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Binaries and directionality
Sep. 24th, 2012 07:10 pmI find it interesting how often the number two appears in life. We talk about issues having two sides. In general, we tend to form couples, not larger units. We even like to divide the world into two, whether it be along gender lines, economic lines (haves vs have nots) or political lines (R vs D), despite the fact that most people fall along a spectrum.
In short, it often comes down "A or B", but never "A and B and maybe C"... classic dichotomies or binary thinking. For example, take this article. This is a particularly interesting binary article in that it is highly gendered. Now, there's nothing wrong with that in of itself. After all, it would apply to at least half the people in this situation (probably a lot more, given the statistics). However, the problem with binary thinking in this case is that it alienates those who might be in such a situation that is reversed. While I have known a few people in relationships that follow the gender norms, I have also known ones in which women are the abusers and a few that fall along same-sex lines. The point here, is that life is messy and complex and if you take a binary view, you can wind up missing on a great many of the subtleties.
For example, since I do security consulting, let's consider control. Specifically, let's consider the controls on LJ and on the Internet in general. Here on LJ, we have a "friending" system. Interestingly, it is not a bidirectional system. Any person may friend any other person, but that action has two effects. The first is that the first person is following the second. In effect, able to read anything they make public to that person. The second is that the second person is granted access to the first person's posts. (There are other subtler effects that involve filters, but that's weirder than I want to get into right now.) Contrast that with Facebook, where an "unfriending" severs all links. On LJ, all it does is block access to friends-only posts. It, in no way, prevents an interested party from reading what someone chooses to post.
This is also a factor in the growth of the Internet. Since content isn't restricted in any technical sense, anyone may copy and paste from anywhere else or provide links to content. Basically, implementing web filtering is really really hard. This is bad news for businesses that wish to control others. However, it's great news for anyone who likes the free flow of information.
So what does this mean?
Suppose you have two entities, one which wishes to control the actions of another. In the business world, this would be by preventing access to a specific website. You know, like this one or this one. In such a situation, the first entity must, to truly control access, first limit access to the information. Say, by blocking the second person from being able to easily see a post, such as this one. However, there several security flaws in that approach.
1) They cannot prevent someone that the second person is viewing from posting a link to this post.
2) They cannot prevent the second person from seeing links in general.
3) They cannot prevent the second person from seeing key aspects from those links that are copied and pasted into other people's posts.
In effect, to truly control the second person's browsing, they must effectively isolate them completely from the Internet. This is why many of my clients are taking a "monitor and discuss" approach to the Internet and have stopped taking direct control. The latter just doesn't work and eventually drives people away.
What I find particularly fascinating about this tendency is that there are people who like control so much that they get 100% stuck in the binary thinking mode. We're seeing this nationally with the political discussions going on. I see it professionally in certain business owners (though, thankfully, none of my recent clients), and we see it personally in the many *ism wars and discussions going on.
One technique that I find useful to shake up one's thinking is to take a heavily binary piece and flip it around. See if it still makes sense. As an example, let's take that article I linked to here and swap all the genders. (Clare, if you have any issues with me duplicating your entire post, please let me know. I'm sure we can work something out.)
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Tactic #4 – Isolation
by Clare Murphy PhD on February 9 2012 (Gender altered by Josh More, without permission but with apologies)
This is the fourth of 16 blogs discussing the patterns of tactics from my power and control wheel – Isolation.
Isolation is a powerful tactic used by controlling partners
Isolation is a pivotal tactic that controlling partners use in order to weaken their victims, prevent them from hearing others’ perspectives, and to bring them into line with her own beliefs and requirements. Often possessiveness and jealousy play a part in some women’s motivation to isolate men from social contact with friends and family. Some tactics aimed at isolating the victim include telling him that he cares more for his friends, family and pets than for her, telling him she’s the only one who understands him and loves him, controlling incoming information including what he reads, calling him names if he spends time with friends and family, purposefully moving towns or countries, and there are a whole lot more tactics that men describe below in interviews from my Masters research.
Isolation is a debilitating consequence of abuse and control
Anyone who lives with an ongoing experience of being abused by a family or household member can become isolated as a result. For instance, the victim may withdraw from friends and family to save face or because they feel misunderstood, judged, stigmatised, or not supported. Particular tactics aimed at isolating the victim can lead men to become extremely dependent on their controlling partner.
She controls the money to prevent his use of the car
Jim said his wife had the money for the petrol, “so I could only go and see my parents if she gave me petrol money. So I’d only go sometimes. I still saw them. As Hannah’s control over me got higher and stronger over me she would let me go more often. Near the end of our marriage, friends would come and she would open the door this much (indicates two inches) and say I wasn’t home. That way I never ended up with anybody to counteract what she said. It did start to wear me down.”
She turns off electricity to prevent him exiting through the electronic gate
A couple of friends of Bob’s said, “’I don’t know how you live here with these gates around you all the time. It’s a fully fenced section with these gates.’ They said they’d feel a bit trapped, it’s like Fort Knox in there. I started to think, yeah, I’d gone to go a couple of times and Lara stopped me coz she switched the power off and I couldn’t get in to turn it back on. There were just a few things like that that started to scare me. That’s when I started to panic and thought I’ve got to get out of here and have some time on my own to see what’s happening.”
She manufactures situations aimed at isolating him
Harry would tell Laura, for instance, that he “was going out with a friend on Saturday and she’d say, ‘Oh didn’t I tell you, I was planning on going away, ring and tell them you can’t, I’ve already planned it.’ Sometimes now I think she really hadn’t planned it, she’d just ring at the last minute, so any time I went to go to an outside activity, ‘Oh didn’t I tell you mum wants to come over’. There was always something stopping me getting contact with the outside world. She’d say, ‘Let’s go fishing, it’s too nice a day you can’t go shopping today, I’ll go and pack and we’ll go to the lake fishing.’ So I’d ring my friend and say, ‘Can we go shopping on a wet day, it’s such a nice day Laura is off to go fishing’. In the end I was realising that I was spending all my time with her. Then when she was doing that with the phone calls I started to get a bit scared. I was scared more than anything.
Says what he does makes her jealous so insists he not do it
Kevin said his partner Felicity “was a very jealous person, she was afraid that I’d be running around screwing everyone. I learned how to shut myself down. I stopped seeing my friends as much. Once the baby came there was utter isolation, poverty, and loss of trust.”
Attempts to isolate her and him as a couple from the rest of the world
Todd said his partner “didn’t want the world encroaching or shining its bright light on anything in the relationship, that it had to be exclusive and separate from the rest of the world. I thought it was quite nice. It meant that you were really special (laughter). Somebody loved you that much.”
Harry’s partner attempted to isolate him from family and friends “mainly because my parents didn’t really like her that much and my friends didn’t like her that much she’d say, ‘Oh if just you and me went to live in Australia it would be amazing. We wouldn’t have your family and everyone against us. They’re all against us here. If we moved away it would be just us. We would be so much happier. We wouldn’t have the interference.’ I didn’t want to move away. I liked having my family. But I must admit there was one stage she’d say, ‘They’re just against us because we’re so happy’. I started to believe maybe my aunty and uncle aren’t very happy, and maybe my grandparents haven’t got anything else to do but think that their grandson should have something better, I’d start going through all that. But I couldn’t make that move to Australia.”
Demands loyalty to her, not to others
Elgin said he really adored his stepson, Jeremy, but if ever his wife “saw us get close she’d really get stuck into me, and to Jeremy too, coz that was like disloyalty to Liz. It would really hurt because I really did adore my stepson. He was just adorable. He wouldn’t let Jeremy ever come near me, it would be like total disloyalty.”
Tells him he is not allowed to see certain people
Sam said, “I was not allowed to keep in touch with my female friends. I made the assumption she was jealous but she’d never admit to it – she had no comprehension that my friendship with these women did not mean I loved her any less or that they’d get more attention in anyway whatsoever – it was so immature and pathetic of her and ignorant that she refused to even meet these people.”
Dismissive of invites to participate with his friends and family
Tim said his partner Patricia “very strongly tried to prevent me from continuing and developing relationships with other people. I did what he wanted. Again it was quite subtle. It wasn’t, ‘I don’t want you to have any friends, I don’t want you to talk to your family’. It was – she’d refuse to come and visit my family for weekends or Christmas. The first Christmas I stayed, I didn’t want to stay, I’d much rather have gone to visit my family, but I felt sorry for her being left all alone, even though it was her choice to be left all alone. So I told my family I had to work because I didn’t want them to know that she was the kind of [unpleasant person] (laughter) who didn’t want to come and be with the family. Then with friends, she didn’t like it when they came round and she’d go and shut himself in the study and be quite dismissive to them. I was especially confused for a long time about the friends thing because my idea of living with someone was that you could have friends around for dinner and drinks and lunch, and that wasn’t the right thing to do. It took me a long time to figure it out.”
She puts limits on his visits with friends and family
Sonny’s sister lived three quarters of an hour away. “But Anna didn’t like me going over there and spending the day with her because I wouldn’t be home doing things. We were allowed to visit my cousin who was 15 minutes drive away. Anna would go off and do a job. When he got home I thought she’d been working the whole time, but she hadn’t, she’d been visiting. I didn’t know this for a long long time, but I know she used to call into various people’s places whenever she was going past, but she used to put a time limit on my outings. I used to argue with her and she used to just look at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘well I’m not talking to you’. And she didn’t. She’d stop talking to me completely.” However Susan would still visit but would “only visit if I had to go and do something such as grocery shopping, because otherwise you have nothing if you don’t have friends.”
Tim “narrowed the range to what was acceptable to her partner.” He used to go away for a weekend with friends every four or five months “and drink lots of Lindauer and eat chocolate and cheese and crackers and I didn’t do that at all when I was with her because she was really threatened by it and didn’t like it.” She said that, “At work she didn’t like it if I spent too much time with other people, or did things when she didn’t know what I was doing. She had to know what I was doing all the time. She used to ring up every hour when I was at home and say, ‘What are you doing?’”
Tells him that his friends or family don’t care about her
Harold said Lana “was starting to set me against my parents, saying, ‘They’re just being mean, they don’t like me, they just want you to go back to your ex-husband and they’re not giving us a chance’.”
She attempts to divide and conquer by provoking jealousies and rivalries
Tom said that his partner Patty would tell him, “That people at work had said things about me, that they had said that I was this, that I was that, horrible things, which I believed and I don’t know whether they had said them or not. I think that she probably twisted a lot of things like that and I believed her, so that would change my judgement.” This led Tom to reduce his interactions with other people, “and my job which I previously really enjoyed, I’d just go to work and do my job and go away as quickly as I could so I wasn’t around people. And I wouldn’t phone people or do things with people at all.”
She’s rude, critical or dismissive of her visitors
When Sam’s “best friend travelled from the North Island to visit him and Dolly in Nelson, Dolly, who was not usually very active when it came to renovating the house, suddenly appeared ‘busy’ renovating the house. She didn’t want to go out, and spent most of her time making my friends wrong or visiting with her alcohol drinking marijuana smoking buddy. My best friend told me I had become a clone of Dolly’s, which I had not realised. She did not want me to keep in touch with him after that and whenever I wanted to get in touch she disapproved.”
Sam also said that “one year, my sister did not tell Dolly she was coming up to surprise me for my birthday coz she knew she wouldn’t let her stay. And another time one of my friends rang to use our shower because her electricity had gone out and she said ‘no’.”
Todd said Patricia “came down to my parent’s place once and that was the only time she would, and hse was rude and I was really embarrassed by it.”
Eli said, “If I had a friend that was my friend and not somebody that Tiffany had introduced me to, she’d run them down, she’d say they’re not like you, they’re a bitch and stuff like that, to get rid of them, put them off. It would work because it was so unpleasant to listen to all the time and she’d embarrass me if they ever visited, so I wouldn’t encourage people to come and see me. Friends would ask me to go out or something. I just kept saying, ‘Oh no, no.’ There was one young girl, she was such a nice girl, we really got on well, and she said when I was leaving work – we’d worked together – she said, ‘I’ll come round and see you, we’ll still see each other eh?’ And I said, ‘No we won’t.’ And she was really hurt I know, but I never explained why. I think she just thought I was a nasty (laughter) person.”
Kevin said “Felicity accepted my involvement with my family more than with my friends, but she was very critical, especially of my mum, which is understandable. And it used to drive me nuts that I couldn’t have my brother there coz I sort of brought up my little brother and I felt very closely bound to him. She would let me have him, but there would always be a bloody hassle, there would always be a row when my brother was there, always. I felt terrible about that because I wanted to give him support and love.”
Eddie “would go to groups or do personal growth type things and I’d meet people and I’d maybe have them over, and Danielle would say to me things like, ‘Why are you making friends with him he’s separated, why don’t you make friends with married people?’ She would be quite cold to them when they came to the house. I would be quite reticent about having them back, or I wouldn’t go to things that she couldn’t come to. If I got invited to something on my own I wouldn’t go unless it was a couple invitation. So I only really did couple things.”
Friends and family decide to stay away because of his abusiveness
Eddie said “I was isolated in the sense that Liz would have a guise of being nice to my parents, but then she would be rude sometimes, enough for them not to like her and they wouldn’t want to come round and see me. She was unwelcoming and unfriendly to anybody who knew me, so people just started to stay away.”
Victor’s “sister came to stay once, my sister and I aren’t particularly close, it was getting close to the end of the marriage and Ginny did one of her ‘behaviours’ and it was the first time that my family had actually seen her in action. And it wasn’t nothing, it was like, ‘you think this is a problem, you should see her on a good day!’ My sister said, ‘I’ll never come and stay with you again because I couldn’t believe the way she acted.’ So it wasn’t about, ‘Oh my God let me support you and help you’. It was about, ‘I’m never coming back, I’m not going to associate with you guys because this is stuffed’. So through the dysfunctions we were having people pulled back, and I didn’t want people to see that. So it was best to pull away and not engage in too many behaviours with others. I didn’t want to admit that this was my lot. If they saw it I’d have to admit it to myself and I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself.”
She makes her feel bad for pursuing friends of her own choosing
Eli said, “I used to try and do any socialising that I wanted to do during the day when Danielle was at work, but in the hours that were acceptable to her. I didn’t do separate things in the evenings although I did join a quilting group and I remember getting a real sense of belonging because it was all men.”
She requires relationship issues be kept secret
Tim said, “Whenever I’d talk to people on the phone Patricia would make it really clear with body language and non-verbal behaviours that she didn’t like it and she’d sulk afterwards. She’d say things like, ‘What happens between you and I is just between you and I and it’s nobody else’s business. I don’t think you should ever tell people what’s between you and I. It’s special, it’s just ours.’ I did still talk to my friends a little bit, but I really cut myself off from people to keep him happy.”
Eli “made the mistake of saying something to mum one day. It was something really harmless about something in the house and Lana waited until we were out of earshot and then let loose. So no I never talked to anyone about it, and my parents to this day don’t know. They still don’t know what it was like. I’ve never talked to anyone.”
Paul’s wife came from parents who thought very highly of themselves and had to keep up appearances. “So her parents believed that if anything went wrong, ‘God you should not tell people because if they think badly of you, you’d go down the ladder!’ Yeah so I had to come to terms with not telling anybody if bad things happened. When we were finally separated, my family just went into total shock because they thought it was an absolute perfect marriage and they were just stunned.”
However Paul did share some traumatic experiences with his friend. “My friend went ballistic at her when she found out about the miscarriage and she was like, ‘Oops I feel a bit awful someone has found out I can get rather nasty and everyone thinks I’m Mrs Wonderful’.”
Paul “was so confused and I thought I was going quite crazy because she acted like nothing’s wrong. So I’d think well maybe it’s me, it’s all my thinking, my perception.” However he finally experienced validation for his perception when his friend, who lived miles away and had not visited for a long time, arrived for a visit and his wife was home on shift. Until that visit his friend had “thought my wife was an absolute angel, she went to school with her.” But at this visit his friend told Paul, “All these months you talked to me on the phone about what she’s been like, I didn’t think you were lying, but I couldn’t see that’s how she would be, because that’s not her.” But he said, “Now I’m here today, I can see this is for real, it’s happening.”
He chooses to isolate herself to save face
Tim said, “I didn’t really want to talk about it to friends or family because I felt that they would see me as a failure and that I’d buggered it up. And I guess also that they would want me to do something that I wasn’t ready to do, like you have to leave. Whereas my feeling was that if you’re in a relationship, then you have to do everything you can to make it work and you can’t just get up and walk out, because you’ve made a commitment.”
Victor said he and Ginny “were very quite secluded and isolated as a couple, so the opportunities to talk weren’t greatly there. I never spoke to Ginny’s family about the relationship because they were in their own dysfunctional homes. My family wasn’t particularly close and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them that I was in trouble. Secrecy was more about my perception of saving face than it was about an overt ‘You mustn’t tell’.”
He becomes isolated due to fear of consequences
Ron said “I didn’t go and see my family as much because Bette really used to get pissed off with me travelling up there. She’d say, ‘Oh it costs so much money.’ That’s probably one thing I did restrict myself in because she was so anti it.”
Victor said he and Ginny “reduced social activities. The only ones we did were involving her family, what Ginny wanted to do. And that’s also because I didn’t want anybody to see us function, or dysfunction is probably more appropriate, as a couple. So I’d go to her family because they were all dysfunctional anyway, and she’d have a tantrum if we didn’t go to her family. Her tantrums had to be seen to be believed.”
Sam said, “I was scared that when I got home Anna was going to get angry and not talk to me. She’s always sulked. If she didn’t like something I did she wouldn’t talk to me. But usually it was for a day. The two weeks she ignored me was far out, it was unbelievable. She still would sleep with me. We wouldn’t have sex, but would sleep in the same bed. I’d talk to her and she’d just turn his head and walk away.”
Kevin said he would sometimes “stop and have a jug of beer with people after uni and I knew there would be hell to pay, I knew there would be a problem. I was fearful, dreading, just the dread. I couldn’t enjoy spontaneity. I couldn’t enjoy social things because of the fear and the guilt, so I would withdraw and just choose not to do it, it would be too much bother.”
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If any of this seems familiar to anyone, there might be binary thinking and control issues at play.
In short, it often comes down "A or B", but never "A and B and maybe C"... classic dichotomies or binary thinking. For example, take this article. This is a particularly interesting binary article in that it is highly gendered. Now, there's nothing wrong with that in of itself. After all, it would apply to at least half the people in this situation (probably a lot more, given the statistics). However, the problem with binary thinking in this case is that it alienates those who might be in such a situation that is reversed. While I have known a few people in relationships that follow the gender norms, I have also known ones in which women are the abusers and a few that fall along same-sex lines. The point here, is that life is messy and complex and if you take a binary view, you can wind up missing on a great many of the subtleties.
For example, since I do security consulting, let's consider control. Specifically, let's consider the controls on LJ and on the Internet in general. Here on LJ, we have a "friending" system. Interestingly, it is not a bidirectional system. Any person may friend any other person, but that action has two effects. The first is that the first person is following the second. In effect, able to read anything they make public to that person. The second is that the second person is granted access to the first person's posts. (There are other subtler effects that involve filters, but that's weirder than I want to get into right now.) Contrast that with Facebook, where an "unfriending" severs all links. On LJ, all it does is block access to friends-only posts. It, in no way, prevents an interested party from reading what someone chooses to post.
This is also a factor in the growth of the Internet. Since content isn't restricted in any technical sense, anyone may copy and paste from anywhere else or provide links to content. Basically, implementing web filtering is really really hard. This is bad news for businesses that wish to control others. However, it's great news for anyone who likes the free flow of information.
So what does this mean?
Suppose you have two entities, one which wishes to control the actions of another. In the business world, this would be by preventing access to a specific website. You know, like this one or this one. In such a situation, the first entity must, to truly control access, first limit access to the information. Say, by blocking the second person from being able to easily see a post, such as this one. However, there several security flaws in that approach.
1) They cannot prevent someone that the second person is viewing from posting a link to this post.
2) They cannot prevent the second person from seeing links in general.
3) They cannot prevent the second person from seeing key aspects from those links that are copied and pasted into other people's posts.
In effect, to truly control the second person's browsing, they must effectively isolate them completely from the Internet. This is why many of my clients are taking a "monitor and discuss" approach to the Internet and have stopped taking direct control. The latter just doesn't work and eventually drives people away.
What I find particularly fascinating about this tendency is that there are people who like control so much that they get 100% stuck in the binary thinking mode. We're seeing this nationally with the political discussions going on. I see it professionally in certain business owners (though, thankfully, none of my recent clients), and we see it personally in the many *ism wars and discussions going on.
One technique that I find useful to shake up one's thinking is to take a heavily binary piece and flip it around. See if it still makes sense. As an example, let's take that article I linked to here and swap all the genders. (Clare, if you have any issues with me duplicating your entire post, please let me know. I'm sure we can work something out.)
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Tactic #4 – Isolation
by Clare Murphy PhD on February 9 2012 (Gender altered by Josh More, without permission but with apologies)
This is the fourth of 16 blogs discussing the patterns of tactics from my power and control wheel – Isolation.
Isolation is a powerful tactic used by controlling partners
Isolation is a pivotal tactic that controlling partners use in order to weaken their victims, prevent them from hearing others’ perspectives, and to bring them into line with her own beliefs and requirements. Often possessiveness and jealousy play a part in some women’s motivation to isolate men from social contact with friends and family. Some tactics aimed at isolating the victim include telling him that he cares more for his friends, family and pets than for her, telling him she’s the only one who understands him and loves him, controlling incoming information including what he reads, calling him names if he spends time with friends and family, purposefully moving towns or countries, and there are a whole lot more tactics that men describe below in interviews from my Masters research.
Isolation is a debilitating consequence of abuse and control
Anyone who lives with an ongoing experience of being abused by a family or household member can become isolated as a result. For instance, the victim may withdraw from friends and family to save face or because they feel misunderstood, judged, stigmatised, or not supported. Particular tactics aimed at isolating the victim can lead men to become extremely dependent on their controlling partner.
She controls the money to prevent his use of the car
Jim said his wife had the money for the petrol, “so I could only go and see my parents if she gave me petrol money. So I’d only go sometimes. I still saw them. As Hannah’s control over me got higher and stronger over me she would let me go more often. Near the end of our marriage, friends would come and she would open the door this much (indicates two inches) and say I wasn’t home. That way I never ended up with anybody to counteract what she said. It did start to wear me down.”
She turns off electricity to prevent him exiting through the electronic gate
A couple of friends of Bob’s said, “’I don’t know how you live here with these gates around you all the time. It’s a fully fenced section with these gates.’ They said they’d feel a bit trapped, it’s like Fort Knox in there. I started to think, yeah, I’d gone to go a couple of times and Lara stopped me coz she switched the power off and I couldn’t get in to turn it back on. There were just a few things like that that started to scare me. That’s when I started to panic and thought I’ve got to get out of here and have some time on my own to see what’s happening.”
She manufactures situations aimed at isolating him
Harry would tell Laura, for instance, that he “was going out with a friend on Saturday and she’d say, ‘Oh didn’t I tell you, I was planning on going away, ring and tell them you can’t, I’ve already planned it.’ Sometimes now I think she really hadn’t planned it, she’d just ring at the last minute, so any time I went to go to an outside activity, ‘Oh didn’t I tell you mum wants to come over’. There was always something stopping me getting contact with the outside world. She’d say, ‘Let’s go fishing, it’s too nice a day you can’t go shopping today, I’ll go and pack and we’ll go to the lake fishing.’ So I’d ring my friend and say, ‘Can we go shopping on a wet day, it’s such a nice day Laura is off to go fishing’. In the end I was realising that I was spending all my time with her. Then when she was doing that with the phone calls I started to get a bit scared. I was scared more than anything.
Says what he does makes her jealous so insists he not do it
Kevin said his partner Felicity “was a very jealous person, she was afraid that I’d be running around screwing everyone. I learned how to shut myself down. I stopped seeing my friends as much. Once the baby came there was utter isolation, poverty, and loss of trust.”
Attempts to isolate her and him as a couple from the rest of the world
Todd said his partner “didn’t want the world encroaching or shining its bright light on anything in the relationship, that it had to be exclusive and separate from the rest of the world. I thought it was quite nice. It meant that you were really special (laughter). Somebody loved you that much.”
Harry’s partner attempted to isolate him from family and friends “mainly because my parents didn’t really like her that much and my friends didn’t like her that much she’d say, ‘Oh if just you and me went to live in Australia it would be amazing. We wouldn’t have your family and everyone against us. They’re all against us here. If we moved away it would be just us. We would be so much happier. We wouldn’t have the interference.’ I didn’t want to move away. I liked having my family. But I must admit there was one stage she’d say, ‘They’re just against us because we’re so happy’. I started to believe maybe my aunty and uncle aren’t very happy, and maybe my grandparents haven’t got anything else to do but think that their grandson should have something better, I’d start going through all that. But I couldn’t make that move to Australia.”
Demands loyalty to her, not to others
Elgin said he really adored his stepson, Jeremy, but if ever his wife “saw us get close she’d really get stuck into me, and to Jeremy too, coz that was like disloyalty to Liz. It would really hurt because I really did adore my stepson. He was just adorable. He wouldn’t let Jeremy ever come near me, it would be like total disloyalty.”
Tells him he is not allowed to see certain people
Sam said, “I was not allowed to keep in touch with my female friends. I made the assumption she was jealous but she’d never admit to it – she had no comprehension that my friendship with these women did not mean I loved her any less or that they’d get more attention in anyway whatsoever – it was so immature and pathetic of her and ignorant that she refused to even meet these people.”
Dismissive of invites to participate with his friends and family
Tim said his partner Patricia “very strongly tried to prevent me from continuing and developing relationships with other people. I did what he wanted. Again it was quite subtle. It wasn’t, ‘I don’t want you to have any friends, I don’t want you to talk to your family’. It was – she’d refuse to come and visit my family for weekends or Christmas. The first Christmas I stayed, I didn’t want to stay, I’d much rather have gone to visit my family, but I felt sorry for her being left all alone, even though it was her choice to be left all alone. So I told my family I had to work because I didn’t want them to know that she was the kind of [unpleasant person] (laughter) who didn’t want to come and be with the family. Then with friends, she didn’t like it when they came round and she’d go and shut himself in the study and be quite dismissive to them. I was especially confused for a long time about the friends thing because my idea of living with someone was that you could have friends around for dinner and drinks and lunch, and that wasn’t the right thing to do. It took me a long time to figure it out.”
She puts limits on his visits with friends and family
Sonny’s sister lived three quarters of an hour away. “But Anna didn’t like me going over there and spending the day with her because I wouldn’t be home doing things. We were allowed to visit my cousin who was 15 minutes drive away. Anna would go off and do a job. When he got home I thought she’d been working the whole time, but she hadn’t, she’d been visiting. I didn’t know this for a long long time, but I know she used to call into various people’s places whenever she was going past, but she used to put a time limit on my outings. I used to argue with her and she used to just look at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘well I’m not talking to you’. And she didn’t. She’d stop talking to me completely.” However Susan would still visit but would “only visit if I had to go and do something such as grocery shopping, because otherwise you have nothing if you don’t have friends.”
Tim “narrowed the range to what was acceptable to her partner.” He used to go away for a weekend with friends every four or five months “and drink lots of Lindauer and eat chocolate and cheese and crackers and I didn’t do that at all when I was with her because she was really threatened by it and didn’t like it.” She said that, “At work she didn’t like it if I spent too much time with other people, or did things when she didn’t know what I was doing. She had to know what I was doing all the time. She used to ring up every hour when I was at home and say, ‘What are you doing?’”
Tells him that his friends or family don’t care about her
Harold said Lana “was starting to set me against my parents, saying, ‘They’re just being mean, they don’t like me, they just want you to go back to your ex-husband and they’re not giving us a chance’.”
She attempts to divide and conquer by provoking jealousies and rivalries
Tom said that his partner Patty would tell him, “That people at work had said things about me, that they had said that I was this, that I was that, horrible things, which I believed and I don’t know whether they had said them or not. I think that she probably twisted a lot of things like that and I believed her, so that would change my judgement.” This led Tom to reduce his interactions with other people, “and my job which I previously really enjoyed, I’d just go to work and do my job and go away as quickly as I could so I wasn’t around people. And I wouldn’t phone people or do things with people at all.”
She’s rude, critical or dismissive of her visitors
When Sam’s “best friend travelled from the North Island to visit him and Dolly in Nelson, Dolly, who was not usually very active when it came to renovating the house, suddenly appeared ‘busy’ renovating the house. She didn’t want to go out, and spent most of her time making my friends wrong or visiting with her alcohol drinking marijuana smoking buddy. My best friend told me I had become a clone of Dolly’s, which I had not realised. She did not want me to keep in touch with him after that and whenever I wanted to get in touch she disapproved.”
Sam also said that “one year, my sister did not tell Dolly she was coming up to surprise me for my birthday coz she knew she wouldn’t let her stay. And another time one of my friends rang to use our shower because her electricity had gone out and she said ‘no’.”
Todd said Patricia “came down to my parent’s place once and that was the only time she would, and hse was rude and I was really embarrassed by it.”
Eli said, “If I had a friend that was my friend and not somebody that Tiffany had introduced me to, she’d run them down, she’d say they’re not like you, they’re a bitch and stuff like that, to get rid of them, put them off. It would work because it was so unpleasant to listen to all the time and she’d embarrass me if they ever visited, so I wouldn’t encourage people to come and see me. Friends would ask me to go out or something. I just kept saying, ‘Oh no, no.’ There was one young girl, she was such a nice girl, we really got on well, and she said when I was leaving work – we’d worked together – she said, ‘I’ll come round and see you, we’ll still see each other eh?’ And I said, ‘No we won’t.’ And she was really hurt I know, but I never explained why. I think she just thought I was a nasty (laughter) person.”
Kevin said “Felicity accepted my involvement with my family more than with my friends, but she was very critical, especially of my mum, which is understandable. And it used to drive me nuts that I couldn’t have my brother there coz I sort of brought up my little brother and I felt very closely bound to him. She would let me have him, but there would always be a bloody hassle, there would always be a row when my brother was there, always. I felt terrible about that because I wanted to give him support and love.”
Eddie “would go to groups or do personal growth type things and I’d meet people and I’d maybe have them over, and Danielle would say to me things like, ‘Why are you making friends with him he’s separated, why don’t you make friends with married people?’ She would be quite cold to them when they came to the house. I would be quite reticent about having them back, or I wouldn’t go to things that she couldn’t come to. If I got invited to something on my own I wouldn’t go unless it was a couple invitation. So I only really did couple things.”
Friends and family decide to stay away because of his abusiveness
Eddie said “I was isolated in the sense that Liz would have a guise of being nice to my parents, but then she would be rude sometimes, enough for them not to like her and they wouldn’t want to come round and see me. She was unwelcoming and unfriendly to anybody who knew me, so people just started to stay away.”
Victor’s “sister came to stay once, my sister and I aren’t particularly close, it was getting close to the end of the marriage and Ginny did one of her ‘behaviours’ and it was the first time that my family had actually seen her in action. And it wasn’t nothing, it was like, ‘you think this is a problem, you should see her on a good day!’ My sister said, ‘I’ll never come and stay with you again because I couldn’t believe the way she acted.’ So it wasn’t about, ‘Oh my God let me support you and help you’. It was about, ‘I’m never coming back, I’m not going to associate with you guys because this is stuffed’. So through the dysfunctions we were having people pulled back, and I didn’t want people to see that. So it was best to pull away and not engage in too many behaviours with others. I didn’t want to admit that this was my lot. If they saw it I’d have to admit it to myself and I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself.”
She makes her feel bad for pursuing friends of her own choosing
Eli said, “I used to try and do any socialising that I wanted to do during the day when Danielle was at work, but in the hours that were acceptable to her. I didn’t do separate things in the evenings although I did join a quilting group and I remember getting a real sense of belonging because it was all men.”
She requires relationship issues be kept secret
Tim said, “Whenever I’d talk to people on the phone Patricia would make it really clear with body language and non-verbal behaviours that she didn’t like it and she’d sulk afterwards. She’d say things like, ‘What happens between you and I is just between you and I and it’s nobody else’s business. I don’t think you should ever tell people what’s between you and I. It’s special, it’s just ours.’ I did still talk to my friends a little bit, but I really cut myself off from people to keep him happy.”
Eli “made the mistake of saying something to mum one day. It was something really harmless about something in the house and Lana waited until we were out of earshot and then let loose. So no I never talked to anyone about it, and my parents to this day don’t know. They still don’t know what it was like. I’ve never talked to anyone.”
Paul’s wife came from parents who thought very highly of themselves and had to keep up appearances. “So her parents believed that if anything went wrong, ‘God you should not tell people because if they think badly of you, you’d go down the ladder!’ Yeah so I had to come to terms with not telling anybody if bad things happened. When we were finally separated, my family just went into total shock because they thought it was an absolute perfect marriage and they were just stunned.”
However Paul did share some traumatic experiences with his friend. “My friend went ballistic at her when she found out about the miscarriage and she was like, ‘Oops I feel a bit awful someone has found out I can get rather nasty and everyone thinks I’m Mrs Wonderful’.”
Paul “was so confused and I thought I was going quite crazy because she acted like nothing’s wrong. So I’d think well maybe it’s me, it’s all my thinking, my perception.” However he finally experienced validation for his perception when his friend, who lived miles away and had not visited for a long time, arrived for a visit and his wife was home on shift. Until that visit his friend had “thought my wife was an absolute angel, she went to school with her.” But at this visit his friend told Paul, “All these months you talked to me on the phone about what she’s been like, I didn’t think you were lying, but I couldn’t see that’s how she would be, because that’s not her.” But he said, “Now I’m here today, I can see this is for real, it’s happening.”
He chooses to isolate herself to save face
Tim said, “I didn’t really want to talk about it to friends or family because I felt that they would see me as a failure and that I’d buggered it up. And I guess also that they would want me to do something that I wasn’t ready to do, like you have to leave. Whereas my feeling was that if you’re in a relationship, then you have to do everything you can to make it work and you can’t just get up and walk out, because you’ve made a commitment.”
Victor said he and Ginny “were very quite secluded and isolated as a couple, so the opportunities to talk weren’t greatly there. I never spoke to Ginny’s family about the relationship because they were in their own dysfunctional homes. My family wasn’t particularly close and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them that I was in trouble. Secrecy was more about my perception of saving face than it was about an overt ‘You mustn’t tell’.”
He becomes isolated due to fear of consequences
Ron said “I didn’t go and see my family as much because Bette really used to get pissed off with me travelling up there. She’d say, ‘Oh it costs so much money.’ That’s probably one thing I did restrict myself in because she was so anti it.”
Victor said he and Ginny “reduced social activities. The only ones we did were involving her family, what Ginny wanted to do. And that’s also because I didn’t want anybody to see us function, or dysfunction is probably more appropriate, as a couple. So I’d go to her family because they were all dysfunctional anyway, and she’d have a tantrum if we didn’t go to her family. Her tantrums had to be seen to be believed.”
Sam said, “I was scared that when I got home Anna was going to get angry and not talk to me. She’s always sulked. If she didn’t like something I did she wouldn’t talk to me. But usually it was for a day. The two weeks she ignored me was far out, it was unbelievable. She still would sleep with me. We wouldn’t have sex, but would sleep in the same bed. I’d talk to her and she’d just turn his head and walk away.”
Kevin said he would sometimes “stop and have a jug of beer with people after uni and I knew there would be hell to pay, I knew there would be a problem. I was fearful, dreading, just the dread. I couldn’t enjoy spontaneity. I couldn’t enjoy social things because of the fear and the guilt, so I would withdraw and just choose not to do it, it would be too much bother.”
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If any of this seems familiar to anyone, there might be binary thinking and control issues at play.
