Is it a red flag if my partner jokes about hitting me?

Is it a red flag if my partner jokes about hitting me?

Self-Gaslighting: The Harm of Being Gaslighted (Bilderman)

Self-Gaslighting: The Harm of Being Gaslighted

Monopolization of perception is a term used by psychologist Albert Biderman in his chart of coercion that identified ways that American prisoners of war were brainwashed into complacency (Biderman, 1957). But actually, monopolization of perception is similar, if not the same, and a more useful description of what actually is taking place in gaslighting.

• Being told, “You're crazy” or “You don’t make sense.”
• Distorting the truth of what took place and accusing the other of distortion. “You’re wrong—you don’t remember.” 
• Outright lying and denying reality.
• Twisting the victim's words to mean something negative and disregarding any attempts at clarification.
• Discounting the feelings of the other with criticism such as, “You’re too sensitive.” “You’re over-reacting”—although, given the circumstances, they’re not. 
• Name-calling and putdowns that are meant to degrade, humiliate, and create shame.
• Claiming to be a victim and accusing the victim of being abusive when confronting them about their behavior.

Self-Gaslighting

If you are a recipient of gaslighting, you can develop negative beliefs about yourself. Internalizing the negative attacking messages could result in, for example, believing “I’m not good enough,” “There’s something wrong with me,” or “I’m at fault.” These beliefs can include distorted beliefs about the cause of the hurtful psychological abuse that leads to blaming yourself and allowing in harmful feelings such as fear, shame, or guilt. These negative feelings can contribute to anxiety, depression, low self-worth, and suicidal thoughts. When these hurtful beliefs and feelings about yourself are left unattended, you continue to be vulnerable to self-gaslighting and the coercion of the gaslighter.

Can He Rape Me if We’re Married?

Can He Rape Me if We're Married?

Stealthing can be another type of rape abusers may use. This is when a rapist-abuser removes a condom before or during sex without their partner’s consent. This can lead to an increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy, the latter of which is a way some abusers try to trap survivors in a relationship. For more information, see our Guide to Reproductive and Sexual Coercion.

7 signs your husband is sexually abusing you (and what to do about it)

7 signs your husband is sexually abusing you (and what to do about it)

2. He refuses to practice safe sex

Experts say sexual abuse includes being forced to participate in any degrading, unwanted or unsafe sexual act. This means even if you consent to sex with your husband, it’s still abuse if you asked him to wear protection and he refuses.

Sexual abuse includes any situation where someone forces you to do uncomfortable intimate acts. If you’re comfortable using protection, your partner should respect and uphold that.

7. He insults and criticizes your body

Sexual harassment ranges from degrading remarks to inappropriate physical contact. This includes your spouse insulting your body and your looks. Your sweetheart should not shame you for the way you look — a loving husband will never harm your self-esteem.

Just because you’re married doesn’t mean your body belongs to your husband. A healthy sexual relationship involves two people who respect each other and will never force the other to do something uncomfortable or harmful.

Contact the U.S. National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673). You can also chat online to receive support, information and advice from a trained specialist.

Sexual coercion: What it is, examples, and getting help

Sexual coercion: What it is, examples, and getting help

• Using substances: A person may encourage someone to use drugs or alcohol to make them more compliant and therefore easier to coerce into sex. If a person has sex with someone while inebriated or unconscious, this is rape.

A person may use sexual coercion alongside other types of abuse, such as coercive control. This involves demanding control over many aspects of their partner’s life, such as:

• what they wear
• where they go
• who they socialize with

Demeaning or insulting comments, humiliation, and gaslighting may also wear down someone’s self-esteem.

Coercive Control — how to spot it and how to stop it (Biderman)

Coercive Control — how to spot it and how to stop it 

Covert abuse, on the other hand, is extremely difficult to recognise.

Small, subtle, petty and seemingly insignificant manipulative behaviours, played out and repeated over time and interspersed with changing tactics, about turns, and generous, kind and loving acts and behaviours, gradually brainwash the victim whilst remaining almost completely undetectable to everyone else. Simultaneously the abuser works to undermine the victim’s self belief and the trust between her and her friends and family, using sly jokes, smear tactics, guilt trips, ‘crazifying’ to cast aspersions on her integrity and the integrity of her support network.

…

“Controlling behaviour is: a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour.

“Coercive behaviour is: an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim.” (UK Home Office)

…

Psychological domestic abuse tactics also mirror the tactics used in psychological torture, which Biderman’s Chart of Coercion — a tool designed to demonstrate and explain the coercive methods of stress manipulation used to torture prisoners of war — lists as: 

Isolation

Monopolization of Perception

Induced debility and exhaustion

Threats, Occasional indulgences

Degradation

and Enforcing Trivial Demands.

Amnesty International, Report on Torture (New York: Farra, Strauss, and Giroux), 1973.

For women in abusive relationships in which there is no overt violence it is particularly hard to recognise that they are suffering domestic abuse.

“Many women try to make sense of their male partner’s behaviours by assuming he must only be acting in just and fair ways. So, if she feels harmed by something he says or does she will let him know, discuss it with him, seek change on his part. But if he says he did nothing wrong, that it’s all in her head, that she provoked it, or that it is her behaviours that are the problem, then she will go away and contemplate what it was in her own character or behaviour that caused him to harm her. Over time she will develop the belief that there’s something wrong with her, that she’s not good enough, that she’s not worthy. If she believes in a just world she will find it extremely difficult to believe her partner is as horrible as his behaviours seem. So she will blame herself and redouble her efforts to be the good wife.” (Speak Out Loud)

Unlike the bruises and scars left by physical domestic abuse, psychological domestic abuse is almost invisible. It encompasses a range of behaviours which demonstrate “…covert, coercive, manipulative intentions masked by innocent sounding communication,…designed to confuse and keep the victim from guessing the perpetrator’s true aim.” (Speak Out Loud)

Furthermore, women in our society are socialised to accept responsibility for solving relationship issues and for building up and supporting the male partner’s ego. This means the victim is far more likely to question herself and try to change or adapt her own behaviour than to put the blame on him.
If she is unhappy — she thinks it must be her fault. If he is unhappy she thinks it must be her fault, or at least her responsibility to make him happy.
Or he denies that he is unhappy or that there is anything to be unhappy about. If there are problems in the relationship he denies them, or tells them they are her fault, and — over time — she comes to believe in his version of reality.

His version of reality is skewed and distorted, and is the creation of a damaged and destructive soul. The more she comes to believe it, the more the victim feels she’s a failure, feels debased and disempowered, but she cannot put her finger on exactly what it is that is making her feel like this.
The abuser tells her it’s her imagination, she’s disturbed, depressed, has repressed anger or other issues, that she’s got it all wrong and that everything is hunky-dory. He will intersperse his “persecution” tactics with periods of happy calm benevolence which throw her off guard and make her hope and pray the bad times might be over, or wonder if they ever really happened.

Can this be happening to me?

“Red flags that there’s a major problem become glaringly obvious when:
— All attempts at getting your partner to take responsibility for his behaviours fall on deaf ears
— He denies that he’s done anything harmful
— He minimises your experience
— He turns the situation about face and blames you

How do I know if I am in an abusive relationship?

Here are some questions for women who are in a relationship with a man.

Can you answer ‘yes’ to these questions?

— I trust this man 100%

— He respects me totally without a doubt

— He’s always honest and truthful with me

— I feel completely safe to be honest with him

— He definitely respects my privacy

— I feel totally free to be myself round him anywhere anytime

— I adamantly feel safe with him — always

2. Mind Games.
“Mind Games are deliberate attempts to psychologically manipulate someone. They are covert, coercive, manipulative intentions masked by innocent sounding communication,…designed to confuse and keep the victim from guessing the perpetrator’s true aim.”
“Mind Games are an attempt to indoctrinate someone into believing they are the guilty party.”
“Mind Games are especially powerful when the victim totally trusts the perpetrator and believes both their roles in the relationship are well defined and socially ‘normal’.”
“Mind Games entail brainwashing — a notion that we usually associate with cults or terrorist hostage tactics.”

Abusers “brainwash their partner when they appeal to her instinct and desire to care for him by saying, ‘If you really love me you’d do what I want’. This gets confusing when you love and trust your partner. But he is slowly — one tactic at a time — oppressing and controlling. It’s insidious — and it can take years to see, and to realise this is a pattern.”
“Brainwashing, guilt trips and confusion lead to exhaustion, which can make women more susceptible to believing some of the denigrating and manipulative language their partners use against them.”
“Some women are led to identify more and more with the abuser, whilst others are able to maintain morsels of a sense of themselves — of their own thoughts and beliefs.” (Speak Out Loud)

5. Isolation 

Moving home frequently making it hard for her to put down roots, finding ways to insist she spends all her free time with him, overt put downs or subtle criticisms of her friends and family to discourage contact, smear tactics about her or about her friends and family to isolate her, making it feel easier for her to be alone, using jealousy as justification to make her avoid contact, making scenes in public or finding other ways to make social contact difficult for her, causing a breach with her friends and/or family

8. Emotional unkindness
Degrading –making her responsible for the heavy physical tasks and the “dirty jobs”, demeaning her with cruel comments, making fun of her

Neglect — not helping when she is ill or overtired, refusing to comfort her if she is upset, withholding sex or physical contact, always putting her needs or desires last

Emotional dishonesty — making promises and then breaking them, denying the validity of her feelings, denying anything is wrong, denying responsibility, pretending to understand concerns and then disregarding them

Denying responsibility — An abusive man doesn’t think there is anything wrong with him so why should he seek help? He does not acknowledge his faults or blames it on his childhood or outside circumstances. Won’t admit when he misbehaves, won’t apologise except if he sees no alternative

Minimizing — making light of her feelings, denying she has a reason to be upset, putting down her accomplishments, trivialising her contributions — including financial

Stonewalling — refusing to discuss things, refusing to listen

Jekyll and Hyde — he intersperses the bad times with periods of happy, calm “good times”, switches from warm and loving to blaming and the silent treatment, belittling and bullying. This is called the Cycle of Abuse, and it is a recognised part of the pattern of Domestic Abuse.

Diversion tactics — changing the subject, accusing and blaming her or others, inappropriate emotional outbursts to divert attention, saying it’s her fault, making her feel she is responsible for changing him

WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE?

There is clear evidence that psychological abuse over time results in the victim’s loss of her sense of self and increasing withdrawal, as well as worsening depressive symptoms such as frequent crying, anxiety, fearfulness, and inappropriate shame and guilt. Victims may also find themselves trying to do anything possible to try to bring the relationship back to the way it was before the abuse. Physical symptoms can appear — ranging from unexplained pain to asthma, eczema and other stress triggered ailments. Insomnia is common, substance abuse and lack of control with drink and drugs, and thoughts of suicide and murder can occur and can lead on to actual — and sometimes successful — attempts.

Do you notice any of the effects listed below in yourself?

In the short term:
Surprise and confusion
Questioning of one’s own memory, “did that really happen?”
Anxiety or fear; hypervigilence
Shame or guilt
Aggression (as a defense to the abuse)
Becoming overly passive or compliant
Frequent crying
Avoidance of eye contact
Feeling powerless and defeated as nothing you do ever seems to be right (learned helplessness)
Feeling like you’re “walking on eggshells”
Feeling like you put on a mask in public
Feeling manipulated, used and controlled
Feeling undesirable

In the long term:

Depression

Withdrawal

Low self-esteem and self-worth

Emotional instability

Sleep disturbances

Physical pain without cause

Suicidal ideation, thoughts or attempts

Extreme dependence on the abuser

Underachievement

Inability to trust

Feeling trapped and alone

Substance abuse

Collusion with the abuser — hiding or abetting the abuse