The Mystery of Loving an Abuser
If we only have a dollar in our pocket, then most of our decisions become financial decisions. If our partner is an abuser or controller, then the majority of our decisions are based on our perception of the abuser’s potential reaction. This is just one aspect of Stockholm Syndrome, as described by our guest contributor, clinical psychologist Dr. Joseph M. Carver.
Stockholm Syndrome
Following on from his guest contribution Are You Dating a Loser?, Dr Carver’s article on Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The Mystery of Loving an Abuser explores a situation that will be familiar to all too many people.
Part 1 of Dr Carver’s article describes the formation of bonds between victim and abuser, while Part 2 continues with observations about cognitive dissonance and offers a list of 14 suggestions for friends and family of victims.
The article introduces Stockholm Syndrome this way:
In clinical practice, some of the most surprised and shocked individuals are those who have been involved in controlling and abusive relationships. When the relationship ends, they offer comments such as “I know what he’s done to me, but I still love him”, “I don’t know why, but I want him back”, or “I know it sounds crazy, but I miss her”. Recently I’ve heard “This doesn’t make sense. He’s got a new girlfriend and he’s abusing her too…but I’m jealous!” Friends and relatives are even more amazed and shocked when they hear these comments or witness their loved one returning to an abusive relationship. While the situation doesn’t make sense from a social standpoint, does it make sense from a psychological viewpoint? The answer is — Yes!
Relationship Questions or Comments for Dr Carver?
As a special bonus, Dr Carver has generously offered to drop by now and again to answer any questions that may come up for readers who find that Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The Mystery of Loving an Abuser sounds just a little too familiar.
So, fire up your keyboard if you’d like to put a relationship question to him, and leave your question in the comments section of this blog posting. We’ll let Dr Carver know when your questions or comments are posted, and he can take a look at them.
Rate this post?
(6 votes, average: 4.17 out of 5)
Loading ...Related Posts
- Do You Know the Prescription for Unhealthy Relationships?
- Someone in Your Life Probably Has a Personality Disorder
- Teens in Dangerous Relationships
- New Home for Personality Disorders Foundation Materials
- Emotional Memory Management
Other articles by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor
This article was last reviewed by on Monday, 6th March 2006. You can leave a response below.
The URL of this page is:
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2006/03/06/stockholm-syndrome/
144 Responses to “The Mystery of Loving an Abuser”
-
Andrew144
I reared my comment again and it is a jumbled mess of a composition. :)
Just one funny bit for those still suffering:Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen
:) -
Andrew143
ps. I am not much of a typist really as you can see and not a native speaker. I did not reread what I have written. I can advise to all victims that the best help they can get is from their families and humour, at least those were the factors that have helped me to finish the matter I think. My personal motto is in the matter is.
WHAT DOES NOT KILL YOU … MAKES YOU STRONGER. -
Andrew142
Dear Dr Carver
I have been a victim of female abuser for a long while. Just lately I have recognized this and I hope, no I am certain I have ended the matter permanently. Well I hope I have ended it though I feel that by trying to find explanation to the things that have happened I might still get under her influence, but this feeling is confronted by my reason which tells me i should get behind this phenomenon. I have just read few of comments and the strange thing is that i have known about Stockholm syndrome did even a bit of superficial research about it on the internet. What would interest me is the person of the abuser. Why has she become well… those people who try to find cure and healing will know how to name them… (this is a public forum after all… sometimes it is hard to say that monster is a good word to describe them.
Would it be possible to be in a multiple abusive situation, meaning that one person controlls and abuses another who in her turn also abuses another (who happened to be me in this case). I am wondering if this is the result of me trying to shift the blame from my abuser to the one on top of the … so to say “food chain”. The thing that scared me almost silly that by trying to somehow cope with the situation i have tried to copy my “abused abuser”, my girlfriend. I started having fantasies about her being abused by the top man, and i feel that by doing this i have very much deepened my I have dependence of her. Finally I managed to escape and tear myself away from her influence (at least i am now quite sure i have escaped)by confronting the man on the food chain… who is an older man about (my exgirlfriend and me are both very much younger). The impulse that drove me to the confrontation with him was mostly the combination of jelousy fear of what i might find out about my ex and finally i wanted somehow protect her from her “tormentor”. Finally the whole confrontation ended in civilised conversation with him, frankly in the end i almost felt compassion for the man who described himself as a person who can not make my girlfriend understand that it is over between them, and he is also so to say a victim of the situation. He also showed concern for her just as I did though in a more reserved way, and he was and still is I think controlled and blackmailed by my ex. He is married by the way and does not want to upset the peace of his home. He said or rather hinted that when my ex-girlfriend so to say admitted her love and affection towards him, he was tempted and agreed to start a liason, thinking my ex would sort of grow out of this passion. I was somehow concerned that something was wrong with my ex, because she sort of left hints that have led me to this. I interpreted this as a sort of cry for help, by which I know now that she only wanted to strengthen the bond between us or more exactly to be able to influence me a lot more. I have to admit that i think her a very intelligent person… or at least a very cleverly manipulative one.
Dr Carver please after reading this short description of the case, which is not a full account since I have left out a lot, tell me if there is a slight possibility that my ex could have been a victim of some assault or some kind of trauma or if she is also a victim who tries to cope with the situation just as tried to do.
I now see thru her quite well and know her also very well and i see how confused she is that i am not reacting to my usual behavioural pattern that she knows and knows how to use to her own intentions.
I have come to the conclusion that by resisting I either make her reaize how twisted and well let me admit in some way evil she has become or she would block me out of her life as she does in situations when she is not in control. I am relieved that I have freed myself of her, I somehow pitty her and would like to try to help her, but I know it is not really possible for me.
To finish in a way I regard my entry not only as a question but - as the result of self analysis - as an answer that I hope I have found. -
Kira141
I’ve read your artical and other like it on a few seperate occasions. the reaction I have to them is always kind of the same, but I’ve never tried to post any questions to the authors before. See, I don’t want to give a faulty portrayl because I’m emotionally worked up, but I think I need help. I know I need some kind of answer. I think I am in a mutually abusive relationship. I don’t know when or where things started, or how, or if it was all just accidental. I met my husband when I was 15, he was 19, we dated for awhile, secretly, until my grandparents who I was living with at the time found out and told us we were never to see one another again. I never dated again until my husband and I met again several months after I moved out of my grandparents home at 18. I had a decent job for a kid ust starting out with no college and no parental support, and a nice little nest egg of eight hundred dollars. Enough to have moved into my own place, I was living with a friend who’s mother was charging me 200 dollars a month to live there, a very nice deal, even for a tiny room in a full and busy house. Then my husband came for a visit to see the older sister of my friend with whom he’d been friends for a long time. Three months later we decided to move in together to save money since we had lived in seperate towns and were seeing eachother constantly and couldn’t aford the gas money. A year later we got married and I was 5 months pregnant. I was pretty much isolated from my family due to gas concerns and because I was not particularly close to my family as it was. I was also no longer working because I had been laid off and my husband told me it was fine and he liked me being home. I had actually gone back to work for a while but the pregnancy forced me to quit because I could not stand up for more than a few minutes without nearly fainting. We lost that child and six months later got pregnant again hoping for a successful pregnancy this time. I don’t know what I was thinking, I’d never liked children, but the romanticism and adorable little girls I saw every day at my job seemed to have sabatoged my good sense. The second pregnancy was sucessful and I hated being a mother. My husband worked all the time and would never watch our son for more than an hour so I could nap, even on weekends. He’d almost never change a diaper, and house chores? I’d never done them before really, but now I was exclusively responsible for them. I think both of us were far too young to consider having kids. I considered giving our son up for adoption, not wanting to give him to my own family members and hoping to find a home for him that would take him in and adore him and never pass him around like I was a kid, and hoping to avoid letting my hormones and building frustration allow me to cause him harm emotionally or physically. My husband talked me into letting his mother, who is agressive, loud, very mean verbally and who I hate and who hates me, take him for a few weeks and said that after a few weeks I’d want him back. I didn’t. My husband never explained anything to his mother, never. He didn’t tell her what was going on, why she was watching him or for how long. She had no idea that my only experiance with babies was one or two bottles and diaper changes. She wouldn’t really even talk to me, or rather, she wouldn’t listen. She’d talk a lot, about how horrid I was, what I was doing wrong, what to do, and not about just my son, but the entire time I’ve known her about -everything-. The way I sweep, the way I wash dishes, the fact that I’m a bad housekeeper and that I need to be doing that and on and on and on.
My husband was raised in a house hold with a very dominant woman who, though she works, is also very particular about upkeep on her house. His family bassically felt that a woman should be “Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen”. While my husband says that he doesn’t feel that way, he also refuses to do any housework himself. For three years I was stuck in a house isolated from eveyone outside of his family because we had no money for gas. We couldn’t afford for me to go get a job because we were too far away from the jobs for me to look, much less actually get there for the first week or two before I would get my first check. For three years I begged him to get us moved. I didn’t want to leave him, I love him, Leaving him hadn’t even occoured to me. Then one day we realized we had access to free wireless internet in our appartment. I began making online friends who told me that I was in a bad situation. I realized I really was. I began to reassess things an finally I realized that I could not spend the rest of my life living like that. So finally I told my husband, “look, we have to get moved to somewhere where I’m not trapped like a rat, to where I can go back to school and get an education and a better job so that we don’t have to live in poverty anymore, or I am going to find a way to do it myself, by myself.” Nothing changed until he lost his job a few months later, partly because our fights and whatnot were making him late to work. My husband has never hit me, he has pressured me into doing things I didn’t want to, but I retaliate when he makes me upset by biting, poking, pinching and scratching, not hard, just enough to make him notice because he doesn’t notice my “No”s or get my “That really upsets me”s, or my “Let go”s. But maybe I’m the abusive one blaming him for my own messed up self. He never defended me to his mother till we moved, and I’ve never actually witnessed him doing so. He reacts badly to the idea of me leaving him. He’ll scream wordlessly like a wounded beast, then he’ll put his head in his hands and start crying soundlessly, he’ll make me feel like a monster for considering it. I’m convinced by things he’s said and how he’s reacted that he’ll break down, go into a massive depression and his life will be bassically over. He’s told me that I’m the only woman he’s ever loved or ever will love. He’s lied to me and others about the strangest things for the oddest reasons. He’s convinced me that I will never find someone to replace him because I’m too selective. His brother’s are both violent destructive criminals, and while my husband has no record some of the things he’s told me he’s thought up to do to someone who really pissed him off make me worry abuot what he might do if I left, not perhaps to me, but to others I encounter in the future. I wonder here if I am simply paranoid.
We have moved to a town with a community college where he got a job after he was fired. I’m going to school now, but I still feel like this might not be the reliationship for me. He says he’s changed, and that he is changing, but he hasn’t much. But maybe I’m too demanding. He has nerve damage, sleep apnea and works a very physical job. So maybe I’m expecting too much to want his affection, to want to have time where we talk and reconnect, to have a little help with the house chores, like, I dunno, him to take out the trash once in a blue moon, or wash a few dishes? Maybe I’m the one being abusive, maybe we both are. I’m so confused and lost and I don’t know what to do. I love him. I don’t want to leave him and hurt him, or be alone, but I want to follow my dreams freely, I want to have room to grow, to maybe find someone who has more in common with me, someone who can understand my passions, not just say they want to help me reach them. Someone who was raised in a way that made them turn out as honest and inquisitive as I am. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’re both just growing up and I need to give things more time. Please, I desperately need some direction.
Pages: [15] 14 13 12 11 10 9 … 1 »