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Abuse is a pervasive social problem that is only recently being identified. It’s not a new phenomenon, however; abuse has probably been going on for centuries — we’ve just never talked about it until recently. The #MeToo movement is a testament to the pervasiveness of sexual abuse, and the defensive (i.e., enraged) responses from abusers is a testament to how abusiveness is justified by those who do it.
We are a deeply wounded culture in desperate need of grieving, but we will not be able to realize the full extent of our wounds until we remove our fig leaves and begin to understand how all of us (even and especially the worst of us) have been abused. I stand by the maxim that hurt people hurt people, and make no exceptions for abusers. I also stand by Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), who believes that psychological disturbances are based in repressed experiences of abuse that occurred during childhood.
Before we can tap into our grief and begin to heal our wounds we must first develop better understandings of what abuse entails; we can’t heal from something until we know what it is that we are healing from. My writing is an effort toward this aim, and this specific piece is an attempt to explain how emotional abuse is performed. I hope that by drawing attention to the doing of abuse we can begin to mobilize collective resistance to it as it occurs instead of after it has happened.
What is Abuse?
Abuse comes in many forms: physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, intellectual… the list goes on. What all these forms of abuse have in common are that they cause harm and are inflicted by those who aim to maintain power over others. Abuse more specifically functions to control the behaviors of other people upon whom abusers depend for a sense of agency. Abusers will never admit dependence on their targets, however, and nor will they own up to being abusive… which is part of what makes them abusive in the first place.
Abuse performs dominance, and dominance feels like superiority. People abuse others in order to feel powerful, which means that they otherwise carry a sense of powerlessness. This sense of powerlessness probably comes from having been abused in the past, which is what makes abusiveness a kind of traumatic inheritance…
