How to Not Internalise Abuse

Coping with the effects of trauma from abuse

The most common advice when it comes to being abused is to leave the situation.

For the most part, this is true — your choice of action should be to leave abusive relationships as soon as possible. On the other hand, it is impossible to avoid all toxic people. You may end up having a co-worker or a boss who behaves in an abusive manner and quitting your job might not be that easy. You may have to put up with the situation until you manage to find a different job and even then there is no guarantee that where you end up next won’t be a toxic environment.

Everyone will experience a toxic environment in their lifetime one way or another. The best defence against this, when there is no choice but to endure for the time being, is learning not to internalize it as controlling external events is not always possible. In order to do this, you need to understand mechanisms such as idealisation, devaluation, projection, and projective identification.

Abuse involves the devaluation of others — in most cases, the victim will internalize the devaluation of the abuser through projective identification.

For instance, an abusive person with abandonment issues might be so terrified of losing their partner that they start making the partner feel bad about themselves and therefore have less confidence. They might criticise their partner’s appearance and intelligence harshly to induce insecurity in the hopes that the partner will feel like no one other than the abuser would have an interest in them or want to be with them. This lack of self-esteem can prevent the partner from making an attempt to leave the relationship, making them believe that they either deserve the abuse or it is the best they can do.

Projection and projective identification come into play here, because even though the abuser is initially conscious that it is he who is actually insecure and feels not deserving of his partner. But because this feeling is intolerable, he finds ways to convince himself that his partner is the one with low self-esteem. Maybe if they weren’t talking to their co-workers and friends of the opposite sex so much just to get attention as a confidence boost, the abuser would not have felt so afraid of losing them.

In other words, it is not the abuser who is insecure and therefore controlling and abusive but the behaviour of the partner who causes him to behave the way he does. This attitude then leads the abuser to feel justified in mistreating the partner. For the partner, they are constantly belittled, ridiculed, criticised and feel that they can’t do anything right. This makes them internalise the abuser’s projection and devaluation — if the abusive person is constantly telling them that they are no good and not desirable, maybe there is a truth to it. Otherwise, why would someone say this stuff repeatedly?

Empathy and mentalization are what’s necessary to stop internalising and recover from abuse.

It seems counterintuitive to ask someone to empathise with their abusers but this is only because people misunderstand what this really means. Empathy is not the same thing as being guilt-tripped into staying in an abusive relationship for longer, accepting treatment that is not fair, being manipulated into feeling sorry for someone or unjustly taking the blame for someone else’s abusive behaviour.

Empathy is the ability to understand someone and relate to their pain. If we take the example from above, the partner in the relationship is being treated badly and this makes them think that they are the one at fault. Maybe they feel sorry for the abuser’s childhood and get guilt-tripped into forgiving the bad behaviour. In most likelihood, they only stay in the relationship because they have low self-esteem as a result of the abuser’s treatment of them.

If they learn to mentalize, their behaviour will be the opposite. To begin with, they would understand that the abuser’s behaviour has nothing to do with them but their traumatic upbringing. Because the abuser felt rejected and abandoned as a child, they grew up expecting to be abandoned by everyone in their lives. This is why they have high levels of anxiety and issues around control — it was ingrained into them in their childhood that they didn’t deserve any better. In other words, they are also victims of abuse.

Once someone can understand that others’ treatment of them rarely comes from a desire to hurt them on purpose, but rather results from past trauma, this allows them to not feel affected to the same level by the same behaviour. If you realise that your partner is only belittling you because they fear abandonment, not because you are stupid or ignorant, it will allow you to not internalise the abuse as you are not taking it personally.

The next stage is to develop to ability to relate to others’ behaviour regardless of how bad it is.

Let’s say the partner in the example, internalised the abuse and felt that they didn’t deserve any better. Their low self-esteem led them to become jealous and controlling of the abuser and start going through their phones to try to find evidence of infidelity. This is an invasion of someone’s privacy and not something appropriate to do. The partner knows how insecure they felt about being abandoned and betrayed by the abuser whilst doing this and can use this to relate to the abuser’s behaviour. They internalised the abuse from their partner but the abuser also internalised abuse from their parents as a child.

This is not an exercise to justify someone’s abusive behaviour but to develop the ability to relate to it. It should ideally be done after the end of such a relationship, which can trigger feelings of anger. If you can empathise with people, your anger towards them will reduce and this will allow you to let go and move on more easily. You can walk away from an abusive relationship but still be stuck in it at the same time if you keep ruminating over what happened to you and feel constant resentment towards your abuser, which means they still have power over you.

Another important thing to do is to make sure you understand your contribution to the problem.

A lot of people in abusive relationships don’t realise they may be abusive themselves. In most relationships where abuse is involved, both sides are abusive — I wrote about this in more detail here:

Abusers have a victim mentality, which means they are often convinced that they are the mistreated party. It can be shocking to hear that a husband might be beating up his wife and still consider themselves to be the victim, but that’s often the case — they feel that their wives made them do it and they are not actually bad. Not to mention, in many cases, the abuse might be emotional and psychological so it might not be clear who’s abusing who, not just from the perspective of the outsiders but for the couple as well.

If you have two people in a relationship who are both passive-aggressive and devalue and undermine one another, it means they both consider themselves as the mistreated party and do not understand their own behaviours are also bad. Taking responsibility for one’s behaviour can help one move on from trauma because the anger towards the other party is reduced. For instance, I was in a really bad relationship in my early 20s with someone who had severe abandonment issues and was very controlling. Even though the relationship didn’t last long, I felt anger towards him for a very long time because his behaviour was awful.

When I started learning more about psychology and personality disorders my anger and resentful feelings reduced because I realised that I was bad to him in some ways; for instance, I was dismissive of him and the relationship, I would never initiate contact, I would triangulate to make him feel insecure and constantly ask to be in an open relationship. All of these behaviours amplified his abandonment issues, whereas I was too busy trying to deal with my fear of enmeshment to notice. Once I could understand all of this I was able to forgive him. A few years ago I would have felt extremely angry if I had heard he was doing well and had gotten better, whereas if I were to run into him today, I can actually be happy for him.

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