Five Stages of Abuse

I work with women who are typically ten to twenty-five years into an abusive relationship.

Typically, by the time she gets to me... she has between three and five kids, and she's quit working to stay home as a full-time parent (if she was originally allowed to get a degree and a job in the first place). She has done her best to be a good mom and a good wife, and poured her energy into keeping everything going and everyone together.

She cannot figure out why everything is so difficult in her marriage. And usually, it’s never even occurred to her that she’s in an abusive relationship.

Instead she thinks, "It's just really hard, and I just can't seem to make things work right. I have got to try harder."

In the meantime, she’s developed some mysterious collection of autoimmune symptoms, or she’s been diagnosed with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. She’s increasingly forgetful, and she continues to blame herself and say things like,

"If I just tried harder, maybe he wouldn't be mean."
"If I just kept the kids quieter, maybe he wouldn't explode on all of us.”
“If I just lost 15 pounds, or got new lingerie, he wouldn’t keep cheating or looking at porn.”
“If I just did XYZ, maybe the ABC terrible thing wouldn't keep happening."

Back when she was a teenager, the core substance of relationship advice she received consisted of, “don’t be a slut, let the man take charge, and only date somebody who loves God first." So she said "I do" with all the stars in her eyes, and she was madly in love.

But in all of the youth group talks about relationships, nobody ever talked about the five stages of abuse.

Perhaps she was sheltered and naive about what traits indicate danger in relationships. Or perhaps she grew up exposed to mainstream entertainment, and learned from the cool kids on TV exactly how to find and accept an abusive relationship.

Regardless, she’s been living in abuse for years now, and nobody taught her what to look for. She hasn't a clue how to recognize the signs.

In fact, the comments and sermons from her pastor and the books she’s read in women’s study groups have reinforced the assumption that the multi-dimensional misery of her body and heart, is entirely her own fault.

What she needed to know, more than how to style her hair or play the piano or bake homemade bread or even how to ace a college exam — were the five stages of an abusive relationship.

How "Every Man's Battle" Enables Abuse - Book Review

1) The crack that gets you hooked.

The flirting, the fun, the attraction. It's the crack that gets you hooked. It’s when everything seems perfect and too good to be true. He's giving the attention you crave.

You feel special.
You feel chosen.
You have warm tingles up your spine.

The problem though, in an abusive relationship, is that the good stuff comes with strings attached.

"I do this. How come you don't do that back for me?"

Or the opposite approach, ”You don't need to do that. I'll do it for you!"

Which sounds really nice, right? It feels great when somebody wants to help you, and serving each other in a healthy relationship should be a mutual gift that goes both ways.

But, in an abusive relationship (and you won't realize it yet) the stuff that gets you hooked on that perfect feeling also creates a sense of dependence and reliance on the other person. This tends to isolate you away from other people that are healthy and good in your life.

Now, it may not be intentional, but the abuser’s approach is... "as long as I make you dependent on the good stuff, you will do whatever it takes later to get me back to treating you well. I can control every aspect of the relationship.” Once you’re hooked on that first teaser of too-good-to-be-true, you’ll bend over backward to get the good stuff back.

So, the beginning will often feel like a whirlwind, so incredibly awesome. And then it starts to turn sour… but not usually overnight. Most often it sours in stages. (However, there are some who experience an overnight identity flip in their abuser, often on the honeymoon or around the birth of the first baby.)

2) The affection that fakes a bond.

There are two types of fake-bonding that often occur in abusive relationships. The first type is that physical connection.

Physical affection draws you in and gives the illusion of deep emotional connection. In a healthy, committed, long-term, safe relationship — physical affection increases emotional connection in wonderful and healthy ways.

Outside of that, in an abusive relationship, physical affection often precedes emotional connection, and then you start thinking you're deeply connected. You feel emotionally attached, but the depth is not actually there.

The second type of abusive fake-bonding is mostly popular in strongly religious environments, and it is rooted in a facade of hyper-spiritual connection. In conservative or fundamentalist religious circles, young people may be discouraged or even forbidden from physical contact. But they pray together, or study together, or talk about deep spiritual topics at length.

This accelerated spiritual bonding creates the same dangerous illusion of being deeply connected, when deep commitment and genuine integrity are not actually there.

Instead of assessing based on things like, "Well, he must love me because he's so good, he's so spiritual, he's so popular, he's so sweet, he's so kind…” it is wiser to ask a very different series of questions:

"How does he treat people who have nothing to give him?"
“What is he like when it's quiet and there is nothing to entertain him?”
“How does he handle it when someone makes him angry or crosses his will?”
“What does he do when he's not in control of things?”

And that leads us to stage three.

3) The withdrawal that makes you insecure.

This is where the abuser in the relationship starts to pull away. But instead of asking, "Hmmm, why is he not committed?" you ask yourself, "What did I do wrong?"

As women, we internalize these self-blaming messages from childhood. And we turn that in to ourselves instead of assessing the character and integrity of the other person.

"Something must be wrong with me! Did I have a zit? Did I do something that made him mad? Why did he go silent? What's wrong with me?"

Now, if you were a jerk or you broke trust and acted without integrity or honesty — then obviously you should deal with that. You should work on your own areas of growth, of course.

But, in general, women focus the blame for relational failure onto ourselves.

Next, you start doing everything you did in the beginning that got the crack, the good stuff. Even if that requires erasing your identity to gain the approval of someone who treated you with deception or cruelty.

Women, especially in religious circles, are conditioned by society that it's our job to keep men happy. It's our job to keep men happy enough to make ourselves safe from being harmed by men. When a girl is raised with this mindset, she grows up living with a constant baseline of hyper-vigilance that easily translates into taking that same kind of responsibility in relationships, too.

So when her relationship starts to go wonky, or she’s not sure exactly what's going on, what's her first question?

"What did I do wrong?"

4) The manipulation that gets you to take the blame.

In an abusive relationship, everything is transactional. "You give me this, I'll give you that." Love cannot exist in a transactional environment.

(The consumption of porn reinforces the transactional mindset as well as cultivating entitlement and destroying empathy, as well. But that is an article for another day.)

Manipulation and intimidation don’t have to be presented as a physical threat, although they can also include aggression. The point of this stage is to get you to take the blame for the relationship and to convince you to deny whatever you know to be true.

The popular term for this kind of crazy-making is: gaslighting. Teaching you to doubt what you know to be true and to wonder if you are crazy so that the other person gets off the hook.

An abusive partner wants you to sacrifice your reality for their perception, and their perception will always be one that is a gain to them, not to you. They will use whatever power and influence they have while exploiting your best traits to your hurt.

A common misperception is that only girls with challenging backgrounds get pulled into abusive relationships. In reality, abusers often intentionally target the strongest, most confident person in the room for the thrill of bringing that person down to a point of dependence and isolation.

Is it just a “very difficult” marriage? Or is it abuse?
You deserve to know.
IS THIS ABUSE? will make it clear.

5) The cruelty that makes you think you deserved it.

This is where most people assume that abuse starts.

By this point, you've accepted the abusive dynamic as reality, and you've been conditioned to accept it as normal. You're living in abuse all the time, they’re messing with your head, you’re taking the blame… and everyone around you is trying to figure out why you're not the vibrant thriving human you used to be.

And culture tells you this is how we do relationships:

• We confuse conflict with passion.

• We confuse vacillation, that back-and-forth wishy-washy lack of commitment, with the romantic chase.

• We confuse loyalty with lack of boundaries.

• We confuse connection with infatuation.

These messages, deeply ingrained, leave you willing to sacrifice any part of yourself, and erase anything in your identity to try to get the good stuff back.

Knowing the signs of these five stages in advance, can help you have a sense of protection and courage so that when you see these things happening, you know you deserve respect, and boundaries, and communication, trust, and most of all, safety.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and I want to tell you a little bit about why I do what I do.

I grew up with the rare gift of watching my parents live out a healthy, lasting, lifelong, loving marriage I also read all the trash self-help Christian marriage and dating books of the 90s and 00s. I wanted to do relationships right.

I married a pastor just two days after graduating from Christian college, and for the next 13 years, I lived with varying forms of domestic violence, deception, and betrayal. I had no idea I was in an abusive relationship for the majority of those years.

I knew it was tough.
I knew it was difficult.
I knew he lied all the time.

I knew he was a sex addict who watched porn incessantly, but I had no idea exactly how much or that it had escalated into real life sexual activity.

I was plagued with cognitive dissonance between the promises and the secrets. More than anything else, I wanted to do what was right, to be a good wife, to be a great mom.

I wanted to make sure I never let other people down, because of my own deep sense of internal loyalty to my own values.

I would tell myself…

“I am not a quitter. I don't let people down, even if they let me down. I don't give up on my promises. I don't break my vows, even if they've been broken toward me."

…until the point where daily life was no longer safe, and I had to start life over in the middle, with two very young and traumatized children.

I do what I do because when I needed resources, they didn’t exist.

Out of those flames, an WILD new purpose was eventually born — not only to guide others through the process of healing after trauma, but also to share tools that will hopefully prevent other young adults from being pulled into that same path. At the very minimum, one in three teenage girls and one in six boys will eventually be in a violent, traumatic, abusive relationship.

But while so many find themselves gradually consumed by painful, life-shattering, soul-destroying relationships — you do not have to be one of them.

Go-to support hub for women who are ready to thrive after surviving abuse or betrayal — with super affordable, trauma-sensitive group coaching + community.

Follow Sarah McDugal on Facebook + Instagram + YouTube. 

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