Does the abusive mother or partner know what they are doing? 🆙

Danger! When emotional abuse continues for too long, the result is as if victims have been brainwashed, in which their truths are gradually erased until they disappear altogether. Will it be?

The perverse narcissist corrupts, demoralizes, depraves and alters the identity of those around him. The pleasure is in acting behind the scenes, where no one from the outside world sees. Whatever they do, comes with the mastery of confusing, destroying all sense of morals and behaviors considered normal in the person with whom he is most intimate.

Perplexed at first, the prey tries to be clear about the type of message received, they are subtle criticisms, along with totally disconnected information. Over time, criticisms gain weight, moods change, although the logic of situations still remains disconnected. The purpose, as we know, is psychological destabilization.

In systems where emotional abuse prevails, the interpretation of actions that destabilize is often denied, even in the midst of evidence. On these occasions, the offended narcissist will still vent all his corrosive fury on those who dared to question him, inserting much more doubts and guilt around.

Does the abusive mother or partner know what they are doing? — Chinh Le Duc/Unsplash

Within this type of abusive manipulation, one of the well-known strategies is the use, or rather, the abuse of the double bind. As an example of an office, we have the mother who tells her daughter that she loves her, but her attitudes are shown to be opposites. Situations arise unexpectedly, in the name of breaking the emotional stability of those who naively surrender in an affective way. In the aforementioned case, the narcissistic mother, in the midst of her illness, cannot stand her daughter's affection, envy what she does not have, doing everything to destroy her and be the center of attention again. Her tricks can happen as much through drama as through pain or through her demonstrations of superiority, because for her the means are always justified, the important thing is that in the end the "circus catches fire" and she as the protagonist of her manipulations can be referred to, being the matter of importance. She always accuses the other of being hurt too much, but she never forgets the mistreatment she imagines she had, she never gives in, she never recognizes what she did, reverses the stories and blames whoever is complaining. She is unquestionable, never admits a mistake, and she is the avenger, the one she never forgets.

The injustices and situations that sick mothers, husbands and partners of this order cause are unbelievable and infinite. When I receive patients in my office who are almost maddened with pain, despair and perplexity for the bizarre situations they have been through, I immediately recognize how much they need to be heard, recognized and legitimized in their pain and life stories. It's a lot of pain and anguish to bear alone. Everyone who has been emotionally abused has stories of disconnectedness and a failure to recognize the truth. I remember a patient who went to visit her parents in the hospital because of a stent that her father had placed, she says that she took flowers and chocolates, and that, in the midst of her affective nature, her mother takes advantage of her moment of spontaneity and love. , and like a good narcissistic mother who at some point doesn't see herself as the center of attention, hides an attack of suffering in the name of destroying the harmony of the environment. In this specific case, she invents a completely unreasonable story, stating with great emphasis that someone had told her that this married daughter would have a lover, something that in that circumstance, besides being impossible, would be unforgivable. The daughter, surprised and outraged by the lying revelation, begins to cry asking why her mother would have said something so absurd and terrible at that moment, also asking who would be the person who would have made that unreasonable gossip. In response, the mother is impassive seeing her daughter literally tousled in the face of the pain of injustice imposed as truth. She says that she will not reveal it under any circumstances and even criticizes her daughter about her emotional lack of control. As a final blow, the mother says she is hurt, saying that she has always loved her daughter and that she neither deserved nor would tolerate disrespectful attitudes like this just because she told her something that had been afflicting her for a long time, ending the matter in the midst of an immense bad mood, evidencing her hurt and anger at not being understood by that ungrateful daughter.

As these mothers are pathologically ill, years later this daughter will remember her mother, still perplexed by the episode, looking for a little understanding, lucidity and who knows, a reparation for the discomfort caused, and in response to the episode the mother apparently breathes deeply. reflexive revealing that she remembered the fact and that she would have made that scene deliberately to get revenge on her daughter because she did not follow her guidelines in another episode that she herself didn't remember, and blaspheming again tries to throw more blame on the story, saying be tired of complaining. That would be a maddening example of a double bind.

Another classic example tells the story of the double bond when a mother goes to visit her child in a psychiatric hospital and, standing in front of him, asks: “Aren't you going to give your mother a hug?” Politely, the boy puts his arms around his mother. However, when trying to kiss her, she becomes visibly rigid, clearly bothered by the physical contact. Responding to his mother's non-verbal message, the boy confusedly walks away from her arms, at which his mother asks him: “What's going on? Don't you like your mother?" Even more confused and annoyed than before, the boy tenses up, looking away, at which his mother pins: “You have to learn to control your emotions!”

Their interaction continued in this fashion, with the boy's anxiety increasing for a few moments, until he exploded into a violent episode that required him to be physically restrained.

In the double bond, the first message is: if you don't hug me it's because you don't love me and therefore you won't have my approval. However, the second message is: “If you hug me, you make me feel uncomfortable and I will walk away and therefore you will not have my approval.

In this case there is also a third message related to the boy's reaction to the dilemma. The comment that you must learn to control your emotions implies that the source of the problem lies in the child's inability to control his emotions, rather than in the mother's incongruity. The implication is: the fact that you feel confused means that something doesn't work well for you. You are the cause of the problem/confusion/etc.

This third message seems to be an important part of the double bind pattern. The other person interprets the individual's discomfort or confusion as a sign of:

1) incompetence, or 2) negative intention coming from a position of power of the person caught in the double bind (reality inversion). Also, very often, the third message corresponds to the level of identity and essentially constitutes a message of negative sponsorship, its implication being that the confusion in which the individual finds himself is evident proof of his defect at this level, that is, , that the anxiety of finding oneself in a double bond is a sign of defective character of those who experience it. Perhaps this third aspect of the double bind is what makes it most emotionally intolerable (the text part of the double bind is taken from web sources).

* The double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.