Power Imbalance in Abusive Relationships – Part 2

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

This is Part 2 in a two part series on power imbalance in abusive relationships.

Part 1 discusses misperceptions on the relationship between abusers and their victims and describes the predatory aspects of abuse and the not so obvious causes of power imbalance in abusive relationships.

Part 2 discusses further the differences between aggression, power, and control in abusive relationships and how healing allows us to access and rely on our own personal power.

No matter what you think or what you read about the abusers’ need to control, people who abuse or exploit others have no superhuman magical powers to inflict pain and also alleviate it. To the contrary, they are much more simple and “weak” than that. Abusers are, in reality, aggressive fearful parasitic spineless cruel individuals who lack compassion and the ability to generate their own power and energy.

People who abuse “simply” are aggressive character deficient hunters who easily betray trust and do not and cannot follow the rules of respect, honor and decency. Aggression and control, however, are not synonymous with power or danger.

Abusers may be overtly or covertly aggressive but they abuse because they lack power no different than the creeps we see on world-wide news who lure and track a defenseless creature, kill it, skin it, behead it, and put its head over the mantel to ogle at and think in their depraved minds that now he or she is more powerful than the truly powerful and majestic creature whose life they selfishly took because they “simply” “wanted to” because it made them “feel” better. What is the difference between these “big game” hunters and narcissistic emotional vampires. Well, not much.

They target us, because our pain addictions and false beliefs of powerlessness we brought with us from wounded childhoods make us vulnerable to their attacks and they WANT AND NEED our power to feel better. They target you, like the hunters “simply,” because they can and YOU are beneficial to THEM and they are character or personality disordered and aggressively go after and take anything they want! They believe they are entitled and that the rules of normal respectful human engagement or honoring life do not apply to them. They make their own rules that serve them. They have distorted views on work and obligation. They “simply” are depraved and have become human predators.

However, because we were powerless to our abusers in childhood, we believe falsely based on our unhealed wounded thinking that we are defenseless to these limited individuals who inflict pain on us and they are the only ones who have the power to take away the pain they inflict. Folks, we do not have to suffer or self-sacrifice to be lovable! And we are not powerless to these creeps. THEY are the powerless ones! And frankly, you DESERVE SO MUCH BETTER.

Read this again!

Healing requires major shifts in our thinking so they are based on truthful and adaptive beliefs that serve our authentic needs NOT the needs of parasitic energy vampires who like the big game hunters need the power of trophy wives or husbands to feed off of and hang over their “ego” mantels. Healing requires us to take our power back, regulate our emotions and not rely on soul suckers and weak spineless people who would sell their own mothers and children for a nickel if it serves them.

Do you have neuroses, compulsions, fears, anxieties, phobias? Most of us do and this is why. In childhood, our abusive or neglectful or invalidating caretakers caused our pain emotions to become toxic and did not, as they should have, validate our emotions and teach us how to functionally and effectively control our emotions and self-soothe. We all have those capacities. They just never developed because we were neglected and were never taught how to use and mature them to benefit our own selves.

Pain-based emotions are here to protect us and not do us harm. We are born with only two fears: fear of falling and fear of loud noises. Every other pain, phobia, and maladaptive emotion-based neurosis we have, we learned. We become reactive to our emotions that control us rather than using them as cues to willfully course or thought correct. Read more here. When we are emotionally starved and fatigued, guess what? We get depressed. And guess what? When we are emotionally fatigued and depressed, we cannot set and achieve goals to support our self-esteem and self-worth that sustain our happiness and emotional health.

Read this again and again. This is no secret.

Real power is willfully and confidently choosing to do what we want to do and when, taking actions sourced from our own power, our own free will to authentically serve our own selves! This is how the human body was designed to function. And as we live our lives, through our experiences and interactions with others and our successes and our mistakes, we incrementally build wisdom and our characters.

Learn more about building personal power and worth.

This functional capability goes haywire from the trauma from abuse including neglect and emotional invalidation. Rather than developing and maturing these abilities, we, maladapt, and learn to rely on other unreliable people, things, and substances to cope and for emotional sustenance and to define our self-worth. So instead of willfully controlling our lives and making independent decisions that serve our goals and nurture our souls, we become pain addicted and dependent on weak abusive exploitive people who do not have our best interests at heart and who trigger our fears and feed off of our power and use “love” to manipulate it from us. They become our conscious source of the pain and the unconscious source of relief to the pain no different than addictive substances, drugs, alcohol.

Cannot heal at same level as pain Folks, the source of our joy is none other than us and the only ones who can rescue and relieve our pain are our own selves. Fortunately, we can heal! However, we cannot heal at the same level of thinking that creates our pain. Healing requires fully understanding why we love people who inflict pain on us and why we tolerate it.

Healing requires us to take our power back and learning to protect and honor our own divinity, reach our highest potential, be our authentic joy-seeking selves, and thrive.

I cover these topics and more in much more detail in my book, Take Your Power Back: Healing Lessons, Tips, and Tools for Abuse Survivors. You can read an exclusive sneak peek and review of the book and purchase a copy here.