking again and again his partner, eroding his self-esteem, disintegrating his soul, destroying his person, annihilating any hint of joy, authenticity, independence, self-confidence, humanity.

Circle that repeats itself repeatedly until it emerges, ignites and grows a spark within the subject, allowing him to step aside to begin to walk another path, to live another reality, to choose another present and to glimpse another future.