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.

My father. What to say about him? My final thoughts on him I will save for the end of the book because my feelings about him are evolving even as I continue to write.

For right now, I will simply relate actions, words, and behaviors to demonstrate what he was like to live with all those years…some examples of what we were up against.

The “second” day

One of the good things about my father was that he wanted us to learn. And he would take us places on vacation. Expose us to new places and things to broaden our horizons. Those parts were the moments we took joy in. But as with everything with Dad, there was always “the second day.”

The buildup to vacation was always great. Dad was in a good mood. There was the excitement of packing, hearing about the places we were going to visit. Even if it was a short trip, that day before leaving and the first day of the trip were just a sheer pleasure. But then there was always the “second” day.

“Where would you like to go first?”

Before I get into the specifics of my father’s tools of control, I want to share some general patterns and behaviors common in many abusive households. And many, if not all of these, applied to my home.

At the time, of course, I wouldn’t have known to call these things abusive. I would have shrugged them off as just one of those bad days we had to survive until Dad was in a better mood. Because after all, no one’s house is perfect, right?

I share them now for all of us to see, and especially to help any others out there right now who are living in the same hell.

Things done by abusers to intimate partners and/or older children

Earlier I spoke about five things often done to wives by abusers. The information came from an article by psychologist and life coach Fahim Chughtai. And while he was speaking of narcissists specifically, I can vouch for the fact that my father did these things to my mother CONSTANTLY:

• He decides what counts as an overreaction
• He rewrites arguments after they happen
• He keeps a running tally of what you owe him
• He makes your independence feel like betrayal
• He apologizes to keep you, not because he means it

The article’s subtitle says it all: “The five patterns that turn a marriage into a slow, quiet takeover, and why none of them are your fault.”

For sure, that marriage was a takeover by my father. And by the time I was old enough to notice these patterns, they were a normal course of life in our house. I will also note that these tactics weren’t reserved for my mother alone.

Is it about a name…or an action?

There are so many labels tossed around:

• Narcissists (Which can now be split into Grandiose versus Vulnerable ones)
• Sociopaths
• Dark Empaths

And diagnoses:

• Antisocial Personality Disorder
• Borderline Personality Disorder
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder

And qualities like the Dark Tetrad of Malevolent Traits:

• Psychopathy
• Machiavelianism
• Narcissism
• Sadism

There are articles I see:

• The 15 Signs of a “this diagnosis”
• The 10 Questions “that diagnosis” won’t answer
• and on and on

All of them contain useful, affirming information. But all of them can also be totally confusing and overwhelming. Especially if I asked the wrong questions.

It would be easy for me to get caught up in ones like:

Before I start writing about my house, the specific tools my father used, or what kind of a person would do those things and why, I wanted to learn more about how domestic abuse operates for anyone. Seeing so many things I experienced listed as “Universal” patterns and techniques felt…affirming. Helpful as a way to stop judging and self-blaming.

For so long I blamed myself for not being smart enough to realize it even was abuse, much less for taking so long to get free. So to see what powerful mind-controlling tools I was up against gave me comfort. The fact I got out was no small achievement and one to be honored, not demeaned.

So, some background that helped me; then I will go on to my experiences.

1950s Terror – A new secret weapon?

In July of 1953, an armistice was finally signed to end hostilities in the Korean War. That also allowed officials on both sides to begin prisoner exchanges.

One particular exchange in September of that year was extremely disturbing to the US authorities there. During that event, twenty-three American POWs, looking well cared for, came forward, shook hands with their captors, shouted expressions of solidarity with them, then, instead of coming to the US side, turned and defected to Communist China. And this was just the beginning of US officials discovering evidence of how many American POWS cooperated with their enemy.

Panic set in at high levels of the military. They were worried that a new “brainwashing” weapon had been employed – one that could somehow render the POWs as “blank mental slates,” and then insert new thoughts and beliefs in them. So, frantic to understand how so many US servicemen could betray their country so willingly, they tasked a US Air Force social scientist, Albert Biderman, to determine what had happened.