Why is it so hard to recognize an abusive relationship from the inside?

About those who cry foul to take control of the game.

Topic: abuse
Takeaway: relationships are a kind of improv game. Abusers are like players who cry foul every time the other player tries to make a move.

I want to make an attempt to answer a question that we ask many times in many ways: why does someone wonderful fail to recognize that their partner is an abuser?

Let me disclaim that I am not a trained therapist or a psychiatrist. These are observations from my own experience and reading, not expert advice. What I offer you here is a way of thinking about relationships—primarily romantic ones, but any long-term relationship will do—that shows both how they go wrong and how they can go unusually, surprisingly right.

A relationship emerges as a collaboration between the people in it. It’s a kind of improv game. At the beginning of an improv session, no-one knows what will happen. The moves will emerge one at a time, each building on the previous ones. The patterns that come out of this will depend on what the players are bringing to the table in the form of their history. As a relationship continues, we find that it is always evolving, always capable of creative transformation. The substance of the relationship, what holds it together and also evolves with time, is the unfolding pattern of moves.

When I talk about “moves”, I’m talking about anything a person intentionally does in a relationship that the other person can receive and react to. Examples:

• “I’m hungry.”

• “This movie looks pretty good.”

• Putting on a song and gyrating sensually to it in view of the other person, who is working.

• “Let’s pack our things and move to France.”

Importantly, this includes things that have real stakes for the people involved. The “moves” of relationships can lead to bad outcomes, like people being deprived of their needs or physically hurt; therefore, each one needs to trust the other in order for play to continue. If one does not trust the other, play will stop—something we’ll get to later.

How can a relationship’s game go wrong? In a toxic relationship, the flow of play gets stuck. The partners have an incompatibility, or an insecurity, that they can’t collaborate their way out of, so their evolution keeps coming back to that same spot and crashing destructively into it.

In an abusive relationship, play is stuck in a different way. It is stuck because one party, the abuser, shuts it down whenever the other, the abusee, tries to participate. The abuser will only accept their own moves, turning what should be a collaborative exercise into a one-player game.

Why does the abusee not recognize this behaviour and step back? There are a few ways to answer that question. The first is to flip it on its head and ask: where do we find the rules that define how we should expect to be treated? That is, how do we ever recognize our own abuse?

As people, we often look to one another for cues about what is okay, what’s not, and even how to react. We see this a lot in children. Think of two cases where a small child takes a tumble. The fall in itself is not serious, no scrapes or bruises. In one case, the adults around all stop what they’re doing and freeze, fixed on the child, ready to provide solace. In the other case, the adults laugh, compliment the child on their gymnastics, and go back to what they were doing.

The effect of this can be quite powerful. Kids who experience mostly the first case will learn to make a fuss when the adults’ cues tell them they should be injured—even if they aren’t feeling any pain. Meanwhile, for better or worse, kids who experience mostly the second case will learn to get right back up after a fall and keep playing.

The point is that, like anyone else, children learn to play a role in other people’s lives. They build this role based on what they understand of other people’s expectations. These expectations they absorb very easily, even when no-one is telling them anything. As a matter of fact, for kids (and not only kids), words actually tend to be less effective in communication expectations than nonverbal cues. If parents tell a child to “stop crying” when the child hurts themself, but the parents otherwise act like they expect crying when the child falls down, what will happen? Probably, the child will keep crying and keep being scolded for it.

Compare this to the situation in an abusive relationship. In theory, a relationship between adults is quite different from the one between a parent and a child because both partners have an equal role in the game: both have an equal part in creating expectations that the other reacts to. In a healthy relationship, there is a sense of mutual trust, where both parties believe that the other wants them to be happy. This trust keeps the game going and, over time, allows the relationship to evolve in a way that reflects the desires of both people.

When one party distrusts the other, what happens? Usually, the one who distrusts will reject the other person’s expectations. At the expression of a significant want from the other person, the one who distrusts will get angry, shout; or ice the other person out, lock up, retreat. This is called a “fight”. Play has stopped because trust has stopped, and now the future of the game is in question.

In a healthy relationship, the fight state is not sustainable. Either the two will find a way to rebuild trust so the fight stops, or the relationship will end. Or it will continue, to the prolonged harm of both parties.

Abusers are different. We can think of them as partners who never exit fight mode. The only valid expectations are their own; any attempt by the abusee to change their behaviour is an affront, an “out-of-bounds” move in the relationship as the abuser understands it. Yet the abuser will not end the relationship. Instead, they will try to keep it going as long as they can.

How does the abuser square this: that at once they are completely distrustful and scornful of the abusee’s expectations, but also that they want to continue playing the game with them? How they explain it to themselves doesn’t matter—maybe they benefit in some tangible way from the relationship, maybe it gives them a feeling of control or an opportunity to vent their own self-hatreds onto another person—but how do they explain it to the other person?

In fact, the future of an abusive relationship relies on the abusee never asking that question, never asking why the abuser wants to keep playing a relationship game without ever accepting the other person’s moves. If the question does come up in some way, the abuser may have some deflections:

• The abuser isn’t playing a game, just protecting the abusee from a worse life outside the relationship;

• The abuser doesn’t think the abusee is worth playing with, but thinks they might be if they could just “get better”;

• The abuser will change, will let the abusee play in the future (often this is accompanied by pampering: the so-called hot-and-cold treatment).

And, of course, sometimes the method of deflection escapes the framing of a “game” entirely: the abuser forces the abusee to stay by threatening them with violence.

Outside of naked coercion, abusive relationships keep going as the abusee continues in the broken game. To a victim of ongoing, unrecognized abuse, it doesn’t feel like an unequal relationship. The abusee thinks that they simply haven’t figured out what moves to make to keep the game going in a mutually supportive way, or that they haven’t figured out how to accept moves from the abuser that hurt them or make them feel uncomfortable. The abusee forms this belief around the indignation of the abuser, which feels genuine: the abuser really does act like the abusee is going far out of bounds.

In fact, the abuser has trapped the abusee in an unplayable game. To keep them trapped, to keep them from recognizing the fundamental unfairness of the situation, the abuser puts on a show of being victimized. They use crying foul as a weapon, constantly forcing the abusee to question their own behaviour.

The abuser’s performance of being victimized is core to the loop that the abusee gets trapped in. Much of the time, they are made to feel like the abuser, or at least the asshole, the boundary-crosser, in the relationship. Their expressions of pain or anger are treated as cynical moves intended to win concessions from the abuser, when in fact the abuser is the one who has weaponized crying foul.

Not all abusers are totally conscious of the abuse they’re doing. They may instead have an unhealthy fixation on control, something that makes them unable to play with another person—since playing would require handing control back and forth. Based on this fixation, they continually shut their partner down when their partner tries to play. Another possibility is that they are unable to take criticism, so whenever their partner tries to stop the game to complain, they treat it as an attack and escalate.

Nevertheless, over time, regardless of intention, these behaviours do add up to abuse.

Given that abuse can happen even without conscious intention, a victim of abuse may want to ask, even after the fact: is it possible that I was the abuser, and not them?

I would answer that, virtually always, the answer is no, by simple fact of asking the question. Someone who is conscientious about others and tries to see things from their perspective is not likely to be an abuser. They may still at times commit abuse, but they won’t form the pattern, built around fixation on control of the other, that merits the word “abuser”.

But there’s another way to look at it. In terms of the relationship game, one can ask of oneself a simple question: did I allow them to play?
When they made a joke, did I joke back?
When they made a suggestion I wasn’t interested in, did I still entertain it, offer alternatives to it, dig in to the need it was coming from?
When they became interested in something, did I try to understand their interest, even if I didn’t share it? Did I make their interest, in any small way, a part of my life?

These are the behaviours that, when mutual, show a healthy relationship at work. As long as a relationship maintains the conditions of mutual play, it is hard for abusive patterns to creep in.

In a relationship that is abusive, the abuser will be the one who consistently rejects the other person’s moves, even small ones. In a healthy relationship, little acts of play fill in the margins of life and create the texture of love as one lives it. In an abusive relationship, the abuser suppresses even these little acts of play, to demonstrate to the abusee the extent of their control.

That’s how the concept of “play” applies to an abusive relationship. What about the less extreme cases? What about relationships that are merely toxic?

If a relationship is in a condition where even little moves are rejected—”Every little thing she does gets on my nerves”—that is a sign of a relationship that can’t or shouldn’t be sustained in that form. Abusive or not, it’s dysfunctional, and stands in the way of the growth of both parties, because growth always requires play.

Alternatively, if one’s relationship still has little acts of play despite significant flaws and fights, those can be the basis of healing. Focus on collaborating in those little ways, on taking turns building a common language of nonsense, of frivolity, of pointless pleasures. In time, this can be the basis of a renewed knowing and save a love that seemed doomed.