Tag Archives: Physical Abuse

Abusive Power And Control

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The following is an excerpt of an excellent resource on Abusive Power And Control behaviors from Wikipeda. Please see the link at the bottom of this excerpt for the complete article. It does a great job of showing many of the power and control tactics used by abusive, controlling, and manipulative people in one short article. It is also helpful in that it lists what most would consider as “positive behaviors”, i.e. doing “nice things” for someone. Most articles on abuse, power and control, and coercive control focus on the overtly negative behaviors, but leave out these positive behaviors that are also used to coerce and control others.

However, it does omit Suicidality. Many abusive, controlling and manipulative people also use threats of suicide as a means of coercive control, emotional abuse and blackmail. These suicidal threats can be overt, or more subtle references to suicide, with a manipulative, controlling intent.

“Abusive power and control (also controlling behavior and coercive control) is commonly used by an abusive person to gain and maintain power and control over another person in order to subject that victim to psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse. The motivations of the abuser are varied and can include devaluation, envy, personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, or just for the sake of the enjoyment of exercising power and control.[1]

Controlling abusers use tactics to exert power and control over their victims. The tactics themselves are psychologically and sometimes physically abusive. Control may be exerted through economic abuse, limiting the victim, as they may not have the means to resist or leave the abuse.[2] The goal of the abuser is to control, intimidate, and influence the victim to feel they do not have an equal voice in the relationship.[3]

Manipulators and abusers often control their victims with a range of tactics, including, but not limited to, positive reinforcement (such as praise, superficial charm, flattery, ingratiation, love bombing, smiling, gifts, attention), negative reinforcement (taking away aversive tasks or items), intermittent or partial reinforcement, psychological punishment (such as nagging, silent treatment, swearing, threats, intimidation, emotional blackmail, guilt trips, inattention) and traumatic tactics (such as verbal abuse or explosive anger).[4]

The vulnerabilities of the victim are exploited with those who are particularly vulnerable being most often selected as targets.[4][5][6] Traumatic bonding (also popularly known as Stockholm syndrome) can occur between the abuser and victim as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change and a climate of fear.[7] An attempt may be made to normalise, legitimise, rationalise, deny, or minimise the abusive behaviour, or blame the victim for it.[8][9][10]

Isolation, gaslighting, mind games, lying, disinformation, propaganda, destabilisation, brainwashing, and divide and rule are other strategies that are often used. The victim may be plied with alcohol or drugs or deprived of sleep to help disorientate them.[11][12] Based on statistical evidence, certain personality disorders correlate with abusive tendencies of individuals with those specific personality disorders when also compiled with abusive childhoods themselves. [13]

The seriousness of coercive control in modern Western societies has been increasingly realised with changes to the law in several countries so it is a definable criminal offence. In conjunction with this there have been increased attempts by the legal establishment to understand the characteristics and effects of coercive control in legal terminology. For example, on January 1, 2019, Ireland enacted the Domestic Violence Act 2018, which allowed for the practice of coercive control to be identifiable based upon its effects on the victim. And on this basis defining it as: ‘any evidence of deterioration in the physical, psychological, or emotional welfare of the applicant or a dependent person which is caused directly by fear of the behaviour of the respondent’.[14] On a similar basis of attempting to understand and stop the widespread practice of coercive control, in 2019, the UK government made teaching about what coercive control was a mandatory part of the education syllabus on relationships.[15] While coercive control is often considered in the context of an existing intimate relationship, when it is used to elicit a sexual encounter it is legally considered as being a constituent part of sexual abuse or rape. When it is used to begin and maintain a longer term intimate relationship it is considered to be a constituent element of sexual slavery.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abusive_power_and_control

Widely Anticipated Article Confirms Court Mistreatment of Protective Mothers, Pt. 1, by Barry Goldstein

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Part 1

For decades, protective mothers have been complaining that family courts are tilted to favor abusive fathers and that they face corruption. Court officials have tended to respond defensively and dismissed the domestic violence victims as disgruntled litigants. Over the years an ever growing collection of research, media investigations and preventable tragedies have supported the mothers’ position, but in a form of confirmation bias, court officials have ignored inconvenient findings.

In my first book with Mo Hannah, Sharon K. Araji and Rebecca L. Bosek wrote an interesting chapter in which they looked at surveys of protective mothers in five states which showed consistent court failures to protect children. It might be easy to dismiss the research because mothers with bad outcomes might be biased, but the authors compared the mother’s complaints with credible research and found the findings supported the mothers. The courts were routinely treating the mothers as if they were not credible but the scientific findings supported other research that found protective mothers rarely make deliberate false complaints.

The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Studies from the CDC demonstrated that domestic violence and child abuse are far more harmful than previously understood and that physical abuse is not required to ruin children’s lives. In other words the courts have been minimizing the seriousness of DV and child abuse and basically ignoring non-physical tactics. Despite the research, courts are still not focused on reducing the fear and stress from abuser tactics that cause children so much harm. And most of the standard court practices undermine the needed healing.

The Saunders’ Study was designed to consider the knowledge and training about domestic violence possessed by evaluators, judges and lawyers. The Study found many of these professionals do not have the specific knowledge necessary to respond to domestic violence. Those without the needed training tend to focus on the myth that mothers frequently make deliberate false reports and unscientific alienation theories. These mistakes lead to outcomes that harm children. Five years after the release of the Saunders’ Study these mistaken assumptions continue to predominate. Saunders also looked at harmful outcome cases in which alleged abusers win custody and safe, protective mothers are limited to supervised visitation. These decisions are always wrong and based on flawed practices but remain common in the family courts.

Widely Anticipated Article Confirms Court Mistreatment of Protective Mothers

The Narcissistic Father During and After Divorce, by Lisa Thomson

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“What happens to grown children of a narcissist father during and after divorce?

This is important to consider because after you’ve left the Narcissist far behind and relieved yourself of the pain, your children continue to deal with him.  It’s not a pretty picture.  As the healthy parent, understanding the Narcissist, knowing what to expect and providing tips for the children will lessen the pain for everyone….

During a divorce, co-parenting with a narcissist can be dangerous.  They will go to great lengths to possess the children.  They will fabricate or distort the truth in order to maintain allegiance from their children.  Deep down a Narc is highly insecure. Parenting after divorce becomes a popularity contest for the Narc.  They have to ‘win’ the children at all costs. Their ego is vulnerable and causes them to lash out at the person who has rejected their idealistic view of themselves.

If you have asked for the divorce you can bet their wrath will be focused on you.  So what begins as a type of possession can escalate into a destructive pattern of parental alienation.  It is fair to say, a Narc parent is more likely than a regular parent, to use parental alienation as a method to retaliate. What begins as possessive and nonstop attention from the father inevitably turns to rejection as the children enter adulthood.”

The Narcissistic Father During and After Divorce, by Lisa Thomson