What is contempt, and why is it such a wounding issue in toxic relationships? Why do controlling and aggressive personalities cling to contempt as if it’s a something to be cherished, rather than a deadly vice that wounds the soul not only of the victim, but of the aggressor as well?
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The answer rests in an individual’s choices and motivations. What do they desire, what’s their goal?

“Faith, hope, love, and the greatest of these …”

We all know the rest of this famous quote from St. Paul (1 Cor. 13:13). If you have no clue what I’m talking about, please stop reading this article, dust off your Bible, and begin a daily habit of Scripture studies.

With that settled, let’s continue. Here’s a crucial question I think we’ve all asked at one point or another in our lives:   If it’s the greatest of all virtues, why is love so difficult?

There are many challenges to authentic love, but in this post I want to focus on just one—and the one that’s often the most difficult.

Love of Self.

Love of self can be particularly difficult if you've been trampled upon in an abusive relationship. When your sense of self has been buried, how can you even begin to love yourself again? When your every thought, motivation, and belief has been called into question, how can you possibly regain (or establish) love of self?

In a previous post I wrote about the early stages of a romantic relationship with someone who’s hiding an abusive personality, and how that experience likely damaged your self-image and tarnished your ability to trust your own intuition. In this post I’d like to address another reason why you were led astray — and how you should never, under any circumstances, blame yourself.

Everyone in an abusive relationship needs to realize that a skilled manipulator has an extremely fragile ego. Such individuals demand to be understood and “respected”—to the point of expecting their target to read their minds—but paradoxically they’ll never reveal their true, innermost selves.
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There’s a two-fold reason for this: first, they abhor vulnerability, and letting someone know who they truly are—with the consequent risk of rejection—feels too vulnerable for them. Second, they don’t even know who they truly are.

If you’re involved with someone like this, you’ve likely come to realize that you’re expected to foresee all your partner’s needs and expectations, and to comply accordingly—even though he doesn’t want you to know the real him and therefore, you could never know what his true “needs” are.

And, of course, your own needs don’t matter. 
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It doesn’t make a difference if you’ve been dating for two months (yet are already love-bombed into a fairy-tale romance) or if you’ve been married for fifty years. If you’re with a skilled abuser, you’re with a liar, a manipulator, and someone who hides. He hides his true self from you, and he hides his true self from himself.

When a couple splits up as a result of domestic abuse—whether a temporary separation or the final straw—the victim will inevitably miss her perpetrator. For those who have never been subjected to intimate abuse, this idea seems unreasonable at best, and deluded at worst. Why would someone miss their abuser?

The answer is: Trauma Bond. But that’s a topic for another article.
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In this post, I wish to discuss the agony of the “man who wasn’t there,” yet who still is. Once you’ve finally made your way out of an abusive relationship and are on your path toward healing, he still haunts you. Your thoughts, your daily activities, your motivations and your self-perception may still be guided by his gaslighting and manipulation. It takes great effort and healing to get him out of your head.

One of the first casualties suffered by someone with an abusive partner is the silencing of her inner peace as well as her once-reliable and trusted intuition. Perhaps you can relate: without even realizing what was happening, covertly and under the radar, your sense of self became whittled away. In your “previous life” you were full of hope, faith, love and trust—but now all that seems to have vanished, particularly the trust in self.

How could you have been so wrong? How could your intuition have let you down so tragically?

He seemed to really get you like no one else ever had—he even told you that, so it must be true. I mean, seriously. Guys aren’t usually so sensitive and open about their feelings, are they? 
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But he was. Because he’d never felt this way toward any other woman—no matter how many he’d been with. He’d been so raw, so open, so vulnerable -- and you’d fallen face first in love.

One of the most destructive side-effects of being forced to endure an abusive relationship is the hazy fog that seems to settle over not only your mind, but your entire self — body, spirit, and innermost depths.
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Physically you may feel depleted, exhausted, and perhaps even in actual pain. A few of the most common side-effects of chronic abuse include headaches, achy joints or muscles, and stomach issues. An erratic heartbeat or palpitations are also typical physical symptoms, as are shortness of breath, dizziness, generalized anxiety, sleep disturbances (either too much or not enough), and cognitive confusion.

Emotionally you may feel flattened and defeated or — as I heard one young adult recently describing her mother after enduring another abusive attack — crumpled and broken. Spiritually you’ve lost joy, connection, optimism, and the ability to feel the fullness of life.

You feel “socially distanced” — from friends and family, from what was once the richness of your spiritual life, from yourself. 

From your true inner self.
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You may not even remember who your true self had once been, or perhaps you wonder if you ever knew her in the first place.

If his target maintains close relationships with anyone other than himself, he feels his control slipping. After all, being around other people may cause a target of domestic abuse to reassess her own situation and to be less vulnerable to her abuser’s gaslighting, criticisms, and manipulations. External friendships will help her maintain a higher level of self-esteem and self-worth—in other words, inner strength. And, if she’s exposed to other couples, she may see what a healthy relationship looks like—and begin to question her own.

Although an abuser may not consciously harbour these thoughts, the underlying attitudes and motivations are still present. Her ability to maintain close ties with others not only means he has less control, but it also means his target’s attentions aren’t focused on him 24/7—something an abusive personality absolutely cannot tolerate.
Isolation in a domestically abusive relationship is one of the key tactics of coercive control because it “deprives victims of all social support; the ability to resist weakens; it makes the victim dependent on the abuser.” This tactic is particularly toxic when the abuser begins isolating his target from her family.

“The narcissist” and “the abuser” tend to be synonymous terms in the current trend of domestic abuse literature. It’s assumed by many authors—and therefore by their readers—that if a person is abusive they must be a narcissist. But what, exactly, do these authors mean by “narcissist”? Are they claiming that all abusive personalities have NPD, whether nor not they’ve been officially diagnosed? Or are they merely commenting on overbearing and controlling narcissistic tendencies?
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First of all, no one has the right to carelessly bandy about terms as if discussing someone who has actually been diagnosed with a psychological disorder. It’s rare for someone to be diagnosed with NPD for two reasons: