The battle formula to complete his control
Already on our “emotional knees” from his “behavior training, isolation, humiliation, and identity destruction,” we received his knockout punches from these next three “big guns.”
The formula for this part involves:
Intimidation + Alteration of Perceptions + Intermittent Reinforcement
Used simultaneously and alternated masterfully, the result is the abuser having absolute coercive control over the victims, while they form deep “trauma bonds” with their abuser.
I’ve already talked a lot about his intimidation tactics – getting in our faces, yelling, threats of violence, and actual violence. For sure, those were powerful. But their power was magnified exponentially by the other two. So I will focus on those.
Alteration of Our Perceptions
While this sounds like some lofty, academic psychology term, put in plain English, it simply means the abuser tells lies and, through his methods, gets the victims to embrace them as the truth.
In our house, Dad set the “truth” of our family life to be what he wanted it to be. Then he wore us down and eroded our perceptions until we went along with him. Dad’s “truth” became our “family dogma” – the beliefs set by the higher authority – him. And his rules and tools were strategically designed to enforce his dogma. It was just like a religion in a way, a system we were already intimately familiar with.
To be good Catholics, we had to accept the beliefs of the faith, accept the dictates of the priest, follow the rules, and take it all on total faith. To question anything was heresy – a total failure in the “faith department.” A person who refused to “believe” was like that worst of all Apostles (except for Judas, the betrayer) – Thomas – who had so doubted that Jesus had risen from the dead after the Crucifixion, that he said he would only believe it after he put his fingers into Jesus’ nail wounds. It was not a compliment to be called a “Doubting Thomas” in Catholicism, and there were many Gospels and Sunday sermons warning against doubt.
So given that we were already well versed in a system of “total faith,” it was not a giant leap to create that same system in our patriarchal household. And of course, the concept of patriarchy, male authority, was also a part of our religion’s dogma. If patriarchy was right in church, by extension, patriarchy at home must also be correct.
Dad had already started dismantling or blocking our perceptions of things with the tools I mentioned in the previous post. He finished off our defenses with these methods designed to alter our perceptions of reality to match what he wanted:
- Gaslighting
- Minimizing a person’s feelings with Platitudes and Toxic Positivity
- Minimizing and Normalizing Bad Behavior
- Twisted logic
- Victim Blaming
- Gaining our sympathy and loyalty by making himself out to be the victim
- Cognitive Dissonance
- Spiritual Bypassing
- Refuse to acknowledge the elephant in the room
- Masking
- Apologies that aren’t apologies
How these work
Gaslighting. Here, the abuser tells their spouse that the truth is one thing when the actions don’t match the words. Words like “I love you,” right after hitting the spouse. The abuser insists that “We are a happy family,” even though everyone walks around tense, hypervigilant, and relaxes only when the abuser leaves.
It is also the “re-writing the story” of what just happened with comments like: “That’s NOT really what I meant,” Or, “You’ve got it wrong. You’re just not understanding. It’s really ‘this way.’”
Another way Dad undermined our perceptions was to minimize our feelings, and minimize and normalize his bad behavior with platitudes, toxic positivity, and derision. Platitudes and toxic positivity include useless phrases such as: “It’s not that bad.” “Well, I don’t do what he does.” “Nobody’s perfect.” “Look at the bright side.” They also include any statement that starts with “At least I don’t…” or “If only you would…”
Alternating these with derision was also really effective. We were often told, “You’re just too sensitive!” To feel or give value to your emotions was viewed as weakness. The implication was that if we didn’t react so emotionally, we’d see that life was just fine. Our sensitivity was creating the problem. And our upset was just our imagination. If a person hears that often enough, they start to wonder if maybe the abuser is right after all.
Minimizing and normalizing his bad behaviors involved twisting the logic to favor Dad. “Yes, i shouldn’t have ‘lost my temper,’” a description that seriously minimized his violent outbursts. “But it’s just that….”
There was always a seemingly valid excuse: “It’s ‘normal’ to ‘lose control’ once in a while because life is just so hard…work is stressful…the boss is too demanding…you just have to blow off steam!”
Mind you, no one else in the house was allowed to lose control, or hit or yell at him. It was only normal for him to lose it. After all, he had it “hardest” being out in the world protecting and providing for us. And we should also remember, he worked hard and made a good living and told us he loved us…and we had to believe that. Or else.
If all this is done right, the twisted logic portrays the abuser as also a victim in an effort to get our sympathy. He would try to have us see his “agony” because it’s so hard out there and he’s doing the best he can. And, of course, he loves us. If he didn’t, would he be working so hard to provide for us? Maybe he shouldn’t have hit us, yes, but sometimes he just overloads. Who wouldn’t?
Then he would add in the “Look what you made me do” tool. Those comments were the subtle accusations that we had somehow failed to hold up our end of the bargain and were partly responsible for his violence. Either we did something that triggered him, or we failed to anticipate and do something he needed. The implication was that here he was working so hard out there for us, and we weren’t giving him the support he needed.
After a while, it almost started to sound reasonable, and we would feel compassion. Here’s a hard-working guy fighting for his family, and they’re failing him. What’s a hard-working guy to do when his family just can’t get it right? Poor guy. Of course he’s going to knock a few heads, right?
Feeling guilty about “our part in this,” we’d begin to see things his way. And to feel sympathy for his dilemma… even as we still weren’t really sure what it was we failed at. But to stay upset with him seemed like we were being ungrateful.
So instead, we’d swallow our anger, apologize, and promise to do better. And in our minds we rationalized it as “life was the problem, not him.” If only life were fairer and less difficult, this wouldn’t happen. The problem was “out there,” not in our house.
That reaction was our “cognitive dissonance.” Our way to resolve the impossible mental situation of being caught between two opposing realities. And the first clue it might be operating is any sentence that starts with “Well yes, but…”
It’s the mindset that says, “Well, yeah, he’s a rapist. But he IS good to his grandmother.” As if one makes the other all better. The two may be true, but one doesn’t wash the other clean. Another example would be, “Well yeah, he hits us, but he loves us and doesn’t really mean it. So it’s not abuse. That happens in OTHER households.” They are two realities for the same moment, and mentally, both cannot exist.
In our house, we were rightfully upset with him. There was no excuse for his violence. At the same time, his arguments presented so strongly seemed so logical and right. Two opposing realities for one situation confronted us. What do you do with that? It’s mentally exhausting.
That is the dilemma of cognitive dissonance. You think one thing, but are also faced with something that defies what you know. Do you keep your belief, or the other? Bludgeoned with that enough times, and overwhelmed by his emotional manipulations, the victim tries to resolve the conflicting information. And in a situation where you can’t fight back…where it’s literally dangerous to fight back…the only way to resolve it is to just accept the abuser’s explanation and block any other one.
Carl Sagan described it best:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Then there was a related form of cognitive dissonance at work, too, I think, in him. “Spiritual bypassing.” He would say he was sorry. Go to church every Sunday. Say prayers. And Dad would sometimes go on a spiritual retreat with the men’s group and, of course, admit to the priest that he wasn’t perfect. But the priest would have him say some prayers, remind him no one is perfect, and then Dad would come back and act as if that changed him. Until the next time.
The thing about spiritual bypassing is that you jump from “sinner to redeemed” in one step and “bypass” the middle part where you actually do the hard work of CHANGING. Where you actually face your truths, failings, and ADMIT to causing harm and wrongs.
But for him, he wouldn’t…or couldn’t touch the reality of what he really was. He was faced with two opposing realities – that he was an abusive monster and that he was a child of God. He was both. But in his cognitive dissonance, he chose the latter and never went near his crimes.
And so, in his spiritual approach, there was no requirement for therapy or serious work to do the things that would actually change him. If he felt bad about his behavior, he just said the words, and then he was all better, right? So he gaslit us that he really intended remorse and change, and chose cognitive dissonance for how he viewed himself.
This thinking was supported by his “elephant-in-the-middle-of-the-room” rule. It’s a common metaphor that describes how things work in abusive households. Issues are not acknowledged, talked about, or resolved in any healthy manner. Instead, no one talks about it. Everyone carefully avoids calling things what they are or even bringing them up. It’s not abuse if no one ever says it is, right? If we just ignore how many times this past month Dad beat Mom in the bathroom during a fight, then those were just “bad days,” and she is not a battered wife. What you don’t recognize doesn’t exist. Dad says so.
Masking was another tool my father used to show the outside world what a great guy he was. By being the easy-joking, easy-going, friendly guy when we were with others, and by even praising us to others, everyone else was convinced he was a great husband and father.
Those moments also made us question our own perceptions. He was telling everyone how proud he was of us. He was being nice to us “out there.” We’d start to let our guards down. Here was the loving Dad again. Maybe we’d been reading him all wrong? Maybe he really WAS proud of us and loved us, and those fights really were our fault for failing him at times?
Finally, there were his “apologies.” They were so intense and seemingly real. But…they weren’t about making amends. THAT one took years to tease out.
Whenever he hit Mom or us, and then took off to cool down, he always came home so upset, contrite, and sorry. He’d plead, explain, excuse, partly blame us, but then apologize again.
I read that this behavior was not about being sorry but about making sure he didn’t lose Mom. And looking back, that makes sense.
Underneath his pleading and remorse, I always sensed an unspoken pressure to accept the apology without hesitation or question. It seemed he needed that to be comfortable again. Maybe he needed to know that he wouldn’t really be held accountable? I can only say that as the years progressed and he wasn’t held accountable, his “apologies” dwindled and those Saturday-morning fights became all-day-long Saturday fights with no amends.
The other thing about his apologies is that they were not about resolving conflict in a healthy way. Those moments were NOT a two-way interaction. We weren’t given any moment to share what WE felt about his actions. Or vent OUR anger at how he treated us. THAT was off the table. We sensed it would have triggered another round of anger from him. After all, there he was, all contrite and pleading, and we were going to say we did not want to accept it? Not likely.
No. His apologies were not apologies to us. They were just nicely-delivered demands to reset things back to where he wanted them. And we had to agree.
Variations on a theme
Every one of these things that I’ve just described, while different in themselves, were just variations on the same theme – warp our minds to control our thoughts and perceptions. Dad determined what the reality was to be. Truth was “his version,” and we were just supposed to fall in line and accept that. No questions or dissent. Or else.
The “coup de grâce” tool
In reading all this, some may be beyond appalled at the amount of mental abuse, never mind the physical abuse, that he dealt us. Others may still question how such mind control could be possible and why we didn’t fight back harder.
To the latter group, I will simply say three things:
- We were in danger. And you can’t understand unless all of those things were your daily, intense reality
- It is not that any ONE of those tools was that powerful, INDIVIDUALLY. It was the COMBINATION of ALL of them, used constantly, that wore us down and bludgeoned us mentally and psychologically into submission
- And finally… there was still that last, one, big gun, his “coup de grâce,” that I’ve yet to talk about
On that last one, even if we’d managed to hang on by our fingernails up to this point, when he applied that last one, it sealed our fate. Our slide into submission would be complete.
Up Next
“Intermittent Reinforcement”…and again, our body chemistry would help set us up for failure.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
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