abusive therapy speak
CW: examples of IPV, DV
We have all seen the memes: the worst person you know just learned therapeutic language. I am willing to bet that most people have interacted with more than a dozen people who wield weaponized therapy speak, regularly. Most days, this cultural trend is just annoying, but the insidious reality is that some of the most deeply inaccurate mis-tellings of the truth are morphed by the storyteller’s over-identification with pop psychology.
A few days ago, I came across a post on social media, and immediately knew that if M were to see it, they would point to it as proof of my violence in our relationship. It read, “always doing what someone else wants is an attempt to control how someone feels about you.” Let’s break it down.
I don’t disagree with that sentiment. People-pleasing is a form of control.
Unfortunately, a person who is - themselves - being controlled may also appear to be a person who is “always doing what someone else wants.”
It seems a little too convenient that an abuser can reach for the oversimplified pop psychology concept of people-pleasing, and then the narrative of the very power dynamic that is driving their abuse, is suddenly flipped.
The level of psychological whiplash I endured during my time on the farm still leaves a crick in my neck. More than once, I would find myself unable to sleep at night, replaying the days’ arguments, and googling things like:
“is withholding affection a form of abuse?” the answer to this, is of course, yes.
“why does my partner always start fights right before I have to do something important?”
“my partner won’t let me sleep with my dog,” unfortunately only yielded results about partners who didn’t want the dog in their shared bed. I couldn’t find any other stories of people who slept on a bus next to their partner’s tiny house, who weren’t allowed to bring their own dog with them to their own bed.
“is sleep disruption a form of abuse?” this was after a series of nights that M was meant to do the middle-of-the-night animal checks, but kept calling me to do them instead. Turns out, sleep disruption is literally a military torture tactic.
Of those I can recall, the google search that still twists my stomach to this day is was, “is it possible to accidentally gaslight someone?” after M claimed I was gaslighting them about a detail I didn’t even remember. When I pointed out that I didn’t remember something so there was no way I could be gaslighting them, they told me I was always gaslighting them, even if it was subconscious, and even if it was an accident. You CAN, you can accidentally gaslight me, it’s a thing! they had screamed, earlier that day.
Hindsight is bewildering.
The thing I have come to realize about M, and it seems true for many people who share similar relational habits, is that they tell the truth about themself by accusing others. And M is a master gaslighter.
Gaslighting - metaphorically - comes from a stage production that depicts misogyny. A woman is lied to, blamed, and made to doubt herself about something that is measurably true, right in front of her. Gaslighting is a tactic, and anything that requires tact implies intention, so no - you cannot accidentally gaslight someone. It isn’t a mistaken memory of piece of information that is relayed, but rather a pattern of interaction that causes a person to consistently and repetitively doubt and blame themselves. The longer this goes on, the more it impacts the person’s sense of self and self-worth.
Similar to the claim that my hands are always sweaty, or I smell bad even after washing myself, M had this ongoing story about my head. I have known since I was very little that my head is quite large, compared to others’ proportions, and that my eyes also appear to most people to be oversized.
side note: after bobagate, when I called Max to ask him if he knew me (in his decades of knowing me) to be a person who might roll their eyes unconsciously, his immediate response was, “no, I think you have big eyes and people can see a lot of the whites of your eyes when you look around.”
From very early on in our relationship, M told me that my head was nearly always twitching. They said I was like a bobblehead. Not the muscles of my face, but my entire head. A bird sitting on a wire can keep its head steady even while its body sways as the wire beneath it blows in the wind. Essentially, they were saying I was the opposite of this, and that when my body was still, my head would twitch and bobble side to side.
I spent the better part of this past year seeing a variety of specialists about my chronic pain, including neurologists. I can say without an ounce of uncertainty, that my head does not twitch or bobble.
What a thing to try and convince a person of. I feel sick with anger reflecting on how unwell I let their lies make me. I believed them. I believed that something was deeply wrong with me, and that they were the only one who could/would see or care about it.
In the very beginning, their insistence that they were the only one who truly cared about me was cute. They would draw me a bath, dress us up in matching outfits, cut my hair, etc. It felt like being doted upon, not picked on.
I was always just a plaything. A doll they could dress up. A doll they could discard when they were done, but that no one else was allowed to play with, because periodically they wanted to be able to stomp me into the dirt, or clean me up and bring me to a fancy tea party.
Soon, their attention only hurt - whether physically or emotionally - and they never again did anything like draw me a bath. Their insistence that they were the only one who cared about me morphed into intense forced isolation. The way they would pick my clothes or cut my hair became requirements, not fun shared moments. I wasn’t allowed to pick my own clothes, and if I tried, I was wrong. Once, I made a haircut appointment for myself in Nashville, and when I came home I was ridiculed and told that I should only let M cut my hair from then on. They’d pick on me for weeks about my hair getting too long, but would refuse to cut it, and when they would finally sit me down with the clippers in their hand, they would pull and twist my hair from the root, ignoring or mocking my mentions of pain. The smallest thing I did would become proof of how terrible of a partner and person I was - once, it was even the way I ate a piece of cake, taking the bites that looked most delicious to me, instead of eating bite-by-bite in a straight line to maintain the rectangular shape of the piece of cake.
So the question still lingers, was all that me “always doing what [M] wants [in] an attempt to control how [they felt] about [me],” or was it abuse?