One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of coercive control and abuse is whether the actions of the abuser are intentional. Do abusers truly recognize the harm they are inflicting? This question is central to our understanding of abusive dynamics and can shape how we respond to and support survivors.
Exploring the intentions behind coercive control can shed light on the complex nature of these behaviors, helping to demystify the motivations of abusers and the impact of their actions on victims. Let's delve deeper into this critical issue and examine what it means for both survivors and those who seek to support them.
So... do those who engage in coercive control truly understand the impact of their actions? The short answer is that, unless they are completely disconnected from reality, the answer is likely yes.
Are there instances where an abuser doesn’t have full conscious recognition of his/her harmful actions? Yes, but this is not the norm. Here are two of the common myths about abusers that have led society to believe that they may not be perpetrating abuse with intentionality.
Myth 1: Abusers are mentally ill.
For the most part, abusers are not mentally ill. And, for those who are, mental illness is not likely to be what is causing them to be abusive. Lundy Bancroft, author of “why does he do that”, says that it’s the attitudes and beliefs that abusers hold, not the existence of a mental illness, that leads to abusive behaviors. Abusers have approximately the same percentage of mental illness as the rest of the population. So, some abusers are mentally ill. However, mental illness does not cause abusiveness. Unless a person is completely disconnected from reality by their mental illness, any mental illness that an abuser has is in addition to being abusive… not the cause of their abusiveness.
Now, there is a correlation between personality disorders and abusiveness, especially coercive control. This correlation is not accepted by all mental health professionals. However, most mental health professionals have very little training or experience with personality disorders. As I have mentioned in previous posts, people with personality disorders don’t tend to think that there is anything wrong with them, and therefore, do not usually seek out therapy on their own. So therapists don’t tend to treat many of these folks.
Additionally, people with personality disorders are often very good at manipulation and deceit, so if they do end up in therapy, they tend to manipulate the therapist into believing that their abusiveness is connected to anything other than an intentional and forceful strategy to get their own way.
The professionals that do have experience and extensive training in personality disorders, often agree that personality disorders and coercive control tactics tend to have a correlation. That doesn’t mean that everyone with a personality disorder is abusive or that everyone that is abusive has a personality disorder. But, the criteria for diagnosing personality disorders do have a lot of overlap with abusive characteristics.
The other thing that’s important to understand about personality disorders is that they are not really the same as other mental illnesses. Yes, they are listed in the DSM along with mental illnesses, which confuses the issue. But personality disorders are different from mental illnesses in ways that make them unique. George Simon, author of “In Sheep’s Clothing”, calls them “character disorders”, and points to the fact that they exist on the extreme end of the continuum from neurotic to character disordered. Dr. Simon say that most mental illnesses are of a neurotic nature, while personality disorders are on the character disordered side. What is important to understand is that people with these disorders have low or no conscience which makes them dangerous to others in interpersonal relationships. (Most neurotics may have bad habits or characteristics that make them harmful to themselves… they are not usually harmful to other people. While character disordered individuals are harmful mostly to others).
Dr. Sandra L Brown calls relationships with character disordered people “relationships of inevitable harm”. The reason for the harm is that people with personality disorders, (I prefer the term character disorders), lack empathy for others, have traits of impulsiveness and irresponsibility, and feel entitled and often superior, so they end up being willing to use the tactics of coercive control to get their way.
However, just because someone is using coercive control doesn’t necessarily mean that they have narcissistic personality disorder, anti-social personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or, the particularly nasty disorder of psychopathy. Only a mental health professional can diagnose these, and you aren’t likely to be able to get an abuser to voluntarily submit to any tests.
The abusers who do not have full blown personality disorders may have some of the traits, or they may be operating from societal engrained beliefs about male dominance as a right (patriarchy). Most of these coercive controllers are not mentally ill or character disordered, but have internalized sexism at a deep level that provides them with “justifications” for their abusive actions. They use abuse to “keep their women in line”, and they justify their double standards with patriarchal views of how the world ought to be run. These men think that they are doing what is “right” by following teachings they learned in our patriarchal society. These abusers don’t act abusively in most of their other relationships, usually only in relating to their intimate partners. They may use the tactics of coercive control with their wives and girlfriends, but they usually avoid them with everyone else in their lives (except for their children, who they often feel they have the right to use as weapons to punish their partners or ex partners... misogyny).
People with personality disorders (character disorders) tend to use coercive control tactics as their main way of dealing with others. (Dr. Evan Stark may have disagreed with me on this point. He viewed coercive control as being connected almost exclusively to intimate partner violence. I view coercive control in a broader context. It is certainly present in the majority of intimate partner violence, but I believe it also exists in nearly all social systems where savvy coercive controllers are able to use unfair and deceitful tactics to leverage their power differential in order to get what they want).
Myth #2 that obscures abuser’s intentionality, is the myth that … Abusers were abused as children, or in a prior relationship, and that has made them abusive.
Don’t get me wrong, some abusers were abused as children, and some may have even been abused by a previous partner. But, according to many experts, being abused does not cause a person to become abusive. Abuse is a choice! Even people with personality disorders, who may have damaged systems for empathy within the very structures of their brains, are still choosing to be abusive. It’s not that they don’t KNOW that they are causing harm, it’s that they just DON’T CARE.
The same goes for people abused as children. For the most part, they know that they are causing harm in the relationship. If you really think about it, this myth doesn’t really make sense. A person who was harmed as a child should be LESS likely to be abusive, not MORE, because they know how bad abuse feels. An abuse victim is just as likely to grow up to be overly empathetic as they are to be un-caring and abusive. And the ones that do grow up to be abusive, for the most part, are doing so because they adopted the attitudes and beliefs that justify their abuse and/or coercive control, not because they were abused themselves. They felt powerless as children and made a choice referred to in research as identification with the aggressor, rather than the targeted victim, whom they perceived as less powerful.
The vast majority of abusers are using some sort of justification to continue their intentional abuse. Some have very little empathy and high entitlement, so they justify their actions in this “dog eat dog” world using their feelings and attitudes of superiority and supremacy. Some abusers justify their abuse because they are men and “God” or “The Bible” (spiritual abuse) put them in charge of the family, and therefore they have the “right” to “correct” their wives as they see fit. Abusers in the workplace may use their title as CEO or President to justify demeaning names or unfair policies because they are the ones “in charge” (workplace bullying). Religious or cult leaders may justify their power and authority over others because they actually believe (or pretend to believe) they are “God."
And, then there are abusers who may have only lived inside of abusive systems and families all their lives. They never saw examples of healthy relationships, and they never learned respectful ways to treat people. These abusers may not completely understand that what they are doing is wrong. But that doesn't mean that it's not!
But, if you have told someone repeatedly that they are hurting you, and they don’t stop… then they are acting intentionally. They fit into the majority of abusers who know exactly what they are doing. They are doing it on purpose, and they are selfishly benefitting from hurting you. If they weren’t, they would have already stopped by now.
These and other societal myths cause quite a bit of confusion, but the biggest reason why a victim or target might believe that an abuser doesn’t know that he’s being abusive is this… abusers LIE… and they lie convincingly! To avoid being caught for their intentional use of coercively controlling tactics, in order to get what they want, they must convince their partners that they don’t mean to do it.
Abusers exploit the myths of mental illness and/or prior victimization to convince their targets that they are in some sort of “denial”. The more sophisticated and coercively controlling an abuser is, the more effective this is. The more empathetic, patient and conscientious the victim is, the easier it is for a coercive controller to use these myths to gain the upper hand.
Healthy compassionate human beings give other people the benefit of the doubt, because they don’t like to feel like they are being cruel or critical of others. This plays to the coercive controllers advantage. All a coercive controller needs to do is convince their target that the targeted victim is judging them too harshly, and the target will usually back down, and accept much of the blame themselves.
Don’t fall for this trap. If you believe your partner, ex-partner, or anyone else, who is using coercive control against you may have a mental illness or an abusive childhood that is leading to their poor treatment of you, demand that they get help. If they refuse. They are probably just lying, or, at the very least, they don’t care enough about you to exert the effort needed to keep you safe.
If they do attend counseling, and they get better, (and stay better for a long period of time), great! Maybe they did have something that they just needed help working through. But if they don’t stop abusing you, it wasn’t a mental illness, and it wasn’t a bad childhood. It wasn’t denial… it was denying… it was a LIE!
AND…. even if the experts I have studied, and my own personal experience, proves to be wrong. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if they are abusing or coercively controlling you on purpose or not. What matters is that you deserve to live a life filled with dignity, safety and freedom!
If they are hurting you… they are 100% responsible for your harm, whether they are “intending” to hurt you or not!
If you are in a coercively controlling relationship there is help out there to escape. You can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) for help in creating a safety and/or escape plan.
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UPDATE (March 18, 2023): I have always personally believed that there was a huge overlap between personality disorders and coercive control. However, the domestic violence field has been wary of connecting these dots. They have good reason to do so, and I have spent many hours considering the ramifications of each perspective. Within our current mental health models, if a mental illness is discovered alongside domestic violence the focus often shifts to treatment. But, as I mentioned above, personality disorders are different from other forms of mental illness. They are "pervasive" and "permanent" by definition, and therefore considered to be untreatable.
So, shifting our focus off holding perpetrators accountable and onto treating untreatable coercive controllers would be a waste of precious resources. Unfortunately, the current trend in trauma-informed care is heading in exactly that direction... attempting to treat coercive controllers who may or may not even be treatable... often enabling the escalation of their coercive control in the process.
Currently, we do not know if coercive controllers can be treated effectively or not. Most research indicates low success rates. However, there is no real incentive for coercive controllers to change, because the systems are enabling them to continue their coercive control, even after separation. So, until we transform the systems to incentivize positive change, programs like batterer intervention and intimate partner violence prevention are not likely to produce adequate results. They may reduce physically violent recidivism, but they are not likely to reduce coercive control, and may even increase it.
For this reason, I believe most funding to end domestic violence and coercive control should be focused on prevention and empowering and supporting targeted victims to escape and heal, as well as increasing truly effective means of holding coercive controllers accountable. To really make an impact on reducing coercive control we need systemic transformation that addresses the inequities in the systems that continue to reinforce coercive controller's dangerous and harmful behavior.
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