There was a time—a time not too long ago, in fact—I believed that polyamorous relationships were less prone to abuse than monogamous relationships.
I think I can be forgiven a certain degree of nativity here. When you read books or papers about abuse, or you talk to abuse survivors, or you take courses about domestic partner abuse, or you look at any of the clinical literature on abuse, one theme emerges over and over again: Abusers isolate their victims. Abusers control the social connections of those they abuse.
This is such a common and central part of abuse that it’s almost a defining element of the abuse dynamic: if you want to find an abuser, look to the person who tries to control who their partners see, who they make friends with, who they spend time with. Control over a person’s social connections, friendships, and other relationships is so central to the abuse dynamic that it alone can often cut through confusion and lay bare the power structures inherent in abuse.
Abuse is about power and control. Control over another person’s social connections is central to control in an intimate relationship, because it makes the survivor more dependent on the abuser, and removes the survivor from his or her support network. This isolation enables everything else, and keeps the victim in the grip of the survivor.
Image: AnnaPhri
“Polyamory involves multiple people!” thought the naive I. “You can’t isolate people in polyamorous relationships!”
Boy, was I ever wrong.
And the amazing thing is, I kept on believing this even after my ex-wife demanded that I break up with another partner, and forbade me ever to speak to her again. I kept believing this even when my ex Shelly broke up with our mutual girlfriend, and demanded I do the same, telling me “can you believe she actually thinks she still gets to have you?”
I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching over the past several years. I am blessed to have found a wonderful therapist with experience in non-traditional relationships and intimate partner abuse, who’s worked with me to unpack a lot of the baggage from my previous toxic relationships. After I was diagnosed with complex PTSD, she’s helped me develop tools to better deal with the lingering consequences of controlling exes.
I’ve also spent the past several years examining the ways abuse plays out in non-monogamous relationships. Almost all the available literature looks only at cishet mononormative relationships between two cisgender people in a traditional middle-class monogamous relationship; there’s a smaller body of research on same-sex relationships, but virtually none on ethical non-monogamy.
Polyamorous relationships are not more resistant to abuse than monogamous relationships. Instead, the same controlling dynamics play out differently. Much of the literature focuses on isolation as a defining element of abuse, but I think it’s more true to say social control is a tool of abuse, and it works differently in polyamory than it does in monogamy.
In monogamy, the easiest way to control a person is simply to make yourself the sun-center of everything, and the easiest way to do that is to cut off the survivor’s other social connections.
In polyamory, this same kind of control is more subtle. Rather than “you’re not allowed to have any other friends,” it becomes “you can have the friends and partners I approve of.” So instead of “you can’t have any other friends,” it turns into:
- Making you get rid of your other partners, directly (as in veto) or indirectly (being so unpleasant or hard to get along with that I drive them off, undermining them in front of you, gaslighting you about them, describing them in unflattering terms).
- Choosing who you date or spend time with.
- Presenting a package deal: “If you want to date me you must also date my other partner,” “if you break up with me, your other partners will also break up with you.” (I’ve been on both sides of this, as when lovers ordered me to end relationships, and when a prospective partner’s other partner vetoed me.)
- Manufacturing Drama when you try to spend time with another lover.
- Controlling when, for how long, or under what circumstances you spend time with other lovers.
And the more I read, the more people I talked to, the more I recognized this: abuse is about power and control, that doesn’t change, but that power and control plays out differently in non-monogamous relationships than in monogamous relationships.
Gaslighting, for example, is a common tool of control. Gaslighting is generally defined as deliberate, intentional attempts to manipulate by undermining a person’s own memories or experiences, in order to make them question themselves or their sanity.
Image: Josiah S
Gaslighting in a monogamous relationship is pretty straightforward. Gaslighting in polyamory may involve calling in other people, for example other members of a relationship network, to question the survivor’s memories or to reinforce the abuser’s narrative. They may do so wittingly, because they benefit from the dysfunctional power structure in the relationship, or unwittingly, perhaps because they fear being abused themselves. It can be used as a tool for isolation, through constant attacks on another partner’s motivations or intentions. (This is, in fact, insidious and endemic in the poly scene; I’ve had this done to me—more than once!—and talked to other people who’ve experienced the same thing.) It can take the form of “you knew this thing you just did was against the rules, how could you do this to me? Now you owe me for breaking my trust!”—when in fact the thing in question was never discussed or never a violation of any relationship agreements.
As I kept reading, and kept talking to people, I kept seeing ways that abusive dynamics work in monogamous relationships isn’t the way they work in polyamorous relationships, so I started to recognize a hole in my writing about polyamory.
That’s why, when I started redesigning the More Than Two polyamory site, I added an entire new wing about abuse in polyamory.
I also created an infographic with some of my observations:
I’ve made a PDF of this infographic, released under the Creative Commons attribution/sharealike license.
Now, I’m not saying I’m any kind of expert or anything. These are my observations, nothing more, which I hope will act as a starting point for more research.
At the end of the day, the thing to remember is this:
Abuse is about power and control.
Abuse is about power and control; the things we normally associate with abuse—isolation, control over social connections, gaslighting, violence, and so on—are tools that serve that need for power and control.
That need for power and control is the unflagging light, the navigational beacon that allows you to see through the fog of different relationship styles to the shoals of abuse. Whenever someone is trying to tell you who to date, who to talk to, what to do, what you are or are not allowed to see or hear or think, look out.
This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. Look for more in the coming days and weeks!
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