I was reading a memoir recently, of a woman who endured a betrayal and abandonment in a relationship. Interestingly, it wasn’t the heartbreak that was most striking to me (and it was awful for her). It was the experience of shaming she experienced for sharing her story, and even the distancing she experienced from others while she went through it, before she shared a word -as though emotional injury and betrayal trauma were a contagious illness. I was struck by how many people minimized, trivialized, ignored, and gaslighted her experience, or even attempted to “make sense” of her partner’s betrayal. And while her words echoed through the pages of a memoir, it was a story I had heard countless times in my therapy clients.
Survivors of emotionally abusive relationships, relational abuse, and relational trauma with a person, partner, or family member who has a narcissistic, antagonistic personality face a unique paradox.
The very thing that will help them can feel very dangerous.
While we are in a “braver” era of mental health, addiction, with an entirely different prevailing conversation about therapy and recovery, we still come up short with survivors of emotional abuse. Why is that?
People who are coming forward and talking about their experiences recovering from narcissistic relationships, sharing betrayals occurring within marriages, families, workplaces, and spiritual and community systems are taking a big leap forward. For years, and even decades people who have endured the confusing landscape of vacillation between abusive and normal, good days and bad, remain stuck in subsequent self-blame, guilt, grief, shame, and self-abandonment. We have words for this – trauma bonding, cognitive dissonance, complex trauma. People are coming forward, on social media, on podcasts, in memoirs and blogs and sharing about the chronic invalidation and manipulation by a parent, the criticism and gaslighting of a partner, the isolation and spiritual bypassing of toxic “healing” communities.
And when they do… They still face shame, contempt, dismissiveness, a sort of pearl-clutching “how dare you?” How dare you air your dirty laundry, shame your family, harm the group. Then survivors may be faced with a litany of talk about glass houses, two to tango, 50/50 culpability in relationships, and that you have only one mother/father/family. The topic of familial estrangement has been getting more focus in recent months, with the prevailing takeaway that the person estranged is invariably inflexible, tearing families apart, keeping children away from extended family. The sentiment then becomes -oh come on, let so called bygones be bygones, and that forgiveness is a magic balm.
There is often a zeal to figure out why the emotional abusers do what they do – and all the hypotheses are floated – insecurity, trauma, abandonment fears, a demanding father, an enmeshed mother, adversity, stress. However, there is often little parallel curiosity for the survivors of abuse – who are often diminished into one-dimensional caricatures of co-dependency, or if you are lucky as “long-suffering.”
When we peer into the experience of the survivor of all forms of emotional abuse or relational trauma, they have done this deep dive into the abusers’ mental state for years – have often constructed theoretical formulations more elegant than a therapist could craft -empathic compassionate narratives about the abusive behavior upheld by rationalizations related to their abusers’ trauma, family of origin, bullying, other purported co-occurring issues.They have put more focus on WHY this person in their lives did, RATHER than understand what is happening within themselves, and holding compassion for their normal responses to betrayal and emotional harm. And when you throw in there that emotionally abusive relationships with people who have narcissistic or antagonistic personalities often vacillate – up, down, and all around – good days, bad days, seduction, criticism, obsessiveness, withholding, rage, silent treatment – and often have a public persona that may be charming, charismatic, charitable, successful, humanitarian, gregarious, or alternately as having had a difficult life or misunderstood. You then have a person who has descended into self-abandonment, self-blame, having disavowed subjective reality and sense of self to belong, to attach, to remain safe.
Speaking truth to behavior, suffering, and vulnerability are essential to healing, it is part of fostering agency and climbing out of the passivity and capitulation survival within an emotionally abusive relationship requires. Yet for many survivors of emotional abuse, speaking truth culminates in a new form of shame – the cacophony of voices around them doubling down on the self-doubt (“I never had a problem with him, your mother has been a pillar of the community”). The just world-ers coming down on those who would threaten the status quo by speaking ill of those often patriarchal structures of marriage, family, and how we metabolize and hold space for power. Relational abuse and emotional abuse can happen to anyone but occurs disproportionately and has greater impacts for those who hold less societal power, for those who are less likely to be believed by the world, and by the institutions within the world. Gaslighting is most efficient with an already disempowered target. Abusers typically have much more robust networks of support and emboldening than survivors.
And yet, the wisest trauma experts such as Dr. Judith Herman would argue, that trauma that happens in relationship must be healed in relationship. We know that testimony is central to healing. We hold different standards for the more heroic or noble traumas of random crime or combat than we do for people who were hurt by those who purported to love them – and yet the damage to the sense of safety and trust of others is often far greater. The people who need to heal in relationship, are often shut down when they do find their voice. Our biases – estrangement is always bad, forgiveness is always good, publicly sharing what happens in our relationships is unseemly, coupled with the social media vitriol often directed at people who share stories of what happened to them in these relationships – means that many survivors often are terrified to access the key tool to recovery – community.
I don’t know that there is an easy fix, after interpersonal trust is co-opted and trust also takes on a new tenor after emotional abuse, especially that which occurs in families of origin and long term committed relationships. Other people are embodied as unsafe, or a signal to become small and unseeable. At a minimum, it is important for all of us who work in recovery and therapy spaces to be more curious about the experience of the survivor of emotional abuse who shares their story than we are about the abuser, and in the zeal to “ensure that the abuser’s story gets told too” we often re-invalidate survivors who took decades to begin the tentative foray to share their stories. It is crucial that we remember that bearing witness to pain is essential to recovery.
We can create safe havens, in therapy rooms, recovery groups, friendships, but the tide of the shaming world – which is woefully trauma uninformed, is always a pull, and concretizes the fear of sharing and relating.
Fostering recovery and healing means being aware of a person’s relational context, our internalized biases, and how trauma, attachment, status-quo, and power operate together in society, to silence people and keep them silenced. When people are simply told -I see it, I get it, I see you, and that behavior was not ok.
We liberate them.