• Abuse, has many different forms: Domestic violence, verbal, physical, emotional, psychological, sexual or other forms of bullying.
• Abuse effects people from all age groups from children through to the elderly.
• Abuse 'empowers' the abuser to 'own' and control the life of another human being.
• Abuse ruins countless millions of lives each year and frequently predisposes people to developing a range of emotional difficulties.
• The consequences of abuse can disfigure the lives of its victims for many years and can lead to mental ill health and suicide.

 

In a nutshell, all forms of abuse are cruel and  based upon the exploitation of one person by another.

 

Abusers have no hesitation about lying, insulting, demeaning, ignoring, manipulating, intimidating and controlling their victims. This being so, abusers are unable to recognise that other people have feelings or needs and simply 'use' them as chattels. 

Abuse comes in many forms. Surprisingly, the dark side of love can be a major source of abuse. Loving someone too much can be abusive. In a sense, a person can treat another as a possession. A chattel or a “thing” to guard jealously. A means of personal gratification. To emotionally imprison in the name of love is abuse. Emotional imprisonment can lead to other more sinister forms of imprisonment. Whilst true love is light and liberating. The love of an abuser is dark and extremely dangerous.

Abusers make totally unreasonable demands on others but do not see them as unreasonable. These demands mean that abusers expect far too much of others and can become intimidating when others fail to meet their impossible demands. Denigrating and ignoring others are also forms of abuse.  The list of types of abuse is too long and makes disturbing reading.

Abuse appears to be divided into two camps: Overt and Covert.

Overt: the open and explicit abuse of another person. Menacing, threatening, coercing, beating, lying, berating, demeaning, chastising, insulting, humiliating, exploiting, ignoring ("silent treatment"), devaluing, unceremoniously discarding, verbal abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse are all forms of overt abuse.  

Covert: abuse is almost entirely about control. It is often a primitive and immature reaction to life circumstances in which the abuser (usually in his childhood) was rendered helpless. It is about re-exerting one's identity, re-establishing predictability, mastering the environment – human and physical.

The bulk of abusive behaviours can be traced to this panicky reaction to the remote potential for loss of control. Many abusers are hypochondriacs (and difficult patients) because they are afraid to lose control over their body, its looks and its proper functioning. They are obsessive-compulsive in an effort to subdue their physical habitat and render it foreseeable. They stalk people and harass them as a means of "being in touch" – another form of control.

To the abuser, nothing exists outside him or herself. Meaningful others are no more than extensions to be manipulated. Partners can become 'absorbed', internal, assimilated, objects – not external ones with thoughts and feelings of their own. This being so,  losing control over a significant other – is equivalent to losing control of a limb, or of one's brain. It is terrifying.

Independent or disobedient people evoke in the abuser the realization that something is wrong with his worldview, that he is not the centre of the world or its cause and that he cannot control what, to him, are internal representations.

To the abuser, losing control means going insane. Because other people are mere elements in the abuser's mind – being unable to manipulate them literally means losing it (his or her mind). Imagine, how it would be if you were suddenly to discover that you could no longer manipulate your own memories or control your own thoughts... Nightmarish!