My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
He takes two to tango, an unequal number, to sustain a long-term abusive relationship. The abuser and the abused form a kind of a bond, a dynamic, and a dependence.
Expressions such as folie et deux and shared psychosis or even Stockholm Syndrome capture facets of this dance macabre.
And this dance often ends fatally. It is always an excruciatingly painful affair, but it can also turn dangerous at the least expected moment.
A abuser is closely correlated with alcoholism, drug consumption, intimate partner homicide, teen pregnancy, infant and child mortality, and incest, spontaneous abortion, reckless behaviors, suicide, and the onset of mental health disorders.
It doesn't help that society refuses to openly and frankly tackle this pernicious phenomenon and the guilt and shame associated with it.
People, overwhelmingly women, remain in an abusive household for a variety of reasons. Economic, parental to protective children, and psychological.
But the objective obstacles facing the battered spouse, the abused spouse, cannot be overstated. The abuser treats his spouse as an object, an extension of himself, devoid of a separate existence and denuded of distinct needs, preferences, wishes, and priorities.
Thus, typically, the couple's assets are all on the abuser's name, from real estate to medical insurance policies. The victim has no family or friends because her abusive partner or husband frowns on her initial independence and regards it as a threat.
By intimidating, controlling, charming, and making false promises, the abuser isolates his prey from the rest of society, and thus makes her dependent on him totally. The victim is often also denied the option to study and acquire marketable skills or augment them.
Abandoning the abusive spouse frequently leads to a prolonged period of destitution and peregrination. Custody is usually denied to parents without a permanent address, a job, income security, and therefore stability.
Thus, many victims tend to lose not only their mates and their nests, but also their offspring.
There is the added menace of violent retribution by the abuser or his proxies, coupled with emphatic contrition on his part and a protracted and irresistible charm offensive.
Gradually, many victims are convinced to put up with their spouse's cruelty in order to avoid this harrowing predicament.
But there is more to an abusive diet than mere pecuniary convenience.
The abuser, stealthily but unfailingly, exploits the vulnerabilities in the psychological make-up of his victim, the chinks in her armor.
The abuse party may have low surface team, a fluctuating sense of self-worth, primitive defense mechanisms, phobias, mental health problems, a disability, bodily law, psychological, a history of failure, or a tendency to blame herself or to feel inadequate, what we call autoplastic neurosis.
She may have come from an abusive family or environment herself, which conditions her to expect abuse as inevitable and normal.
Abuse becomes her comfort zone.
In extreme and rare cases, the victim is a masochist, possessed of an urge to seek ill-treatment and pain, and to revel in them.
The abuser may be functional or dysfunctional, a pillar of society or a parapathetic con artist, rich or poor, young or old.
There are many types of abusers. There is no universally applicable profile of the typical abuser.
Yet abusive behavior often indicates serious underlying psychopathologies.
With absent empathy, the abuser perceives the abused spouse only dimly and partly as one would an inanimate source of frustration.
The abuser in his mind interacts only with himself and with what we call introjects, representations of outside objects, such as the victim's.
It is a monologue, never a dialogue.