Humiliating Others-Deliberate Abuse that Cuts Deep

No one would argue that people who have suffered from emotional, psychological, verbal, sexual, or physical abuse have issues.

Having fallen victim to aggression, they sometimes believe what an aggressor has said. They might believe, for example, that they deserved the psychotic angry rage, that they even provoked it. Believing this is having fallen under the hypnotic persuasion of the aggressor, a person who wants the victim to feel badly, wants her to hurt. (yeah, it's usually a her)

If you think you deserve to be hurt by others, then your self-esteem is low. This is characteristic of people who have grown up in abusive families. In therapy such folks describe feeling "less-than" in many different ways with many different adjectives: inferior, stupid, ugly, powerless, every negative attribute imaginable.

And there I sit, looking at these beautiful, intelligent, sensitive people who think they're garbage. It kills me.

Anyway,

These negative self-attributes are the meat of low self-esteem. An older generation of psychotherapists called it the "bad self."

Thinking they must have deserved the abuse (for victims of abuse have been told this so many times that it has become a hypnotic suggestion), survivors, meaning those who got out of childhood alive, are at risk to become people like the people who abused them.

Many of them identify with the aggressor, become an aggressor.

Why would anyone do that? Surely victims disdain violence, hate the people who abused them, and hate what they stand for.

One would think, but not always. It's just safer, is all, to err on the side of what one perceives to be strength, power.

An abused person can be persuaded into believing that if a parent is strong and mean, then it is strength and meanness are respectable traits. People want to loved, especially by their parents. Our personalities are shaped during a time of life when we don't know very much more than what our parents tell us is true. We conclude things about ourselves based upon how we are treated and based upon what they say.

Those who become violent are convinced, at some point in their psychological development, that that the world is divided up between the strong and the weak. And they'd rather be strong.

They see that strength as the power to bully. It is what is needed to be on top in the hierarchy of power that they see in all relationships. Others are unaware of this hierarchy of power, the weak versus the strong, or don't care.

To feel on top, "survivors" take satisfaction, even joy, in the humiliation of others. This is definitive schadenfreude, enjoying the suffering of others. Their psychological work is to master their own sense of powerlessness, having been humiliated and abused themselves. So they choose strength, dominance.

Therapists like me teach people that it is much harder to contain anger, to manage aggression, than it is to let it go.

No doubt, however, it is easier and it feels better, it's even cathartic, to let insults and fists fly. It's a lot harder to communicate rationally with logic and persuasion.

People who have been badly abused can be terrible at logic, persuasion, negotiation and verbal expression of feeling.

They weren't entitled to it as children, didn't practice it; nobody asked them for their opinions. They were told what to do, and generally had no decision making power or power at all, for that matter, in their families of origin.

When they feel intense anger it is a mixture of near-psychotic anxiety and fear that has to be purged in the only way that they know how. If the opportunity presents to take that rage and anxiety out on someone, to bring someone down, this relieves this disproportionate affect and functions not to merely level the playing field in their perverse hierarchical thinking, but to bring themselves up to the top of the pyramid.

This lording something over someone, humiliating, hurting someone, feels great to certain insecure people. For those with self-esteem, it feels mean.

That's how badly having been abused can affect one's personality, behavior, and every relationship. Sucks to be them, in the vernacular of our youth?

Well, yeah. But you get them at the right time, the right place in their lives, and they're educable.

Everyone can change.

Copyright 2006, TherapyDoc