WarningShot
These thoughts were triggered by my frustration with the concept of adaptability…
A while ago I heard about how easy it is to boil a frog if you place it in a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the temperature. The frog automatically acclimates to the heightened temperature until it’s too late for it to make an escape. Humans are no different. But instead of us being boiled alive by water…we are boiled alive by our ability to adapt to toxicity. The best example I can give is being in an abusive relationship. For the sake of minimal trauma bonding in this post, I’ll pick the less graphic type of abuse…verbal. I have reached levels of legendary status on both the giving and receiving end of this abuse so I feel like I’m qualified to give an accurate assessment on how possible it is to slowly lose yourself to the acclamation of verbal assault. The build up to the acclamation usually takes time because abusers don’t start out displaying this abusive behavior on a consistent basis. They usually start off slow and work their way into cornering their victims into the fetal position. And once they have you where they want you…restructuring the relationship in a way that excludes verbal violence is damn near impossible. The dynamic has already been established and the more dominant abuser will exhaust all avenues of abuse before they give up the position of power they have over their chosen victim.
In my experience with being the receiver, the verbal jabs usually start off with backhanded compliments. The backhander does this to feel out whether there is the potential to go further with their intended target so they throw out bait. If the lower tier insults aren’t challenged…they slowly reach top tier levels that eventually leave the victim feeling like this way of communication is normal. What I wish I had known, when engaging with my own insulters, was how much power they don’t have. Their need to tear down who I was resulted from the worthlessness they felt. But they were so good at masking their low self-esteem because all their time was spent highlighting aspects of my personality that they convinced me I should feel ashamed about. Their ability to constantly make me question my own worth made me put them on the pedestal that they secretly knew I belonged on. Because the gag is…no abuser picks an ‘abusee’ whose worth they don’t see. The worth that they see is the bait we unintentionally display because we aren’t aware that we possess it. So abusers are able to feed off our unseen worth because their verbal volatility keeps us in a constant state of self-doubt. That separates us from our self-esteem and makes us cling more to them because they’ve convinced us how lucky we are that they still want to be with someone who they have tricked into believing is so unworthy. Classic bait and switch.
In my experience with being the giver, I realize that once I started using my tongue to return the self-doubt given to me…back to my abusers…their power disappeared. Not because my words left them powerless…but because they never had any power to begin with. Because people who emotionally prey on others are cowards…who convince those they prey on that they are more than what they are. So when I started ‘popping my sh*t’ and meeting emotional abuse with emotional abuse…the worth my abuser had seen in me from the beginning started to reappear in a way that finally made it visible to me. But because I realized that allowing my worth to come in the same way that my abuser got theirs made me no different than my abuser…after taking back my power I was then required to use it wisely. The wisest way to use it is to completely discard the person responsible for my identity crisis. But this was not always a choice. So my next best option was to learn my abuser in a way that allowed me to back them in the identity crisis corner that they wanted me in. And because I wanted to do it in a way that allowed me to feel an authentic form of self-worth…I backed them up by telling them the truth about themselves. As opposed to the lies they told me about me to cosplay their own sense of worth.
Love,
Choosy
