Pushed to the Edge: Being Called “Crazy” When You React to Being Abused
Reactive abuse is when you react to the abuse you are experiencing.
Have you ever been with someone who triggers you often and causes your nervous system to dysregulate? You are driven to anger by their abuse, their boundary-crossing, their lies, and their betrayals. You react in defensiveness, anxiety, and fear by yelling, throwing something, hitting your abuser, running away, or name-calling. You might not feel so great about this behavior and this can make you believe that YOU are the real abuser. After all, wouldn’t it be the most reasonable thing to do to simply respond in calmness instead of to react? Wouldn’t it be more mature to detach from their behavior, to know that they have issues, and to walk out the front door? Well, in ideal life situations, yes, this would be a better tactic; unfortunately, this is not how it usually goes in abusive relationships.
When you are abused or betrayed in some way, you have a right to be upset. Anyone would be. Your body has a primal reaction to being threatened. It does not think about social norms. It just fights, flees, freezes, or fawns. After reacting and feeling guilty about your actions, you apologize and grovel to your abuser and you hope that you will be met by this person you love with compassion, apologies, or understanding. You hope that they see that they were wrong for how they treated you. Instead, you are met with, “You are bipolar!” or “You are so insecure and jealous!” or “You are crazy and delusional!” What?!?!? You might be asking, “How did this become a ME problem? I was only reacting to how you treated me.” When you are in an abusive relationship, this is the norm. Being poked and prodded into a reaction and then being gaslighted into thinking you caused the problem and that you are the one with mental problems is just part and parcel of this toxic relating. You then spend a large amount of your time trying to prove to your abuser that you are actually good and decent and not abusive. The cycle goes around and around endlessly until someone leaves the relationship or until you become a shell of a person or potentially, and in many cases, you die from the abuse.
When you think about it, doesn’t it make sense that when someone you love and trust hurts you, you’re going to have a reaction? When someone crosses your boundaries and hits you, rapes you, demeans you, cheats on you, or calls you horrible names, aren’t you likely going to react? Again, ideally, we would all respond instead of react, but if your nervous system is primed to react to abuse by fighting (screaming, hitting, name-calling) to protect and defend itself, it’s really no wonder that you are going to seem a little “crazy” to someone else, right? You really do feel like you are going crazy when someone pokes you into feeling crazy. And that is what is happening. You are not crazy. You are sent into “crazy-making” land by your abuser.
Being called crazy after someone deliberately creates within you anxiety, fear, self-doubt, or insecurity is a fun game for an abuser. This way, they get to tell everyone they and you know that YOU are the nut job. People outside of your relationship only see the Dr. Jekyll side of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality (disorder) of your abuser. No one can possibly believe that the charming Dr. Jekyll spends a lot of his or her time at home actually being the calculating and sadistic Mr. Hyde by demeaning, raging, controlling, triangulating with other people to make you feel jealous and reactive, and doing many other power and control mind games to keep you off-kilter and increasingly losing confidence in yourself. No one would ever believe you over your abuser because Dr. Jekyll wears a false mask of being attentive, adoring, helpful, and kind to his family and friends outside of the home. This also keeps you dependent on the abuser because now everyone thinks that you are the problem and no one you love believes that you are actually being abused secretly. Eventually, you may even start to believe that YOU are the problem, which is bad for you and great for the abuser, who now gets to try to “help” and “fix” your “issues” privately while telling the entire world that you have mental problems and that they are so “concerned” for your well-being. This is a lie, of course. They are intentionally causing the issues you are having so that they can make you look bad to everyone you love and care about. This is control and manipulation, and it then isolates you more and more from friends and family who think that maybe you are really too emotional or reactive about things that you, frankly, SHOULD be emotional and reactive about.
To make matters worse, when you come from a dysfunctional family system where abuse, neglect, and addictions were the norm and you were constantly forced into fight or flight mode and did not feel safe, you did not necessarily always react well. In fact, you might have screamed, cried out, or hit those who were traumatizing you, which often resulted in those same abusive people shaming you into the false belief that YOU were the real problem. Parents who abuse their children are ALWAYS at cause. The child is never the one who starts the abuse. The child reacts to the abuse. A child does not know how to be abusive until they are taught to be. Abusive parents may have said things like, “If you would only be a better child, I would not have to hit you” or “Why can’t you just stop talking so much? You are so annoying and stupid.” They gave you the message that YOU needed to get your act together and stop overreacting to being harmed or to stop simply being your true self, which was light and happy and thereby threatening to insecure and jealous caregivers. Think about this carefully: Were you truly overreacting to being hit, burned, called horrible names, belittled, and ostracized or feeling afraid of potentially being abandoned by an addicted family member who might overdose or drive into a ditch and die or be arrested and sent away from you for their criminal behavior? It seems to me that you were reacting quite normally to an abnormal situation. So, technically, your nervous system and brain were primed or conditioned from early on to attract future abusers who now push you into reactivity. When you reacted as a child to abuse, you were shamed by your abuser into believing that you were a bad child for “talking back” or “crying” when they hurt you.
As you get older and attract abusive partners, because you were imprinted as a child with the belief that you deserve to be mistreated because you are a bad and shameful person, you still carry that same shame—and tenfold even. So, when your abuser tells you that you are bipolar or nuts because you scream out in fear, or you try to leave or call the police when you are betrayed, pushed, rejected, or you are threatened with abandonment in some way, you will believe your abuser. You will believe on some level that you deserve their mistreatment. Your current abuser can remind you that you are the problem here. Your abuser justifies the abuse by telling you that they had to betray you because you are not kind or loving to them like others are or that you deserved to be called names because you spend too much money or don’t clean the house well enough and that you are lazy and unmotivated. Your abuser can demean you by telling you that you are crazy because you are too sensitive and take things too personally and that you should “take a joke” when something they say does not feel funny to you and feels mean and degrading instead. This is why people standing outside of abusive relationships looking in and judging people for “staying” when they should be “smart” enough to leave are completely misguided. Because a person was primed for abuse, their bodies seek out abuse. It’s not a conscious or logical decision. It is a primal one. You stay in these relationships until you heal and learn how to love yourself and know your worth and that you deserve better. When your body, mind, and soul are aligned in this knowing, you stop attracting abusive partners.
Listen, if anyone who is not professionally trained to diagnose you as depressed or Bipolar, Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, or Sociopathic (or any other personality disorder or mental illness) tells you that you are any of these, stop listening to that person. That person is trying to control, gaslight, and manipulate you. If they are telling your family and friends that you are nuts and making your loved ones believe them over you because they turn on their best Dr. Jekyll, that is not loving. That is not love. To make the people you love think the worst of you and turn against you is abusive and cruel. If your abuser actually cared about your mental health and thought you had a true problem, they would be asking you to get some help for it. They would show concern for you instead of ridiculing you and making you feel worse about your mental condition. People who throw that out are trying to damage your self-esteem and keep you small, helpless, and insecure for their benefit. They are trying to get their flying monkeys (their little Dr. Jekyll fan club) to side with them against you so that you will be ostracized, alone, and considered the emotionally unstable, abusive one instead of them.
If you suspect that you have a personality disorder or a mental illness of any kind, please seek help from a licensed therapist or psychologist who can run tests on you to be sure. If your person or anyone else does not fit into this category and is using verbal attacking to hurt you and keep you under their thumb and dependent on them, pay attention to that. They actually do not know if you have a mental illness. They are attacking you to feel better about the abuse they cause so that they can simply continue doing it to you. Many people like to tell their victims that they are Bipolar or Borderline to make them feel insecure and scared. Although we may never know exactly why, abusive people LIKE hurting you and using you as their punching bag and their scapegoat because then they don’t have to look at their actual issues. Hurting innocent people makes abusers feel powerful and in control of their uncontrollable rage, their immense fear, their deep and abiding shame, and their overwhelming sadness. Abusing and belittling others who they consider “weak” makes them believe that they are strong and okay because they do not ever feel okay or in control inside themselves. When you react to the abuse, you reinforce their belief that you are the one with the issues and that you are the one who started the abuse. Come out of the fog and confusion that you are in in the relationship and really recall WHO started the abuse. Was it you or them? When did it all start? It is a continuous cycle so I can guarantee you that it started long before this latest incident. Someone started the abuse and then someone reacted to that abuse and the long and toxic dance was born.
Once you decide to get yourself some help and to stop engaging in the toxic patterning, you are starting the pathway to freedom. If you decide to stick it out, your reactivity toward your abuser can only get worse as you start to fight back more severely and can even hurt or kill your abuser or be arrested yourself. So, it serves you to get help and to walk away from anyone who makes you feel out of control and “crazy” to the extent that you could harm them. Remember that you are not necessarily mentally ill “crazy” when you react to being abused. You have been made to FEEL crazy because of the abuse. Abusive relationships do not get better. Once you and your partner have established a dynamic of power and control, fighting, hurting one another, and making up only to start the cycle again, you are in it for the long haul.
Sometimes, we encounter people who trigger us and who we trigger. This is a growth opportunity, not a happily-ever-after love story. These types of relationships are not healing ones long term. They show us our childhood trauma patterns so that we can NOTICE them and start the process of healing ourselves. They are mirrors to show us things we need to change within us. We need to move away from them in order to survive and to thrive. If the relationship comes back together once you have healed your trauma and abuse patterning, then it is meant to be. But it’s not meant to be when both people are going around and around in sickness. Both parties end up sick when we stay too long. We need to remember that we are good people and that we are not weak for loving sick people. We learned to take on abuse from abusive people and until we wake up to it, we are loyal to a fault. So, it’s not your fault and you are not a weak person. You can be confident and happy again.
Remind yourself that people who have inner peace and who have overcome and healed from their trauma treat people with love, care, and respect—not with abuse. People who know their worth and love themselves spread love, not fear, hate, confusion, and abuse. I invite you to find safety, ease, and inner peace inside yourself in order to stop attracting abuse of any kind any longer. Let me know if you need help. I can show you how!
