Soul Mosaic

“I saw a post online where someone said, ‘An abuser doesn’t abuse every day.’ That, my friend, is intermittent reinforcement in a nutshell.”
— Shannon Thomas, author, Healing From Hidden Abuse

Intermittent Reinforcement

I don’t know what any mental health professional will say, but my own opinion from my own lived experiences is this: Intermittent Reinforcement is the HUGE one, the coup de grâce tool. It is the one that takes all of his individual tools and intensifies them into one immense, laser-focused, emotional superweapon that delivers the final blow.

What is it

It is the unpredictable delivery of love and rewards in between rounds of abuse. One moment he is laughing, praising us to others, joking; the next moment he is raging. Then at some undetermined moment in the future, he is loving us again.

That is intermittent reinforcement, and it is precisely that lack of consistency that makes it the most powerful tool of all. Why?

Coercive Control

As I wrote in an earlier post, the ultimate goal of POW captors and domestic abusers is to dominate their captives through coercive control of their minds and behaviors. There are three main elements that captors need to create in their prisoners…or spouses and children…that will give them the leverage needed for ultimate control:

• Dependency
• Debility
• Dread

And in either instance, that’s where the methods listed on Biderman’s Chart of Coercion come in.

Here, for comparison, is a chart from an article in Psychology Today, “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion Applied to Domestic Violence,” by Lisa Aronson Fontes, Ph.D. It shows how the exact same methods from POW camps are used by domestic abusers:

So, like a prisoner, a spouse may first be reduced to dependency through emotional, psychological, cultural, religious, physical, or financial means, as well as the responsibility for any children in the house. In such a situation, repeated emotional and psychological badgering wears them down to a point where they give up trying to fight back. And this is reinforced by instilling fear and terror through threats, intimidation, and/or violence. Such was the situation in our house.

Status check: A tiny, subtle “shift”

I need to take a moment before I continue to reflect on some changes within me that I have noticed lately during my writing.

When I started, there was a lot I felt underneath but did not understand. All I had were broken pieces of a life story, rage reactions, destructive emotions such as self-hate, high anxiety, and depression. I knew that what was done to me was wrong. Severe. I knew I had been harmed. But without the clear vision of the entirety of it all….HOW it was done to me, and why, all I was left with was confusion and those roiling emotions.

Now, as I continue to dissect my past and learn about emotional dysfunction, mental health and control issues, and how trauma is caused and handed down from one generation to the next, I notice a “shift” within me.

If there’s one movie character that I immediately associate with my father, it’s Robert DeNiro’s hitman character in the movie The Irishman. The facial expressions, the coldness, the matter-of-fact attitude when hitting someone. In both attitude and mannerisms, my father and that character could be twins.

Even at the end of the movie, they were alike. DeNiro’s hitman was nearing death, but was without remorse or apology for his life; he showed no introspection about his life’s choices. My father was the same. Flat emotions. No apology. Just cold to the end. I sure didn’t see any concern about “meeting his maker.”

The origins of his “malware”

“Although the majority of victims do not become perpetrators, clearly there is a minority who do. Trauma appears to amplify the common gender stereotypes: men with histories of childhood abuse are more likely to take out their aggressions on others, while women are more likely to be victimized by others or to injure themselves.”
Judith Herman, MD, Trauma and Recovery

My father shared stories that pointed to the fact that he was abused as a child. His mother could be violent with him. At least until he got to his teens. He said that the last time she hit him, he just stood there and stared her in the eye. He noted she looked afraid and never did that again.

She gave him unnecessary enemas that no doubt crossed boundaries with sexual implications. I remember him telling me how he would get turned on to see her walking around in her bra when she was nursing his baby sister. He also happened to mention that, as a middle-school-aged boy, he often had to change his baby sister’s diaper. Given his later admission to getting turned on when giving me a bath as an infant, I have to wonder how safe she was with him and if his sexually abusive tendencies were already at work then.