COVERT 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.

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.