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Having relationships with other people is part of the human experience. Whether romantic or not, these realtionships should be healthy and overall beneficial to the people in them. While everyone defines 'healthy' differently based on their needs from a partner, most of these definitions boil down to fundamental principles like respect, trust, support, and good communication. These principles make having healthy relationships one way survivors learn or enjoy sexual experiences, intimacy, and consent.
How to Spot Unhealthy Patterns
The Power and Control wheel has 8 different tactics on the outside that abusers use to control and manipulate their partner.
The way in which these tactics play out in a relationship can be different when physical and sexual violence are used against the partner in conjunction with these 8 power and control tactics.
If your partner uses these tactics, with or without adding physical and sexual violence, you are in an unhealthy relatsionship.
This Ted Talk by a member of One Love discusses what healthy vs unhealthy relationships can look and feel like.
Uses One Love's cartoon couples to illustrate common acts of healthy and unhealthy relationships.
This Ted Talk (start at 10:29 mark) explicitly explains some actions of an unhealthy relationship. Note: This video uses the gender binary to explain abusers and people who are abused. This is not the case as anyone can be abused and anyone can be an abuser, regardless of gender identity.
Psychological & Emotional Abuse
Psychological & Emotional abuse can occur in intimate and non-intimate relationships. These types of abuse involve the intentional use of words and non-physical actions used to manipulate, hurt, control, or weaken a person mentally and emotionally. This type of abuse can result in confusion and distortion of reality for the person being abused.
Your experience with this type of abuse is valid! There are some resources on coping with this type of abuse down below.
The book "Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" by Lundy Bancroft. Bancroft was a co-creator of the first U.S. program for abusive men. While this book only looks closely at the violence of men against women, it addresses why men abuse and what can be done about it.
Gaslighting
What is gaslighting? - How to spot it and how to handle it
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person or group makes someone question their sanity, perception of reality, and/or memories.
People who experience gaslighting usually feel confused, unsure, anxious, and unable to trust those around them and themselves. Gaslighting can cause depression, anxiety, and result in long-term psychological trauma.
Gaslighting usually occurs gradually over time, making it hard for someone to detect in their relationships.
There are many avenues for gaslighting to occur:
Racial Gaslighting
Medical Gaslighting
Intimate Relationships
Insititutional Gaslighting
Child-Parent Relationship
Racial Gaslighting
Racial gaslighting is when people use gaslighting tactics to invalidate a person's experience with discrimination based on race.
Racial gaslighting can sound like:
"____ people can be racist too"
"What I said/did wasn't racist"
"You are being too sensitve"
"If you protested more peacefully then people would listen to you"
"It was just a joke calm down"
"Racism doesn't exist anymore"
"To play Devil's advocate..."
"Racial Trauma" - Ana Loza shares personal testimony to being racially gaslighted
Medical Gaslighting
Medical gaslighting occurs when health-care professionals downplay or explain away symptoms with non-medical or emotional reasons. This leads patients or parents to doubt themselves or think they are exaggerating. It can result in prolonged pain for the patient and may even put lives at risk.
This type of emotional abuse can occur based on gender identity, sexual orientation, and race. This happens due to fact that the medical world was founded on white patriarchical values, a foundation for attempting to control physical bodies that do not identify as straight, white men. Medical terminology also relies on this foundation, for example, the diagnostic term 'hysteria' comes from the Greek word meaning uterus.
Gaslighting in Intimate Relationships
Gaslighting in intimate, romantic relationships is used by the gaslighter to gain power and avoid responsibility for their actions against the other person in the relationship. It can be used to isolate the partner of the gaslighter from friends and family to create an unhealthy dependency to the gaslighter.
Some common phrases of gaslighting in a relationships can be seen in the figure on the right.
Institutional Gaslighting
Institutional gaslighting is when a group within an institution are posing as support on a person or group of people's behalf, but in actuality, act to belittle or deny the reality of the harmful situation in order to protect the institution’s reputation. The institution's use of gaslighting tactics for their own self interest can cause the victim(s) to question their own perceptions of reality, feelings, instincts, and even sanity.
Sankar describes institutional gaslighting through examples of institutional denial toward acts of white supremacy.
Sankar illustrates the way in which society makes the reporter become the "bad guy" or the "problem"
This article discusses institutional gaslighting in response to whistleblowers, why institutions gaslight, and what we can do to stop institutional gaslighting.
Gaslighting in Child-Parent Relationships
Gaslighting in child-parent relationships can have lasting, damaging impacts on the childs mental health and thought processes of reality. This abuse can negatively impact future relationships and create dependencies on people who resemble the qualities of the parent that committed the acts of gaslighting.
In the Ted Talk, Ariel Leve shares her personal story with gaslighting as a child and shares 4 tips to overcoming this type of abuse.
"How to Deal with Gaslighting - Ariel Leve" - Ted Talk with Ariel Leve about 4 steps to deal with gaslighting in a child-parent relationship.
Love Bombing
"What is Love Bombing" by Dr. Ramani - with Spanish Subtitles
Love bombing is a part of the cycle of abuse and can be extremely damaging to your psychological, emotion, and physical health. It can also progress into more violent abuses, controlling behaviors, and verbal abuse.
Love bombing is a form of psychological manipulation that is an attempt by a person to influence another through acts of attention and affection like gifts, promises, compliments, etc. The manipulator wants to gain trust and affection in order to obtain something from another person. Love bombing is also used to distract you from the manipulator's character flaws and place you in a toxic relationship.
The phases of love bombing are: Idealization, Devaluation, and Discard.
The manipulator will place exaggeratedly positive attributes and affections onto a person (Idealization), then do the opposite and place exaggeratedly negative attributes and affections onto the same person (Devaluation), and then eventually Discard them.
Why do people love bomb?
Insecurity of self
Need for fast and intense emotional intimacy
Narcissism
Reactive Abuse
Darren Magee discusses the term 'Reactive Abuse', a common manipulation tactic employed by toxic people. A tactic that abusers often use to avoid responsibility and portray themselves as the victim, 'the abused abuser'. This tactic can leave victims asking 'am I the abuser here?'
This video looks at what Reactive abuse is (blame shifting, victim shaming, gaslighting).
Physical Abuse, Domestic Violence, & Intimate Partner Violence
Physical Abuse
What is Physical Abuse?
Physical Abuse is an intention act of physical nature that hurts another person.
Physical Abuse comes in many different forms and does not need to be quantified on an injury scale.
Physical Abuse in Relationships
"We need to remind you that all relationships are not meant to be salvaged and if you are coming out of any relationship where abuse took place it’s probably better to seek proper guidance, to heal and to move forward…However, we also believe that people shouldn’t be ostracized forever because they’ve made mistakes. And so we wanted to a short video to provide you with both perspective and guidance if you find yourself in these complicated circumstances."
Domestic Violence
National Domestic Violence Hotline: https://www.thehotline.org/
Phone: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
Live Chat Available
Provides resources for safety planning, identifying abuse, local resources, and more.
Domestic Violence Survivor Explains Red Flags To Look For
Domestic Violence is defined as violent and aggressive behavior in the home, it usually involves an act of physical or sexual violence on a spouse.
It can also extend to close relations, family friends, ex-partners, and family members.
How Can We Combat Domestic Violence In Our Communities?
Discussion about combatting domestic violence in any community regardless of gender, race, privilege, sexuality, etc.
What are the Types of Domestic Violence
This video describes what a domestic relationship is and what types of abuse can occur in a domestic violence situation. The law coverage mentioned in this video covers the Caribbean, for your state's laws please look here.
Intersectionality of Domestic Violence
Depending on a survivor's identity (disability status, immigration status, race, ethnicity, religion, culture, class status, etc.), the access and barriers to service change and can be more challenging.
The intersectionality of poverty, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, culture, religion, children status, etc. impacts survivors of violence and their ability to safely leave.
"Hindered Help: African-American Partner Violence Victims" - Bernadine Waller.
Bernadine Waller describes the experience of women of color in the U.S. that hinders people from getting the help they need from healthcare, police, shelters, and the community because of harmful stereotypes of the feminine African-American community. "You see me as an angry Black women and it's killing me" - B.W.
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is any type of violence enacted on a person by their current spouse, partner, or ex-spouse or partner.
Common characteristics of a person who commits IPV:
low self-esteem
belief in strict gender roles
history of aggression or violence
hostility towards the identity of their partner
isolation or anti-social behavior
emotional dependence or insecurity
"Healing Series Video 1: Healing From Domestic Violence" by The Queen Experience is a personal story from this woman who has experience domestic violence and had friends who dealt with domestic violence. She gives healing advice while sharing her story.
Sexual Violence
Sexual Violence means that someone commits a sexual act against another person without consent. This includes: any act that is used to attempt to obtain a sexual act without consent, unwanted sexual comments or advances, acts to traffic, any sexual act that uses coercion. It is wide-ranging and usually is broken down into: sexual assault, sexual abuse, and rape. It is further reaching than this in the non-legal world; including sexual harassment, groping, stealthing, child sexual abuse, etc.
"How to Support Through Trauma" has a really good conversation between these two individuals in their relationship dealing with past sexual assault.
Sexual Violence is seriously damaging to a person's sense of being, mental state, physical health, and emotional stability. The traumatic impact of sexual violence is long-lasting and debilitating. It can manifest itself in many ways: hypersexual behavior, dissociation, depression, hypersensitivity to sounds and smells, anger, fear, and much more.
Wherever you are in your journey to live as a survivor of sexual assault, know that what you are experiencing is difficult and challenging as hell, but you will get through it.
Incest
Incest is when sexual abuse happens between people who are blood-related or within the same family group. This abuse is very complicated because it creates trauma bonding - where the abuser inflicts an act of violence but also provides other forms of affection in other non-violent, non-incest situations - like affection, food providing, attention, connectedness.
Incest is statistically most common between a father or stepfather and a daughter. The current stat is 1 in 7 families have a father-daughter incest situation. "Incest is considered abusive when the individuals involved are discrepant in age, power, and experience. The argument that a younger person may have desired, sought, or given consent is irrelevant. Those very behaviors may have been groomed, coerced, or generated in response to perceived pressure and/or threat from the more powerful person."
"Sexual Abuse We Don't Talk About": Ted Talk by Dr. Syeda Ruksheda goes through an in-depth definition of incest and why we don't talk about it in society.
Dr. Ruksheda urges for the normalization of bringing incest into the conversation
Healthy Relationships as a Survivor
The two above videos are about dealing with your traumatic experiences in new relationships, when to tell your new partner, and how to handle intimate moments moving forward.
The two articles above are written to give advice on building intimacy after trauma. Remember to be gentle with yourself and with your partner. Open communication, time, and respect can be great foundations for building intimacy as or with a survivor.
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