Part IX of Living and Dying with Abuse
[TW: depression, CPTSD, suicidal ideation]
The wisest thing is to get out of an abusive environment quickly, but one may be particularly impeded when economically bound, traumatized, depressed, anxious, fatigued, chronically ill, disabled, or with executive dysfunctions. One might simply have a shitty head start, whereas it would have been important, and perhaps otherwise not even that difficult, to have become aware of the abuse earlier.
Abuse is deliberately designed to cage you, and frustrations and disabilities in themselves can be caging. Circumstances can seem so inescapable and unchangeable and the trauma response can be to simply endure abusive moments, wait until it’s over, and try to continue with whatever was disrupted. Living with this feeling that everything is wrong but that there is nothing to right it, or not knowing what it is, is paralyzing in a way. Everything is stagnant, until it is lost. With death the option to make it right is permanently gone.
Long-term exposure to abuse, lack of education on the subject, failed attempts to separate, and emotional or material binds can create a mentality of passivity and learned helplessness; feeling familiar within an abusive environment, they become hard to combat. Entrapment within an abusive environment feels static, contrary to the overlooked mental and physical deterioration due to the abuse.
Abusers don’t want you to take a self-imposed stop and reflect, they want you to run after them. And for a while you probably will, trying to keep abreast through the mistreatment and distress, neither looking back or forward but only keeping eyes on the abuser. As abuse has to be mystified, opening up, seeking help, even naming it poses a threat to the abuser’s image and their validity in their position, and they will seek retribution for its disclosure. Abusers see emotional distress and mental health issues as innate weaknesses, which redirects any accountability away from them. They may also feel affirmed in their impact which can serve as motivation to perpetuate it. It is also fitting for them to trigger trauma reactions in a child to keep them immobile and isolated in their experience, to call them hysterical. Being in a condition that makes one in need of support can also make one be at risk of an abuser’s attempt for more control. Their partner or child showing trauma due to their abuse will not be free to recover, and the abuser will gaslight, manipulate, and isolate them lest it becomes known that it is their fault. “Saying the word abuse to an abusive person can be like lighting a tinderbox: When you name the unmentionable secret, he goes wild” (Bancroft, p. 90), he will verbally attack and gaslight you, and set out to manipulate other people to trust him more. The want and obvious need to deal with one’s pain and suffering means that abuse has to be eradicated in order to get better. For that to happen, the abuser would need to entirely change and let go of all the benefits of abuse, which is unlikely, or you would have to separate, which the abuser doesn’t want because they would lose influence, control, status, and luxuries.
The wider social context may also potentially adopt the abuser’s side which translates into the fear of being invalidated, shamed, and accused of being “crazy”. Societal and cultural stigma, stereotyping, lack of knowledge and understanding about abuse and its symptoms are not only a disservice to good parenting but to all interrelations in life, they are only a service to what-/whoever produced it in the first place. An unfortunate possibility is disbelief of one’s surroundings, or abusers making sure that the only perspective that counts is their own and the only person who cares what is said about the abuse is themselves. What will always hinder healing is the abuser pushing themselves into the victim role, into the forefront, into your life again, reinforcing the triggering effect they hold.
You’re always recovering, always re-traumatized, it’s exhausting to make progress and then burn out and have to start anew. And recovery is tied to further personal circumstances: What is available, what are the possibilities, what/who is there to return to, and what can be looked forward to? I have been more occupied with appearing functional than actually improving. There is no open healing when you are trying to keep up with the world moving around you. And recovery is impossible with an abuser present, as any unruly, weird, depressed, vulnerable, or childlike behavior is a justification for past and further abuse and control.
It is also depression’s innate characteristic to preserve itself, trapping one in it and its causes, therefore making it hard to seek help. Depression arising within an abusive environment, and at a young age, may foster more harmful ways of coping than within a non-toxic environment, or having no hope or energy for attempts to initiate change. We may become indifferent to our own pain, and death can become an escapist thought.
A big factor is the interplay of age, development, and understanding. You can be a child lacking the ability to lead in dealing with abuse, battling various consequences, and only beginning to suspect something. You can be an adolescent, still not mature enough due to various factors like fear and dysfunctions, instead hoping for a mature adult to take the lead. You can be an adult with solid walls around your low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness, and learned helplessness after decades of abuse, needing committed intervention from the outside. Lacking behind can certainly present itself as an obstacle to many aspects in life, in addition to its stigmatisation. It can hinder getting things done at the right moment in time, and make one linger instead at the thought of lost opportunities, losing even more time. Hesitation can be a killer.
Being unattuned to one’s own emotions due to depression, autism, ADHD, or other things will take more time to become aware that there is something wrong. It takes time to realize that one is living in constant pain, and that one doesn’t have to. Oftentimes, the scope of damage can be incalculable and hard to process, and the only way to cope with the immense pain is to suppress it, which can unfortunately mean to further endure it instead of work towards change. If it has become a habit to cope with abuse by shutting yourself off and becoming numb, then there will be difficulty changing that.
With time, the mounting and overlapping symptoms turn effectively into a positive feedback and solidify the cage of abuse. Trauma and ADHD symptoms can exhibit similarities. If developmental and behavioral issues due to abuse are overlooked then other learning disabilities or disorders may so as well. Having ADHD makes one in need of an external structure and of help regulating emotions, being Autistic makes one more gullible and in need of positive sources for mimicry, and other special support. Any verbal barriers due to inhibitions, neurodivergent or otherwise, like mutism which can become extreme with immense distress and trauma, will be a problem for communication. Preexisting executive dysfunctions make it difficult to tackle the problem of abuse, without an exoskeleton helping one to deal with it.
Time blindness can simply make you forget to take action. Having a rather disconnected relationship with time, as is typical with depression and ADHD, may make one simply miss the right timing to attempt something (or think so and then become discouraged about future endeavors). Having to deal with everything else in one’s life, trying to keep up and fit into your setting, despite any learning or developmental disabilities and mental illnesses, creates a problem when dealing with abuse, as it may require a complete halt and a completely new direction in life (which can be frightening). You can lose your sense of time, and with that, lose time. I missed to consider the importance of time and I felt inept in initiating and realizing anything.
Consequence blindness can make you overlook that inaction, too, has consequences. Dissociation and escapism are a consequence of needing and seeking escape from abuse but they can entrap one further in the toxic environment. All of this makes a person take longer to develop, longer to realize, longer to work something through and out. And when one has to live with such a toxic cocktail since a very early age, without any positive coping mechanisms, it’s a constant cycle of developing and unravelling again.
As mind and body are trying to cope with everything, one may become myopic, lethargic, paralyzed, blind to its source and solutions, focused on the wrong things, set on surviving the day or the week or even just the moment until it can be cast into oblivion. Even when the honeymoon-phases of abuse did not make me forget anymore, they did make me lose my sense of urgency. It’s also easy to disengage when you’re not the primary subject of abuse. To ignore and forget may be a welcome tool to cope with the ugly truth. The increased severity of trauma, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and executive dysfunctions muddied my vision and made it difficult to know where to start. I was selfish, too, in focusing mostly about the effects it had on me, and not on others.
On the other hand, once the abuser is left you will not automatically become better. It’s a lot of work to undo the effects of abuse: A child not learning open communication, seeking help, coping with stress, being independent, and an adult having unlearned all that within an abusive environment will need to learn it again. The trauma symptoms will at first become stronger as your body is finally free to express them fully. It is a sign of recovery, which some ignorant people may regard as undesirable while preferring your caged exterior in the presence of abusers.
Departure or escape can feel strange, unnatural, even dangerous inside an abusive environment, and abuse is so energy-consuming that one can be too exhausted to make the necessary life changes. Taking action to get free of abuse takes tremendous effort, will most likely mean a lot of trouble, and take a further toll on one’s mental and emotional wellbeing. When an abuser sets up roots in your life it can be hard to escape. I understand why so many people cannot muster the strength, and decide to remain in abusive relationships. It can take long to escape when we are afraid of healing, afraid of acknowledging pain and what happened to us in the first place, afraid of showing needs, and letting ourselves be vulnerable and open for change and recovery. One may only tend to focus on small gestures and a couple nice moments for respite instead of aiming higher. But we need to take action more than to take comfort in small things.
But once abuse is recognized we should start to feel the mortal danger that it can get (irreversibly) worse at any moment. For tragedies will happen if things are left to run their course.
The course of events seem deterministic now, with causes and logical consequences, because of course this couldn’t have gone on for ever, nothing is ever stagnant, everything has an expiration date and the possibility to become worse. No one can live long with such a man, in this environment, it’s traumatizing and unhealthy. Life with an abuser is simply unsustainable. It lowers your quality of life and even your lifespan, it affects your mental health and may very well affect your physical health, too. The countless exploitations, mockeries, messes, screams, and worries are a slow death, destroying body and mind over decades. Even if it happens to be a long one, it isn’t really a life to begin with.
Venn Diagram of overlapping symptoms of ADHD, Depression, and PTSD, https://tfw-adhd.tumblr.com/post/628547371772624896/as-it-was-requested-i-made-a-diagram-showing-the?is_related_post=1
Kerry J. Heckman, medically reviewed by Lidia Zylowska, DHD and Trauma: Untangling Causes, Symptoms & Treatments (2020), https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-trauma-somatic-therapy/
