11:30am June 24, 2014

More thoughts on abusive relationships, helpers, and “helpers”

Having a friend who is in a complicated relationship, or even an outright abusive one but the abuser is not a complete monster with no redeeming qualities, or is in a situation where they can’t decide whether or not to get an abuser out of their life, or in a situation where they’re partly dependent on an abuser for things like money, transportation, etc… can be difficult.

We know, because we’ve been that friend.

It can involve a lot of the friend coming to you in tears after the abuser said or did something nasty or manipulative to them. It can involve them begging repeatedly for reality checks: “was that a bad thing, or am I just being crazy and oversensitive?” It can involve this going on a lot. Night after night. Because they need an outlet, someone to vent to, a third party to give them reality checks.

And again, we’ve been that friend.

And we’ve also been in the situation of having other people who were that friend. And sometimes we were that friend to each other.

There’s a point where it can be tempting, where your friend comes to you devastated yet again, to want to snap and yell at them to do things that aren’t possible for them in their situation. Mostly, this is to appease your own guilt over being unable to help them, so you push it off onto them, tell themselves they must be okay with it on some level or they would have found some way to leave by now.

I think this is where a lot of “get rid of them, move in with us, kick him out and leave all his stuff on the curb” explosions of frustration come from.

And it can also go toxic when someone decides the person is *so* helpless, so brainwashed by their abusers, that they need to have someone hand-hold them into “normalcy” again. Of course, people who have been enmeshed in an abusive situation for long enough are not going to have a good concept of what normal is, and will often put up with all kinds of stuff for a long time, if you tell them you’re teaching them how to be normal, to help them.

And this can turn into a situation where a person decides another person is in desperate need of their help, that they require their help in specific to get them out of their abusive situation, but actually has developed deep-seated resentment for them, and a disgust for what they see as their conditioned helplessness. (Which may or may not be real conditioned helplessness, but it doesn’t justify the resentment.) And then they will try to persuade you to move out of your situation, offer you a place in their home. Their offer may be completely unfeasible and extended to you out of guilt and just wanting you to shut up about the abuse already. It may involve asking you to move a long distance, or to another country, or to a situation where someone can’t support you financially. It frequently involves insisting that you must move RIGHT NOW, to the point where they start practically threatening to kidnap you out of your current living situation “for your own good.” It may ACTUALLY involve inviting you to visit, and then doing everything possible to prevent you from leaving.

It may involve being crammed into a living situation with very minimal space, where, for instance, you may not even have your own bedroom. You may find out after you’ve moved in that the rules of the household are very strict, and no matter what you do, you always seem to be in violation of one of them and get yelled at for doing something wrong. Your “helper(s)” may even have an entire new life plan for you, to “rehabilitate” you in their own image, and insist on having control of it every step of the way. They may insist that you take a certain job you can’t actually handle, and then claim they picked that job for you because they “knew” you could handle it, and if you say you can’t, you’re just making excuses. They may begin bringing down ultimatiums, like “you must get a job or else,” when you’ve had no decompression time or space, or they might try to pull you into doing work for their own business, and they take all the money and you get no compensation for your part of the work. They may try to convince you that you’re not disabled, if you are, or are “not as disabled as you think you are,” and that you can do all kinds of things you really can’t. They may say they have a plan to move you out eventually, but only when you’ve reached a certain level of “functionality,” and they must choose where you move to, and all the while act resentful of your very existence.

In short, basically a home-brewed institutional situation. One which can be created completely by accident when other people let their impatience override their desire to help someone in a complicated situation.

If you really want to help a friend in an abusive relationship, do NOT try to control-freak them out of it. Do not invite them to move a long distance or into another country to live with you, if you cannot provide them the space, the disability accomodations, the financial support, and the patience that they need. No matter how frustrating it can get to hear them talk about being subjected to the same kinds of abuse over and over, do not decide “this person clearly can’t save themselves, I have to save them” and charge in. Just keep listening to them. Just keep giving them the reality checks they need.

Because you will often end up resenting them, hurting them, and even abusing them yourselves, if you do that.

We’ve seen this, more than we wish we had. And we’ve been the person whom other people hated for “having to help.” And it seems to go bad, more often than not.

And there are obviously situations where a person DOES move a long distance to get away from abusers, but it’s carefully planned out and they have some form of financial support and housing lined up already, and disability services if they need them. Hell, our current living situation with our housemate& started like that. And we had to learn to temper our impatience, too, until it became actually feasible for them to move out, and learn that “JUST KICK HIM OUT” was a knee-jerk reaction coming from our own guilt at being unable to help them.

Anyway, just wanted to mention that, as a big red flag that both people in abusive relationships and people with friends in abusive relationships need to watch out for, a destructive pattern that people can very easily fall into without realizing it.

(Of course there are abusers who prey on people by offering to get them out of an abusive situation, but I’m talking about what happens when you thought you had a supportive friendship with someone and then it turns nastily conditional and control-freaking and resentful, in the name of “rescuing you.”)