It's Not Your Fault - The Mend Project

Abuse is Never the Victim’s Fault

If this is your reality, you may feel confused, afraid, angry, ashamed, or trapped. You may blame yourself or feel responsible for what has happened in your relationship. You may even feel responsible to fix it. These feelings are normal responses to abuse. There is nothing wrong with you. We know you are doing the best you can.

Before we tell you why it’s not your fault, stop to take a moment to recognize any shame or responsibility you are feeling for the conflict and pain coming from the abusive relationship. Recognizing this is the first step in your recovery. Chances are you’ve been stuffing the feeling down or ignoring it and might be numb to its presence. This will hinder your ability to heal, so it’s important to reject the lie that the emotional abuse was your fault.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why the abuse is not your fault.

Break Free from the Maze: Find Clarity and Healing in Confusing Relationships. To learn more about this course from MEND, click here.

You were conditioned to believe it was your fault.

The internal dialogue of self-blame is one of the most important ideas your abuser conditioned you to believe. Through constant criticism and other manipulative means to confuse you, they tried to make you feel responsible for the narcissistic abuse and any conflict making you feel worthless.

If only you looked at them differently. Or if you were a better friend, lover, child, parent – a better anything – they would not have harmed you. Or “if you weren’t so depressed” they wouldn’t have done that. Their accusations likely were relentless and wore you down, which made it difficult to reject them.

What they tried to make you believe about yourself was never true. It can make you feel like you are going ‘crazy’, or create serious cognitive dissonance crippling you from being able to evaluate your situation accurately.

Abuse is never the victim’s fault. Still, those lies they told you probably seep into your thoughts today as if they were your own. That doesn’t make them true.

If the abuse had been your fault, you would have been able to make it stop, but nothing you did seemed to work. And the abuse did not stop.

You may have reacted in ways that do not make you proud.

Another reason victims feel responsible is because they feel ashamed for the ways they reacted to the abuse which were outside their normal character. You may wonder if you were also abusive. These responses are known by professionals as “Reactive Abuse”. MEND refers to it as “Reactive Defense”, because those reactions result from involuntary brain responses triggered by ongoing trauma of recurring relationship abuse which compel the victim to respond in a fight, flight, freeze or appease mode. You may react strongly and even aggressively to the abusive situation. You can learn more about it by reading our blog on Reactive Abuse.

Reactive defense is the body’s natural self-defense mechanism designed to protect you. It is not abuse.

Self-blame helps you to see your partner in a more positive light.

Often, self-blame is not about taking responsibility, but about how abuse victims avoid facing the reality of physical or sexual abuse, or emotionally abusive circumstances they continue to encounter. A victim’s constant self-blame is like a “reverse psychological projection.” Blaming themselves allows them to project their positive traits onto their partner, which they desperately want to believe are true.

Emotional abuse is a result of the faulty mindset and worldview of the one causing harm.

Why your partner chooses to use abusive tactics that harm you has to do with their own faulty belief systems or mindsets they developed long before you met and which are possibly generational. We call these foundational truths the Pillars of Abuse:

Entitlement: the expectation by the emotional abuser for preferential treatment, double standards, or rewards even when they do not deserve it and regardless of whether it causes harm, or deprives others’ needs or well-being. This entitlement holds a deep-seated belief that rules which apply to their partner do not apply to them under any circumstance.
Faulty Belief System: This involves the abuser’s moralistic judgments based on limited knowledge, family system, or social bias, which causes them to oppress others. For example, gender bias, sexism, or patriarchy can skew the abuser’s belief system making it very difficult for them to recognize a need to change the behaviors resulting from that system. Equality, mutual respect, mutual validation, and reciprocity would indicate a healthy relationship where conflicts are rather peaceful and solutions-oriented.
Image Management is when the abuser will do anything to hide their flaws or insecurities in public and protect their image at any cost, most notably at the expense of the target of their abuse.

A person’s motivation for covert emotional abuse is to intentionally oppress, power over, and control, while other times their motive is to avoid truly being seen through authentic emotional connections and conversations leading to a secure attachment. The emotional abuser is so uncomfortable with emotions they do anything to avoid dealing with their partners’ or their own feelings. The faulty thinking and beliefs drive their actions to shut down or block their victim’s voice.

Now, let’s look at some ways to release shame and self-blame.

How Can You Accept that Abuse Is Not Your Fault?

Here are some steps to help you have self-compassion and accept that abuse is not your fault:

Acknowledge the truth. So long as the victim remains in agreement with the lie that the abuse is their fault, it will control them and hinder their healing process.
Remember that no matter how hard you tried, you never stopped experiencing emotional abuse. Maybe it subsided for short periods of time, but it never ended. If you were responsible for it, you would have been able to make it stop.
To begin healing, you need to adopt the truth that your mistakes do not excuse their abuse. If you made mistakes, as we all do, abuse is never an appropriate response to them. Responding abusively is a choice, it is not a mistake or accident.
Stop telling yourself that “maybe you should have stopped it.” Many victims feel responsible for the abuse because they ignored early red flags, didn’t leave sooner, or weren’t able to make it stop. Many psychological abuse victims don’t realize that what they are encountering is abuse; they lack clarity of what is actually happening and are stuck in prolonged states of stress and confusion.

Whether you ignored the warning signs, shut down your own instinct, or stayed beyond the time you knew you needed to leave does not mean the abuse is your fault.

5. Declare aloud (and often) that the abuse is not your fault even if you don’t feel that way on the inside. Make it your daily (maybe even hourly) mantra: “The abuse was not my fault” or “I did not deserve it.” “I am loveable and deserve to be treated with kindness and mutual respect.”

“WHAT IS ORIGINAL ABUSE?”

UNDERSTANDING IS THE FIRST STEP TO HEALING

COVERT ABUSE: Hidden Original Abuse

Covert Original Abuse is considered one of the most destructive forms of abuse. This is because it significantly harms one’s perceptions, memories, thinking, and ultimately, one’s sanity. Covert Emotional Abuse is difficult to identify and difficult to confront. In overt emotional abuse, the verbal assaults and concrete manipulations are much more obvious to the victim. However, Covert Abuse is meant to confuse, causing one to experience profound self-doubt, often questioning their reality. Covert Abuse is intended to exert control over another. Being alone as a recipient of the abuse, the only true witness of it, causes a bewildering inability to sort out one’s traumatic experience.

Just a single covert behavior in a repeated pattern can be destructive to an individual or relationship, but multiple patterns are exponentially more harmful to a victim in terms of their ability to understand what is happening: the victim becomes unable to identify his/her experience, to find support, to confront the abuser, or to free themselves from these insidious manipulations. Even worse, prolonged confusion and stressful states not only compromise the victim’s ability to think and function, but cause greater consequences to their physical health through adrenaline and stress hormone spikes. This severely weakens their immune system, making them more vulnerable to disease and collapse. These patterns can vary between people and situations: one individual may break out in a rash, another may begin fainting, another may end up in the ER with a dangerously low white blood count. However these symptoms manifest in individuals, they are expressions of the impact upon one’s endocrine, immunological, and biochemical systems. If these symptoms are not taken seriously and are minimized by the medical community (see Double Abuse®), the consequences can be life-threatening. This is why when persons of authority over-confront the victim and minimize the truth and severity of their experience, they are contributing to an escalation of the victim’s decline. To begin to understand Covert Emotional Abuse, let’s first describe the characteristics of the abuser’s aggressive or defensive actions whose motives are to avoid authentic communication, accountability, and responsibility, therefore maintaining control.

EXAMPLES OF COVERT ABUSIVE BEHAVIORS

All or Nothing: Using black and white thinking to divert the focus off the perpetrator in order to disarm the victim.

Blaming and Reverse Blaming: In blaming, issues are always one-sided or reversed with the problem being laid at the victim’s feet.

Broken Promises: Making promises to do certain things or change, then denying ever making those promises, refusing to keep them, or saying they forgot.

Catastrophizing: Creating fear and negative dependence in the victim and blowing things out of proportion.

Cover-ups: Attempting to prevent people from discovering the truth about a person’s behavior or actions. For example, volunteering in the community or giving gifts to cover up destructive behavior done behind doors.

Crazy Making Behaviors: Intentional distortions of reality for the purpose of making the victim feel confused. A “cousin” of Gaslighting.

Creating a Cloud of Confusion: Telling false and grandiose stories to third parties in order to objectively undermine and manipulate the end result or outcome.

Deflection: Defensively refusing to authentically communicate, changing the topic, or inventing false arguments.

Denial: A fundamental refusal to accept responsibility by living in a false reality.

Disavowal: Belittling and devaluing of the importance of one’s abusive behavior.

Dismissivism: Getting rid of the other’s value and what they hold dear with a wave of the hand.

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Entitlement: Unrealistic demands that one is deserving of preferential treatment or double standards.

Faux Confusion / Abusive Forgetting: A form of manipulation where they appear confused or conveniently forget.

False Accusations: Stating an unexpected negative lie told to or about the partner. False accusations often lead to Scapegoating and Gaslighting.

Gaslighting: Altering or denying a shared reality so that victims feel they are wrong in their perceptions and experiences.

Grandiosity: Inflating one’s value to diminish the other’s.

Joking: Saying mean things, then acting as if you were joking when you are confronted with your behavior. “That was just a joke” can be the first sign of an abusive relationship.

Lying: Consciously or unconsciously withholding or altering the truth with blatant disregard.

Magical Thinking: When abusers or victims are believing an abuser’s problems will go away with an apology or promises when it will take much more work than that.

Minimization: Abusive belittling of the victim’s perspective with the intention to make the victim’s values unimportant, and therefore, kill their confidence, creativity, and individuality.

Partial Confessions to Distract from the Real Issue: To distract or gain favor from the victim, an accountability partner, or a social circle by protecting oneself from actual consequences.

Pathologizing: Making the victim the problem by inflating their expression of a problem, which is actually caused by the perpetrator in the first place.

Playing the Victim: Using language or defeatist posture, such as pouting, to avoid accountability and responsibility.

Rationalization / Excuse Making: Justifying destructive behavior or an attitude with supposed logical reasons or excuses. Goes hand in hand with Scapegoating and Reverse Blaming.

Reductionism: Stripping the other’s ideas, expressions, or actions of value, thus minimizing the perpetrator’s culpability.

Retaliation: Engaging in deliberate “payback” for imagined harm instead of problem solving. This can be expressed in aggressive or passive-aggressive behaviors.

Refusal to Take Responsibility: Negating responsibility for one’s actions by diverting accountability and avoiding the hard work of changing.

Sanitization: Normalizing unhealthy behavior to make it artificially acceptable or good.

Scapegoating: Creating scenarios where facts are mischaracterized in order to confuse and turn consequences against another so the victim is viewed as guilty, or forced to bear the responsibility for the problem; the victim is victimized twice, first being made the brunt of the situation, and second, being made to bear the resulting shame or punishment.

Withholding: Refusing to communicate, listen or rejoice in one’s good fortune. One of the most toxic forms of abuse.

Undermining: Undermining is a sneaky way to squelch joy, effort, creativity, or ideas that could bring positive attention to the victim.

VERBAL ABUSE: Overt Original Abuse

Abusive Language
Undeserved Accusations
Bullying
Intimidation
Judgements
Name-Calling

Harsh or Chronic Criticism
Orders and Threats
Put-downs
Ridiculing
Teasing

Types of Abuse

Original Abuse
Original Abuse is any physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological action or threat of action that manipulates and controls another person into submission and against their best interests. We call it “Original” abuse in order to distinguish it from the secondary layer of abuse that can happen when victims speak up or reach out for help (see “Double Abuse®” definition). Know more about Original Abuse.

Domestic Violence (also called Relationship Violence, Intimate Partner Violence or Domestic Abuse)
Domestic Violence is a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship by one person over another person whether through physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological action or threat of action, that leads to the unfair treatment of the other resulting in psychological harm.

Many communities across the country still consider Domestic Violence to be solely physical violence, but this is not accurate. In fact, the Center for Disease Control and numerous scholarly studies describe domestic violence in a much broader definition, with an emphasis on the severity of emotional abuse. Know more about Domestic Abuse.

Covert Emotional Abuse
Covert Emotional Abuse (“CEA”) is the hidden, hard-to-name, regular, and repeated behaviors used to mistreat another person and cause harm to their heart and inner emotions.
These tactics are hard to describe, name, and therefore nearly impossible to confront.

Verbal Abuse
Verbal Abuse happens when negative statements are directed toward someone, causing emotional harm. These statements are insulting, humiliating, or threatening and can happen in the form of harsh language, undeserved accusations, harsh or chronic criticism, intimidation, judgments, name-calling, orders and threats, put-downs, ridiculing, and/or teasing.

Physical Abuse
Physical Abuse is the intentional use of force that results in bodily injury; such as (but not limited to) punching, slapping, pinching, choking, kicking, or shoving.

Sexual Abuse
Sexual Abuse is any nonconsensual, unwanted sexual contact or sexual maltreatment imposed upon another.

Spiritual Abuse
Spiritual Abuse refers to both (1) a church or faith leader using their position of power to manipulate and control congregation members, often by creating a toxic culture within the church or group by shaming, and/or (2) a partner using spirituality as a means of control, or to minimize or shame the other person. This includes when a partner ridicules or insults the other person’s religious or spiritual beliefs, uses their partner’s religious or spiritual beliefs or their own faulty beliefs to control, manipulate, power over or shame them, and/or uses religious beliefs to minimize or rationalize abusive behaviors.

Financial Abuse
Financial Abuse is pressure or force upon an individual to become financially dependent and controlled by one person. The abuser maintains total control of financial resources, by stalling or withholding financial information, access to money, or intervening without the victim’s mutual consent.

Institutional Abuse
Institutional Abuse occurs when power is misused to intimidate, offend, degrade, or humiliate, resulting in the mistreatment of individuals who are part of its organization. Institutional abuse also occurs when an organization denies a victim’s story, justifies it or avoids it. For example, publicly promoting abusers attributes, protecting their position due to fear of retribution against the organization, working to preserve the employment standing of abusers and/or those who support them. Institutional abuse may attempt to minimize financial liability while often the opposite occurs.

These offenses significantly cause further harm and result in Double Abuse®, leading to longer and more difficult roads to healing. For more on institutional abuse and what you can do if you find yourself in an institutionally abusive setting, click here.

Bullying
Unwanted and aggressive verbal, social or physical behavior creating a real or perceived power imbalance.

Child Abuse
Verbal, physical, sexual, or emotional harm caused by action or inaction (or neglect) of a child, especially by a parent or caregiver. (The same is true for elder abuse and abuse of the disabled.)

Double Abuse®
This secondary form of abuse takes place when victims finally find the courage to speak up or reach out for help. Rather than being believed or receiving support, victims are minimized, criticized, ignored and even shunned by therapists, family, friends, church, or professional communities. Double Abuse® causes more harm to victims and significantly exacerbates their trauma. For a greater description of Double Abuse®, please see Double Abuse® PDF.

The Roles in Abuse

Victim
A victim is a person of any age who suffers physical, sexual, mental/psychological emotional and/or criminal harm.

Abuser
An abuser is one who forces physical, sexual, mental, psychological and/or emotional harm upon another.

Survivor
A person who is able to go on living after having sustained dangerous and harmful behavior and abuse and/or who is able to stay alive after lethal harm of a physical, sexual,
mental, emotional and/or criminal act(s).

First Responder
A first responder is any person whom a victim discloses their story of abuse, or any person a victim seeks help from. A first responder is typically perceived by the victim to be a safe person, entity, authority figure, or person of knowledge.

You Are Not Crazy

You Are Not Alone