Everybody encounters abusive behaviour occasionally, but the key to not becoming a victim is to recognise healthy boundaries, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
WHEN ANNA decided that she could no longer stand the misery of working for an abusive boss who followed her around the office roaring at her, blaming her and belittling her in front of others she still hoped to be able to sort things out with him on her last day in the job.
But, she wrote in an unsent letter, “You just treated me like dirt. I’ll never forget the way you spoke to me. You didn’t even say thank you for all my work or sorry for what you did.”
Anna’s story is one of those told in Jim O’Shea’s new book Abuse: Domestic Violence, Workplace and School Bullying.
The desire to sort things out, to make things “right” with an abusive boss or partner is a common one, but O’Shea, who is based in Thurles, Co Tipperary, believes it’s a desire unlikely to be realised.
This is because abusive behaviour has deep roots in childhood and very often there is very little the victim of the abuse can do to change that.
Only a great deal of hard work by the abusive person admitting that he or she has a problem can bring hope of change and many abusive people never get around to making that admission even to themselves.
Abusers in the home, the workplace and the schoolyard are very often harbouring a deep fear of abandonment, O’Shea believes. “That’s well proven now,” he says.
Children are hardwired to seek a connection with their primary caregiver. If that connection is denied, for instance through neglect or indifference, the child’s brain becomes hardwired in a new way: for insecurity.
Some may respond by withdrawing into themselves. Others may learn to control through anger, fear or other forms of manipulation.
Nobody really knows, O’Shea says, why some react to their deep insecurities through abusive behaviours and others do not.
But why do men and women who are the victims of abusers put up with it? Why don’t they cut and run?
Another mystery and one with many possible answers. Abusers can be charming in the early stages, O’Shea says.
In another case study in the book, Linda describes how she married a man who was so charming that at first she “thought I had received all my lucky stars at once. Never had I felt so close to anyone, and felt such companionship”.
But marriage changed everything. It was “like a switch being flicked” as he isolated her from friends and family, disappeared for four or five days at a time, and humiliated her in public by flaunting his affairs with various women.
That isolation from friends and family, by the way, can often be an early clue that it’s time to turn and run in the opposite direction – unfortunately it can happen so insidiously that the victim is isolated before he or she realises what is going on.
For many abusers, of course, violence is part of the controlling, fear-inducing mix. But whatever the means, manipulation is a hallmark of the abuser. It’s as though the abuser is able to read the mind of the victim and knows just what will work to keep that person in place.
Denial makes a difference too, O’Shea says. At first, the target of the abuser believes that what is happening cannot be happening. If things are going wrong it must be their own fault, whether that abuse is happening in the home or in the workplace.
And the victim stays stuck until he or she reaches the “enlightenment” stage and recognises that what is going on is wrong and should not be tolerated.
Finally, the victim takes responsibility for his or her own wellbeing and leaves. That action, as we know, can lead to a redoubling of efforts by the abuser to keep the victim in place and even to more extreme actions, in some cases even murder.
There are other complications. For instance, there is the victim who bonds with the abuser, O’Shea says.
In this scenario the victim sees the abandoned, vulnerable child in the tormentor and relates to that child. This prolongs the agony for the victim.
And if the victim has grown up in a family which engaged in shaming and humiliation, which did not respect its members’ individuality or in which the children were routinely blamed for the bad feelings of the parents, matters become even more complicated.
Here the victim takes responsibility for the feelings of the abuser – and the abuser is quick to take full advantage of this. In other words, there is an absence of boundaries between the victim and other people.
The person with healthy boundaries quickly recognises abusive situations and gets out. Those who lack these boundaries, though, can be in very deep trouble indeed if they find themselves in the hands of a manipulator.
O’Shea recognises in his book that abusers include both men and women.
O’Shea has written a special module for schools which they can obtain by contacting him. His website is jimoshea.net. He is also the author of another excellent and moving book, When A Child Dies: Footsteps of a Grieving Family (Veritas).
Abuse: Domestic Violence, Workplace and School Bullyingis published by Atrium
