I have a question. Are abusers just abusive and not capable of having “normal” relationships”. Please bare with me for asking.

[Myfirstborn]

If you have “abused” another in an intimate relationship. I kind of dislike that term and prefer to say used abusive behaviours to control another. If you have manipulated, gaslighted, intimidated, scared, lied, given silent treatment etc to an intimate partner in the past does that make you “abusive”?

As in your are “abusive”, instead of you were on that occasion. Implying I guess that you are capable of non abusive relationships in the future? I would self prescribe myself as relatively normal and would not do those behaviours on another. I would feel emotions if I felt rejected but I would not project them onto another. I’d go away, process perhaps feel justified or feel crap then get over it.

Do they have a fault in this process one that is just who they are with every aspect of their life?

I can’t answer your question from my own behaviour.

But I have been seeing a highly qualified therapist about my ex husbands emotional abuse of me.

In his case I would say the abuse would occur with anyone he was with if he isn’t getting his own way. My therapist says he has narcissistic traits and so he genuinely believes he’s never at fault.

We have also discussed unhealthy relationship dynamics, which may be more what you are thinking of. That one takes two to tango.

Its similar to another thread I saw earlier about the difference between abusive behaviours and toxic relationships.

So the ultimate answer is yes and no. For some it’s yes, and others it’s no. It just depends on the person/people involved.

I think there must be quite a few of us who struggle with this.

I guess people pleasing is an unhealthy behaviour as is shouting and intimidating. The difference is people pleasing doesn’t cause fear. You please in order to stop the fear from happening. But in a way it is still a way controlling the other person and situation. That puts blame on both sides.

Perhaps someone doesn’t start out to be abusive but you are a bad match and it brings to the surface their abusive behaviours and triggers. Perhaps another person doesn’t bring out the behaviour because they are more suited but it’s still in there. I do think though that if you are capable of putting the fear in someone to make your point you have huge issues. Even worse if you can’t admit that the behaviour was your fault, you can walk away and leave. You are still capable of doing that to another person if they trigger it.

I know my ex did anger management but that doesn’t really get to the reason of why they want to get there point across by getting angry. The other person must of some how triggered a loss of control
so they still blame the other person.

There must be different types of abusers, those who deliberately do it and those who don’t but it happens none the less.

@pixie5121I think you are right.

I did criticise his behaviour all the time because it upset me. E.g I criticised the fact he didn’t want to help do up the new house we bought together. He wanted to sit and watch me do it. I criticised him when he was fired for being overly aggressive to a female member of staff. I criticised him for his drinking as when he drank he got mad. I tried to control him a lot I think but he was who he was and I should have left.

Perhaps the new girl loves a drink, perhaps she would side with him that the girl at work deserved his anger or she was fine doing all the renovation whilst he sits and drinks and watches.

There's a few threads at the moment that are expecting results about 'what abusers do'. Abusers are not a homogenous group. Some might be abusive in one relationship, some might be abusive in all relationships. Some might only abuse under certain circumstances or in particular conditions. Some might change, some might not.

Questions about 'what they do' or 'how they do it' are like questions about 'what blue-eyed people do' or 'how blue eyed people do it'. It's not a group of people who all act the same way; it's a group of people with one thing in common. Their patterns are peculiar to them, as individuals, not to them as a group. They don't have rules or guidelines.

But surely if you need to have power and control you can’t turn your behaviour on and off. Wouldn’t you need this in all relationships as that’s how they see the world. I need loyalty and respect and acceptance, I need this in all intimate relationships for us to have one because that’s me. I can’t turn that on and off.

But surely if you need to have power and control you can’t turn your behaviour on and off

We all use these things to varying degrees, OP. When we use them unpleasantly, it can be classed as abuse. But we've all been nice to someone because we need them to do a job for us, when we would have preferred to poke them in the eye. We've all got angry with someone because they couldn't see that doing things our way was 'the best way'.

Abusers over-do things that we all do. It's not a 'you do it or you don't do it' thing. It's about how much we like to exert ourselves.

I suppose but then if I got angry and someone said you scared me a bit then I’d feel bad. I wouldn’t blame the other person then do it again. I can self reflect and feel bad for my part or learn. They seem to lack that part.

You hit the nail on the head op - they do not self reflect. They live in a world of 'what I can do TO others and what others can do FOR me (and have done to me that they need punishment for)'

Anyone who intimidates others through invading their personal space and getting up in their face or threat of violence, is a wrong'un. And that's never going to change.

Abusers are wired differently.
Normal, neurotypical people are lambs.
Abusers are lions. They aren't sick, they just aren't like us.

The only exception might be people who have become abusive due to heavy substance abuse. Though often you find the underlying personality was already there...the booze just brings out extra wickedness from them. But it is arguable that if they got help for their addictions and kicked those habits, they may no longer abuse.
They need to be single whilst doing this though. And potentially, indefinitely.

There are different types of abusers but the end result is the same: they are ALL deliberately damaging others.

I don’t agree at all with your people pleasing analogy. The only harm being done there is to the person that’s trying to shoehorn themselves to make someone else happy. They are sabotaging themselves and their own happiness but its provenance is not that of abusive behaviour. In fact it is often the result of experiencing abuse themselves or some form of emotional damage that incites people pleasing.
I also get exasperated when people fail to distinguish unhealthy relationships from abusive ones. Abusive relationships always feature continued domination, subjugation and terrorism of some form by one of the two individuals in order to produce something linear: preservation of the status quo for the abuser whereas unhealthy relationships involve more mutually destructive exchanges / contributions where power imbalance / interplay of personalities and independent choices feature more heavily . Abuse often strips the victim of choice especially when homes, children and finances are weaponised.

Abusers function continuously and independently of their emotional relationships being a good or bad match: the only things that isn’t always the same is the degree to which their abusive true colours need to manifest themselves to achieve the desired result or indeed how their real selves can be manipulated so the become almost a hologram. Abusers do not necessarily reveal their rage or unleash violence. This could be due to the relationship being new, their deceit and false representation of themselves in order to establish an environment where the abuse then becomes far easier to begin once other factors cause stress or the need to question / challenge the abuser.

If someone is abusive then very often legitimate behaviour in a situation we’re both parties are franchises becomes triggering : kept typically in the sort of scenario your describe about someone with anger management issues being “triggered”. I would expect that the triggering is nothing more than a healthy response to unacceptable treatment but the abusive component of that individual’s make up produces a disproportionate and abusive reaction. That is not is not possible to legislate for and not should it since that results in people staying in this environments, walking on eggshells and trying to keep a forever uneasy peace.

I wonder how many actually seek therapy or anger management off their own backs. Mine offered to go to anger management numerous times, never went but offered on the premise I changed also. Because I said his anger was not dependent on me he wouldn’t go. The only time my ex offered to have therapy was the day he knew I was serious about leaving. Still I left so he didn’t go.

I had a relationship with an abuser and he would be - mostly - non abusive with someone who shared his "values".

His values were that people in relationships should not socialise separately or have friends of the opposite sex.

He was apparently (mostly) non abusive when he had that status quo.
Though his "temper" immaturity, entitlement, and narcisism did break through at other times; those were relatively infrequent.

i did not share his values so he abused me regularly (verbally and also threatening to end the relationship or implying it was ended etc.).

He also expected/wanted regular sex (not that there's anything wrong with that) but I have a low sex drive after the honeymoon period - especially if the man is selfish, unskilled, not motivated to find out what works for me etc. so he also became verging on abusive about that (bad mood, complaints, wanking indiscretely within ear shot on a short break etc.). Again he wouldn't have acted ike that if he was having regular sex.

*bad moods

*wanking indiscretely within ear shot on a short break etc.

Forgot that in addition to the indiscrete "performance" wanking in the bathroom ok the short break; on another break he complained about the lack of sex (even though we had had sex) in an airport queue, knowing it was inappropriate abc people might overhear and I'd be v uncomfortable & embarrassed.

Sounds exactly like my ex, I could have written that myself. Except it looks like he might be on the way to losing a 4th job due to complaints about him.

So probably in answer to my own question it depends a lot on the type of person they in the relationship with and there objective for this relationship and whether the person enables the objective. Mine wanted kids immediately, it aggravated him that I didn’t so he tried to get me drunk to have unprotected sex but I don’t drink so that pissed him off more. His new girlfriend got pregnant within a year and moved in.

I wasn’t abused as bad in the beginning because I was young but as I matured I started to pick up and point out a lot of the discrepancies in his actions. I wasn’t sorry he got fired (that wasn’t the first time) I wasn’t happy with his explanations so I questioned them. At that point the abuse became totally disgusting and violent. It was his demise really as it became too obvious, which made him mad because he didn’t want to look bad.

Appeasing the abuser will only work for a while.

This is because abusers are going to abuse. The only thing that will stop the abuse is complete acknowledgement that they are wrong, and years of therapy . Neither of these is likely to happen.

They will feel exhilarated about a fresh start, new relationship, etc, but eventually they will devalue the new job, the new colleagues, the new girlfriend. Once devalued, everything and everyone is going to be treated with contempt, anger, rage, criticism.

My exH has a string of short term jobs (a few years at a time) under his belt because he decides a few months into each job that the people he works with are morons who don't deserve the benefit of his amazing intellect and talents. It takes him a while to put in a bit of time so he doesn't look like a flaky job hopper, get his CV out there, interview, and land another job. But he leaves every single job at about the three year mark.

This is when every relationship he enters into starts to head south too. The colleagues with feet of clay and the girlfriend or the wife who isn't reflecting back his grandiose self image at him will be punished for failing to meet his need for endless 'supply'.

Any hint that a woman in his life (or man, because there are women who behave like thus, and gay men too) is a separate human being with feelings and thoughts of her own will be met with anger. The function of a partner in a relationship with most abusers is to be a mirror. I strongly believe most abusers have cluster B personality disorders.

(He has also simply resigned without another job. He did this twice when we were married, once when I was pg and had suspected placenta previa, with weeks of bed rest facing me, and once right after we had moved into our house, with a mortgage to pay. He liked to create financial chaos. It was part of the pattern of abuse).

@mathanxiety shit mine did that. I never saw it as financial chaos. He always did it at the most inappropriate times. Like wanting to quit his job (yes another) and sell the house and live on a boat whilst I was helping my dad through chemo and his death. They are such awful people.

@mathanxiety at least he resigned. My ex basically got told to leave on each of the 3 previous occasions (and quite possibly the current one that is ongoing although I don't know details) because another member of staff had made a complaint about him. But each time he saw it as him being harassed by management who wanted him to leave. So he never saw it as anything to do with him. Just as he couldn't see that my leaving him was anything to do with him, it was just that I was a terrible person for doing so. I have no idea how his current GF has stuck it out with him for so long. I met her once and she seemed perfectly nice, although it was when she came over to my house to tell me he was drunk and so I had to go and collect the kids. But that's another story.

You're mixing abuse up with personality disorders.

Abuse can be when someone gets angry and swears at a person or calls them a name, or pushes them out of the way; a momentary loss of control, perhaps on a regular basis. Lack of conscience can be part of this, but often, abusers feel terrible for their abusive behaviour, as we've probably all felt terrible in the past for momentary lapses in having our shit together.

OP, if you're talking about cluster b personality disorders, yes, they do all sing from a very similar hymn sheet, but this doesn't describe or define other, more common sorts of abuse, or abuser.

I'd argue that the majority of abusers have personality disorders.

It's not abuse to get angry at someone.

As for name calling or shoving, what sane person does that? No matter how angry they are.

Unless they are reacting TO abuse perhaps. And it's the only thing they feel they can do in that instant to get this other person to back off. But that would make them victims, not perpetrators of abuse.

I see what you are saying, that people sometimes do or say things they regret in the heat of the moment. But there are things normal people never do or say.

It's also common for abusers to claim they just 'lost control' as an excuse.

Perhaps, one instance of abnormal behaviour under stress could be considered just a mistake. Eg: 'fuck off!'. (But not physical violence). But generally speaking, abuse is not a one off.

As for name calling or shoving, what sane person does that? No matter how angry they are

It doesn't mean they have a personality disorder, though. Nor does claiming to have lost control. Most abusers do not have a personality disorder. Personality disorders are a very low percentage of the population. Abuse is all around us all the time.

Cluster b personalities have been argued by many experts in the field to be as high as 1 in 7 (of course this is the high end estimate, some put it at only 1 in 20). They aren't rare.

So I disagree with you about personality disorders and abuse. I think it makes up the vast percentage of it. That and substance abusers.

However, there are exceptions, some people come from abusive backgrounds and know no difference, so when they couple with either abusers or, people with poor boundaries, the cycle continues.

Source wise btw, Dr Ramani on YouTube, puts it at 1 in 10.

And if you want to Google the percentage of bpd, npd, sociopaths and psychopathy (each individually) they add up to 1 in 10 too. Not to say that Google is the best source lol but just to highlight.

These disorders aren't rare. They're just rarely diagnosed because psychopaths aren't interested in therapy :/

Feel terrible I’m really unsure about this. I feel so terrible I’m going to not pay child maintenance. I feel so terrible I’ll take you to court for everything I can get so you feel how terrible it was that you left. They don’t understand the meaning of remorse.