What makes a person likely to be abused?
Abusers and their victims don’t find each other at random. People who are abused tend to have qualities that those who abuse can spot. Not everyone is equally likely to be subject to abuse.
Things that make people susceptible to abuse
While anyone can end up in an abusive relationship, some people are more prone to being abused than others. This is not to say it’s somehow their “fault” that they’re being abused, or that people who have been abused are to blame for their own abuse, but rather that abusers gravitate toward people who have traits that make them easier to abuse.
Some of those traits, in my experience and observation:
Poor boundary-setting skills. This is something I struggle with, and something that led to my own abuse at the hands of former partners.
If you aren’t good at asserting boundaries, you can end up yielding control to an abusive person step by step, where each individual step is a small thing, nothing that screams ‘abuse,’ until you wake up one morning to see that you’ve made hundreds of such steps and arrived at a place where you’ve ceded an unhealthy amount of control. Most abuse is about power and control, and this dynamic is very sneaky.
Boundaries are about you—about access to you, about your self, your body, and your property. “I don’t want you to talk to other girls” is not a boundary. Boundaries are things like “don’t touch me there,” “don’t speak to me that way,” “don’t use my things without permission,” and “don’t tell me what to eat or what to wear or where to go.”
The tricky thing about having poor boundaries is that even people who don’t intend to mistreat you can end up abusing you, because they become accustomed to getting their own way, and eventually start treating having things their own way as an entitlement.
“Poor boundaries” can look a lot like “big heart,” because many of the things people associate with being bighearted—agreeableness, availability, being accommodating, never saying no, prioritizing others over self—are much more about poor boundaries than about being big-hearted.
Game-playing. This is arguably more common in women than in men, because it’s a social trope, but if you find yourself saying ‘no’ to people you’d actually like to say ‘yes’ to because you like the feeling of being pursued or you’ve been told that good girls shouldn’t be ‘easy’ and should make the guy work for it, you’re much more likely to end up in an abusive relationship.
Why? Because people who respect boundaries accept your ‘no’ and quit chasing you. The sort of person who keeps pursuing you after you say ‘no’ is exactly the sort of person who doesn’t care about boundaries and doesn’t care if you say no or not. In other words: an abuser.
Not recognizing abuse when it happens. That might be surprising, but few people are actually taught how to recognize abuse until it reaches the point where the abuser actually hits you. I’ve had this problem myself as well. You simply don’t recognize manipulation as abuse, emotional abuse as abuse, pernicious control as abuse, financial abuse as abuse. We think we know what abuse looks like, but it’s often way more complicated and way more subtle than we think.
Isolation from others prevents reality-checking. One of the defining elements of most abuse is isolating the abuse victim from other people. A lot of people are taught toxic social values that normalize this.
“You’re my girlfriend now, you’re not allowed to have any male friends.” “I should be able to see your phone and see who you’re chatting with.” “I don’t want you talking to other girls on social media.” All of this is toxic. When you have isolated the victim, it’s really hard for them to get any messages other than what you provide, so they might not have anyone nearby who can say “y’know, this thing you’re experiencing, are you sure it’s healthy? Because what I see here is…”
If your partner doesn’t let you have other male friends or other female friends, or controls your social circle, run.
Not recognizing abuse part II: A lot of people are ingrained with the idea that abuse happens by men to women. So when men are abused, even in ways so overt they’d clearly recognize a problematic relationship if the roles were reversed, it’s easy to dismiss, downplay, or simply ignore the toxic elements of the relationship.
Abusers don’t abuse all the time. Most abusers are, to some extent anyway, genuinely capable of love and genuinely love their partners. They simply lack healthy ways to deal with things when they don’t get their way, or they have mental health issues that prevent them from being capable of healthy modes of relating
Not recognizing abuse part III: People who grew up in an abusive household may internalize controlling, toxic, abusive dynamics as ‘normal’ and ‘just how relationships are.’ If you’ve never had a healthy relationship modeled for you, how will you know you’re in an unhealthy relationship?
Fawn response: Psychologists talk about the “four F” responses to conflict or trauma: fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
Fight response means you respond to conflict with aggression. Flight means you respond to conflict by leaving. Freeze means you respond by retreating into yourself, unable to speak up or defend yourself. Fawn means you respond to stress or conflict by becoming overly agreeable, to try to defuse the conflict through placating the other person.
People with freeze and fawn responses are particularly vulnerable to being abused. I have a fawn response, and it has not served me well.
Conflict aversion. This, I think, is coupled both to poor boundaries and fawn response, and it’s another thing I struggle with. I hate conflict; when a partner yells at me, I’m far more likely to cave to whatever they’re demanding than to argue or fight back.
It’s normal and healthy to be averse to conflict; seeking out conflict leads to unstable relationships, after all. But when conflict aversion goes so far you won’t stand up for yourself, or you would rather give a partner whatever he or she demands even if you don’t think it’s reasonable than argue about it, that makes you far more easy to take advantage of, and far more easy to abuse.
Some degree of conflict is an inevitable part of life. Being willing to stand up for yourself is a vital part of setting and maintaining boundaries. Remember that in a healthy relationship, nobody should be able to control things that are yours—what you eat, what you wear, who you socialize with, access to your body, sex with you—without your consent. A person who demands control over these things is not treating you well, and it’s okay to defend your boundaries and control who has access to your person and your property.
Why people ignore red flags
Often, at the start of a relationship that becomes toxic, there may be warning signs you don’t notice, or perhaps don’t recognize for what they are. Then, as the abuse escalates, you can find yourself wondering how the hell you missed the signs.
Thing is, it’s easy enough to beat yourself up over the warning signs you missed, but there are a lot of reasons why you might miss them. Some of the reasons I’ve observed:
Because red flags aren’t always obvious. As with many things, they’re clearer in hindsight than in foresight. Yes, there are some obvious ones (bursts of anger, violence toward objects or animals), but in the beginning of a relationship these might not be present. They often begin slowly and escalate over time.
Because the relationship seems awesome at first. It’s easy to disregard all kinds of things in that giddy rush of a new relationship: incompatibility, different values, different relationship goals, and yes, red flags. I know I’ve been guilty of this. In that first heady rush of new relationship energy, everything is wonderful and anything seems possible.
Because optimism. When you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, red flags just look like flags. I mean, this is me in a nutshell.
Because you think “I can change them.” Trying to save the broken person is a standard romance-novel trope (*ahem* 50 Shades of Crap *ahem*). And it’s not just women who think this way—how many guys think you gotta take the crazy if you want hot sex?
Because you don’t think it can happen to you. If you sincerely don’t believe, I mean really don’t believe, because you’re too savvy or too good at relationships or whatever—that abuse can happen to you, you simply don’t watch for the signs and you don’t recognize them even if you do see them.
Because you’re desperate. If you see relationships as scarce and hard to find, you may grab hold of any opportunity for relationship that presents itself no matter how dysfunctional.
Because of social pressure. If you live in a society or a family where there’s a lot of pressure to be in a relationship or get married, same thing—you may grab hold of any opportunity for relationship that presents itself no matter how dysfunctional.
Because of gaslighting. You may see the red flags, but your partner or people around you dismiss or downplay your concerns, tell you you’re imagining things, or make you doubt your own judgment.
Because the rest of the relationship is wonderful. That’s a thing a lot of folks don’t get. A toxic relationship is rarely toxic all the time, and your partner might sincerely be absolutely wonderful much of the time. This can seriously mess with your head, even make you doubt yourself.
It’s way too easy, in the rush of NRE, not to see what later become clear warning signs. This is normal, and not your fault. Those warning signs can be incredibly subtle at first, and abusive relationships can be wonderful at first. Being alert to those early signs before they escalate is, unfortunately, a learned skill, and sometimes we learn the signs of a good relationship by going through bad relationships.