Humiliation As a Perfect Tactic to Emotionally Abuse You Into Staying Small

Belittling is a cruel yet effective way to abuse someone. Emotionally abusive people often rely on this tactic to keep power and control alive in a dysfunctional relationship.

Have you ever been the recipient of someone’s cruel or harsh tone? Have you been talked down to in a way that makes you feel powerless, demeaned, and humiliated? It feels awful. It can make you feel unworthy, stupid, disrespected, and not good enough. For many of us, it was bad enough having been treated this way as children, but when we are treated this way in our adult partnerships, it is maddening. This feels unfair and wrong. You feel unloved and unacceptable too. Adult relationships should be about equality, respect, and give and take, not a repeat of the childhood you just survived (barely at times) with dysfunctional relating, disrespect, and telling you what to do all the time. You can never seem to explain enough to the emotionally abusive person how this treatment is heartless and inappropriate. They don’t seem to get it, to care or, even worse, take ownership of it. It might seem like a no-brainer, but when you are truly loved by someone, you feel GOOD in their presence—consistently. You feel free to be yourself without fear of being told you are unacceptable. You are liked and valued simply for being yourself, even if you aren’t being perfect every moment. You are truly at home with yourself and the other person. In emotionally abusive relationships, this is not the case.

“No One Cares About You As Much As I Do” and Other Lies and Grooming Tactics

Generally, by the time you are reacting to this demoralizing behavior from your abusive partner, you have been groomed so much that you simply have no real leg to stand on in the relationship. Your abuser has worked hard to get to know all of you, to make you feel like the sun rises and sets on you, and that he or she cares and has more compassion for you than anyone ever has. They might remind you often that, “No one cares about you as much as I do” and statements like that to remind you of just how lucky you are to have them. First of all, maybe they do love you deeply, but how can they know that they love you more than anyone does? Maybe your mom or your cousin or sister loves you a lot too. How can anyone really measure this? And why should that even matter? Love is love and there is no shortage of it. Everyone is allowed to have as much it from as many people as possible. Besides, love is a feeling and you don’t really need someone to claim it about you. You just feel it. It’s nice to hear it, of course, but when someone loves you and you feel their love, words are not needed. So, why the big announcement about it, emotional abuser? Just BE. This is also an isolation tactic to keep you bound to them and away from anyone else who might spot that you are being abused. This would be bad for the abuser. When this happens, you can lose close friends or family, which is a win for the abuser. The abuser then gets absolute control of you in every way, which works well for them. Abusers often have a huge abandonment wound and they need to feel in total control of people to ensure they will not be abandoned again. It is a very primal and childlike response that many grown adults have not healed. It ruins lives and creates even more loneliness and abandonment for the abuser in the end, however. I have a lot of empathy and love for those who were abused and neglected as children. I understand why they act the way they do, but I cannot be okay with it because, like the Holocaust, if we pretend it never happened, it will happen again. We have to hold these folks accountable to their healing or we all get hurt.

When the abuse starts, he or she essentially has your number and knows exactly which buttons to push to make you react like a “crazy person” to their abuse. Your reaction to their seemingly “innocent” tone or name-calling is what they will use later to identify you as someone who is “emotionally unstable” or “volatile” in some way. Remember that their tone was likely not “innocent” and was probably sarcastic, fueled with anger, resentment, or blame or insinuated in some way that whatever they are upset about was somehow your fault even if it wasn’t. And let’s just say for argument’s sake that you WERE in a bad mood. Is it your fault that your abuser abused you, even if you were in a mood? You are not responsible for anyone’s feelings or behaviors. Just because you might have been upset, it does not entitle someone to talk down to or demean you. So long as you are not abusing anyone else, you are allowed to feel whatever you feel. Not every day is going to be a happy one after all. The difference could be that you were kind of grumpy and not very social but not taking it out on anyone. You were just kind of there being a grump. The abusive person took it a step further by blaming you for their bad mood and displacing it onto you as the cause of it.

When you are treated as less than, you are, of course, going to be pushed into anger and emotional dysregulation. Since the emotionally abusive person is calculating, toxically manipulative, and charming by nature, no one outside of the home will ever see the real person behind the mask who is privately poking the bear continually until the bear loses her crackers. (I patently refuse to tell anyone they are “overreacting” or “emotionally unstable” when they have been abused for many years or decades and their nervous systems are in constant fight or flight mode. “Emotional dysregulation” is the more appropriate term and takes the shame out of it, too.)

So, you might be wondering, why is it so easy to groom you in the first place? It could be because you were treated this way as a child. You are used to equating this kind of abuse with love, so when someone comes along who reminds you of the abusive caregiver you once had, you believe this is true love. THIS is family! This is not healthy, of course, but it’s what the nervous system is used to and it feels like HOME. You are simply repeating a pattern that your body and mind are used to and it will take some work to overcome the abandonment, rejection, shame, abuse, or trauma that your body and mind believe are love. It’s all about learning new skills, and it can be done and is being done every day by millions of people. No one is left alone in this recovery, so you’ve got this!

Your Reaction to Their Abuse Is How They Keep You Hooked and Manipulated

Your reaction to their abuse is exactly what the abuser is looking for. For one thing, it gives them pleasure and calms them down. It calms their own dysregulated nervous systems because the abuser has been the victim of abuse, trauma, or abandonment as well. Abusive people learned to abuse from being abused. Unless one becomes conscious of family trauma and abuse and takes ownership of the abusive patterns they have inflicted on people, they run the risk of simply doing what their caregivers did to them and repeating the generational trauma, while justifying it along the way. Facing the abuse they have done to people will bring up a lot of shame and abusive people cannot handle their own shame. In fact, this is why they feel peace and relief when they have projected and displaced their abuse onto their victims and others and turned the tables on them. If they could face their abusive childhoods, they might see that they were also the victims of abuse, which was not their fault. Then they could get better and stop perpetuating abuse to the next generation.

Until then, this is the reality of what often happens instead, and I will repeat: When you are abused and you react to the abuse in anger or fear, it gives your abuser a sense of peace and takes away their anger and shame and displaces it onto you. This helps the abuser feel less guilt about abusing you since now he or she can point the finger at you for being the “abuser.” The guilt you now feel as a result of “abusing” them (as they have now twisted the truth around), keeps you locked in confusion about which is the chicken and which is the egg. It also gives them a big dose of supply (energy and attention) because even your anger and volatility give an abusive person the attention they seek to fill a void inside them that they can almost never fill themselves. Besides, maybe when they were young, they learned to create anger and volatility, name-calling, hitting, or screaming from their abusive parent in order to feel a sense of control in their own lives when they didn’t have any. Even negative attention gave them a sense of power over and a sense of “love” from their abusive or neglectful parent. Sadly, this can feel like love to the abusive person since this negative reaction was how they got any kind of attention at all.

Children need to feel a sense of control and if his or her parent could not handle their child becoming autonomous and believed that it meant they were losing control of their child instead of seeing it as a developmental necessity, the parent may have become controlling and abusive in order to maintain control. Because the child NEEDED to have independence and was not given it, they found a way to be in control by rebelling against the parent and trying to exert power and control over them so they feel a sense of control over “something.” Having power over our parents as children is very rewarding and can become a habit or an addiction in a way. A power struggle ensues throughout childhood as the parent and child vie for this power and control. When the child becomes an adult, this is the pattern they carry into their adult relationships. The abuser inflicts this control onto others in order to get their needs met that weren’t met as children. This is only one example of how abusive patterning in a person starts. There are many, many more examples.

So, your “reactive” anger (“reactive abuse” is what the victim will often do in response to being abused first) allows the abuser to define YOU as the abuser once you have become angry and reactive. The truth is that you were likely just minding your own business when the abuser came in and humiliated you in some way. You react angrily because your boundaries were crossed and your protective instincts kicked in with a fight response. It happens naturally and automatically because our bodies are always looking to protect us. We are animals by nature, so we have a protective instinct against others coming into our personal space. This happens with animals and people when another animal or person attacks us physically. We feel a need to attack back. It happens as humans, too, when we are emotionally and verbally attacked as well. We react to that attack, especially when it is someone we love and trust doing the attacking. This is called betrayal trauma. It also might happen because of past trauma from childhood when your dysregulated nervous system took over to protect you in some way from the abuse.

So, please realize that reacting to abuse is not a character flaw and does not make you weak. People get into trouble when they react to the point of harming the abuser. It’s akin to reacting to a bully and getting into trouble yourself for fighting back. The law often will protect the bully who became the “victim” even though the bully started it. If there is no real proof that the bully started it and was later harmed by the victim, the bully walks away unscathed while the actual victim is punished for reacting. This is why emotional abuse is so effective for abusers. There is no outward evidence of the abuse. The victim’s scars are all on the inside. I do not promote retaliating and reacting abusively to abuse, although I definitely understand WHY it happens. My advice is this: Once you realize that you are being emotionally abused by an abusive bully, walk out the front door. Forever. Don’t fight them or abuse them back in words or actions. Don’t reason with them. There is no reasoning with people who are not reasonable and who have it in their minds that they need to be in total control and will stop at nothing to make you lose your sense of reality, of confidence, of self-respect, of self. These people HAVE to believe they are right at all costs or shame will surface and their limiting beliefs of being unworthy or a failure in some way will arise. Since they cannot face those beliefs, the shame, and their harsh inner critic, they will not concede to your reasoning. If a person realizes that they were abused as a child and has carried their abusive patterns into adulthood, they are certainly welcome to get help for it. But, it is not the victim’s job to save or rescue an abuser who will not take any responsibility for their actions and who believes it is someone else’s fault that they abuse. Change takes a long time and theirs is a long path to healing and may not happen in this lifetime. Let them go. Letting them go might actually cause them to hit rock bottom and get the help they need, but please don’t hold your breath on it. They will likely continue trying to find people they can abuse and charm to believe they are innocent in order to gain the supply and control they desperately need. Your only job is to focus on you and to heal yourself so you can stop attracting abuse.

Love-Bombing Is Very Intoxicating and Creates a Trauma Bond

How does this abuse happen? The love-bombing that took place in the beginning was so addictive and felt so wonderful that you absolutely KNEW this person wanted you and loved you like no one has ever loved you before. Perhaps you had recently come out of some hard relationships or left your family home and this person magically appeared to remind you that you are the best person they have ever met. Wow! That is really intoxicating. It fills voids we didn’t even know we had. When you have been alone for a long time and feel lonely, abandoned, or unlovable or if you have been rejected time and again and then, out of the clear blue sky, this person shows up to make it all okay, you are in! On top of that, if they remind you of the parent who abused you, even better! You get a do-over and you get to finally be loved by a person who reminds you of home. Yay!

Once they have you hooked in and trauma bonded with you, they can start the abuse intermittently and whenever they want. Their mask slips a little here and there and it is really confusing for the victim. You wonder where that wonderful, attentive, kind, and decent person went. You start to realize that maybe this unmasked version is the real person but then you remember all the ways they are normally so good to you and how they “just have bad days sometimes like everyone does. They don’t mean to hurt me. In fact, I probably caused it.” Yes. This is how they get ya! The good times still roll on, too. In fact, because the abuser has you where they want you and feels good and empowered from disempowering you, the good times might be even better for you, even if they are not quite as frequent. Although it happens more often after the relationship goes on, the emotional abuse is not constant. It happens occasionally, but when it does, it is heartbreaking, frustrating, and so confusing. It’s like being on a toxic roller coaster ride.

It’s like this kitten I have who is perfect 98% of the time. It’s only two percent of the time that he does things that are deal breakers. That two percent is enough to wreck my entire day, but it is ONLY two percent of the time. But two percent of absolute HELL is two percent too much. Catch my drift? You know your boundaries and if you are allowing anyone to cross them, it is TOO much for you. But if you are under the trauma bonding drug spell and believe that you are at CAUSE for the abuse, you are being tricked and lied to. Your brain is on actual feel-good drugs. Taking space from your abuser can correct your brain chemicals. You are an addict and this is not your fault at all. As with any pain in our bodies, your body does a lot of things to protect you, and releasing dopamine, oxytocin, and other neurotransmitters that numb your pain from the abuse is one way it does this. It even does this with emotional and verbal abuse, not just with physical or sexual abuse. This is because your nervous system needs to feel regulated and calm in order for your body to heal and do the job of keeping you alive. When you are under emotional, verbal, or physical attack, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline to “run from the tiger.” It puts you into a fight or flight mode. Then, when the fight is done, it pumps out other chemicals to calm you down. This is often when the fight has ended and you associate this calm with loving feelings again. One has nothing to do with the other. Your body is simply trying to get you to chill so it can get back to work and you connect it with the peace you now feel after having accepted the blame for the fight your abuser started.

The trauma bonding brain chemicals that keep you addicted to the abusive person create a feeling of peace and contentment whenever the times are “good” again. You think that maybe if you become a pretzel for this person, say exactly the right thing to them, encourage them to get some help, walk on eggshells and try not to rock the boat so much, or try talking them down and being there for them that, eventually, all will right itself and go back to “normal” again. It won’t. This is the actual pattern the abuser was going for. It keeps them in power and keeps you off-kilter and losing your own sense of self and confidence. It keeps the abuser in control of you. Remember that this person did not have their developmental needs met as a child, so they are trying to get that from you now. Not your job. It was their parents’ job. Now it is THEIR job. Period. Therapy exists for a reason. So does coaching. Everyone has access to help if they want it.

The Brain On Emotional Abuse

All of this causes cognitive dissonance in the victim. The brain needs to know what to expect, so it believes the happier times are the real person because those are the most abundant times you are having with the abuser. And besides, the conscious mind wants us to be happy. It is not concerned much with survival. The conscious mind overrides the subconscious mind until the subconscious thoughts, patterns, and memories are brought into conscious awareness, which cannot happen as easily while you are in an abusive relationship or until you make a concerted effort to uncover them. Although more difficult to do, if you do choose to stay in an abusive relationship, you can do the inner work to uncover your hidden limiting beliefs and the messages your inner critic is giving you that keep you stuck in your abusive relationship. It will just take more focus and effort, which the abuser might not like because when you are paying attention to yourself, it is very threatening to the abuser. They need your constant attention (supply) because of their abandonment fears. However, if you can find the time and space to focus on your own healing, this can help you get out of the relationship and not attract it again.

So, since the abuser is mostly pretty nice and not doing much to cause conflict, can be very loving, friendly, and everyone you know loves them AND has likely also convinced their victim (and others—their “flying monkeys”) that THEY are at fault for the abuser’s behaviors or that the victim is the one abusing (remember that the abuser projects their behaviors onto the victim), the victim stays in constant confusion, shame, and tied down under the abuser’s control. After all, the abuser loves the victim and only has their best interest at heart, right? No. I will repeat that the abuser has had a lot of trauma, abuse, or abandonment from childhood and NEEDS to finally have control of something or someone. They will stop at nothing to have this control. They have targeted their victim as the one who will do this for them and they will do whatever it takes to maintain this control. When the mask slips and the abuser abuses, THIS is the real person, not the phony and manipulative version who is normally being showcased. Sociopathic, narcissistic, and psychopathic people who lack empathy can easily turn into Dr. Jekyll any time they want. They have no fear of societal ramifications and are excellent actors, which means that they easily and pathologically lie and pretend they are someone they aren’t. When they are in Dr. Jekyll mode, everyone they encounter loves them because they are very charming and they are the center of attention, getting positive supply from people. When Mr. Hyde appears, it is another story all together. They can be quite cold, cruel, humiliating, belittling, demeaning, dismissive, devaluing, and discarding. Although it can be done, as long as you are entangled in this kind of energy with an emotionally abusive person, you cannot very easily heal and find your self-trust, your self-confidence, or your clarity of who you are. You are losing yourself each and every day that you are being brainwashed by this person. This is dangerous and very frightening.

A Punching Bag Comes in Many Forms

When you are belittled in some way, you might use the excuse that the abuser is simply having a bad day. And, perhaps they are. But I will argue that…so what? Is it okay when someone is in a bad mood and hits their partner and then blames the victim for “causing” it or blames it on how their boss was mean to them that day? There is no difference in being used as an actual punching bag and being a metaphorical one by being the recipient of someone’s harsh and humiliating tone or name-calling. There are more effective ways to communicate when you have had a bad day. And even if the person accidentally talks down to you, which can happen in any intimate relationship sometimes, there needs to be repair of the rupture in order to salvage the trust again. Something like an apology and ownership of what they did wrong and a vow to try hard to not do that again to the person they love and respect would be appropriate. And then following through on that promise.

When there is no repair, it creates a huge tear in the relationship that can be threatening for the couple. The emotionally abusive person has little interest in truly mending the relationship, but will do the bare minimum to make it appear that they care. And if you ask them to apologize, they might do it reluctantly just to move past the issue at hand. Or, they will tit-for-tat you by bringing up how you have done the same thing to them, so why should they apologize? They might be right. You may have done the same to them. You likely were reacting form their abuse and did something to them to retaliate. But, this is probably not your pattern. It IS their pattern, however. They are deflecting here in order to maintain control. Recall that they cannot be wrong at all or they have to feel shame, which is unbearable to them. So, they must maintain control now and not be in the wrong—even if it’s for a little thing. They were probably shamed mercilessly when they did things to aggravate their caregivers by trying to gain autonomy as two- and three-year-olds (which was NORMAL behavior for them at that age) or simply because they were being abused and traumatized as regular ol’ kids who just happened to be in abusive homes. But still, this is not true ownership of what they have done in the current situation.

To top it off, there is usually a lot of gaslighting or “word salad-ing” (going round and round with no resolution to keep you confused with abstractions and blame) going on as well that makes the victim believe that they are the one who caused all of the trouble to begin with. It is a true mind…mess! The abusive person knows how to create a false reality, bring up past issues and behaviors that highlight how the victim is actually at fault, and will leave the victim completely confused, speechless, and exhausted as the abuser walks off with supply, a totally free and clear conscience since you are now the owner of what they caused, more energy from their victim (from energy vampiring them), and happiness and peace that it ended with them on top again. You have now taken on the blame and responsibility for this situation that was not started by you at all. Confusion is one of the main ingredients in abusive relationships. If you find yourself confused about what just happened (time and time again), this is your sign to start noticing. This is a toxic pattern that is actually harming your body, mind, and soul.

No Worries, Your Authentic Self Is Totally Okay

So, now what? You have experienced this “thing.” Okay. All of these life situations are simply experiences that can be seen as lessons that can be overcome. There is no doubt that these experiences happened, and they traumatized you. For sure and for real. However, the awesome news is that they don’t have to define who you are. I realize that we often will live thinking that they do define us and they surely can. Often they will for decades. I get it. This is because you continually repeat these old patterns since you have not healed them yet. But you are going to now. So, yay!

Staying stuck in this patterning disempowers you, but really do take it seriously and make sure you grieve this and make it known to yourself that you were victimized. Feel through and accept what happened and never deny it to yourself or push it down. This only hurts you in the long run by keeping that energy alive in you for other abusers to hook into and creates a lot of stress on your body and mind as well. But then realize that you have more power than you might think. Maybe since you were groomed from childhood to accept abuse as love, it is in your mind to believe that abuse is true love and in your nervous system to call out to abusers that you “want” this. Whatever we believe inside our bodies is what we attract, so I invite you to start examining what you truly believe and want for your life. Make it your state of being. After all, you are already doing this every day with the things you don’t really want.

The good news is that you actually don’t have to continue attracting abuse if you have decided not to. Phew! However, until we know this, we don’t, and this is how we continually attract abusers into our lives. There are parts of you that were deeply affected by the trauma and abuse you suffered from as a child and now as an adult in similar relationships. There is also an authentic part of you that has never, ever been affected by the trauma and abuse. In my role as your coach, I help you love, feel compassion for, and unburden those parts of you that were affected by your trauma and abuse and heal and integrate them so that you can more easily step into that authentic, wise part who can command the love and respect you rightfully deserve from now on. This part of you is like the observer part who can witness your pain without going down the rabbit hole again and again. It stays detached in love and understands your pain without re-telling the old story. Once you have stepped into this part, you are set free. Everyone has access to this part of themselves and you are no exception.

When this part of you is in the forefront of your life, you will not attract abusive people into your space again because you will have nothing for them to hook into anymore. If you do still attract this type of abuse, you will more easily spot it sooner and get out faster until you are completely free of abusive love relationships. This is all a process, but the good news is that eventually you will become invisible to these lower vibrational people. Self-love is the antidote to all forms of abuse and you CAN learn exactly how to love yourself and find true love and self-respect that maybe you thought you could never have. Maybe you are not sure if you are in an emotionally abusive relationship. It is normal to not be quite sure about this because this kind of abuse is insidious, subtle, and very, very confusing as you blame yourself for all the problems. As I’ve said, this is the intention of the emotionally abusive person. Once you see how this happened and that it is not your fault, you will be able to have the 360-degree vantage point and not “go there” again.

If you need help identifying if you are in this kind of abusive cycle or if you want help becoming abuser-proof, please contact me to schedule a Discovery Call. It would be my absolute honor and pleasure to help you get out of this toxic patterning and onto a happier life path.