Signs of covert abuse you might have taken for love or friendship

Posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2021 at 4:15 am in Australia - Last edit on Tags: Abuse, Friendship, love, signs

I want you to understand, first, that I totally believe in true love and eternal bliss. I believe in love at first sight, and I believe relationships can be truly beautiful, even when so attached and so bonded, that NOTHING WILL EVER break you two apart. Truthfully, I believe that some amazing relationships freak out others around you because you seem to be in a bubble of your own and that makes others nervous. I believe your family members will freak out when you find a True Emotion Mirror¹ because the sexual chemistry between you two is so strong your mommy and daddy don’t like it – they can no longer pretend you’re their little child they so desperately wish to see you as. I say that so the following won’t make you callous and fearful of true love, that sometimes DOES seem a bit… Weird!

HOWEVER, there are many ways our innate need for love like this can be abused. There are A LOT OF PEOPLE who want to MANUFACTURE love like that forcefully and without true feelings. True love will make you devote your whole being to the other person, yes. True love will make you want to shut out the rest of the world and just exist in your love bubble forever, yes. True love will want to work toward making all of the people YOU love happy and safe, and you want to make THEIR loved ones happy and safe. Yes. True love makes you want to make sure your loved ones get all the love given to them and protect them from all bad things. All that happens. BUT. Then, there’s abuse. And that’s what this post is about.

Day one: Full, presumably life-long commitment

Women especially are so afraid of never finding a man who is willing to commit to them permanently, that they will INSTANTLY accept a man who says he’s up for that. The roles can be reversed too, there are plenty of men who feel no woman will ever make a full commitment to them. However, commitment cannot happen overnight. It is not how commitments are made.

DATING cannot mean exclusivity. Dating means that you get to know a person and find out whether you like them enough to get into a REAL relationship with them. DATING does not mean a commitment nor automatically even exclusivity. If that means that you can’t sleep with a person before they commit to you, and you alone, then, don’t, but you cannot expect a lifelong commitment from day one. (You can expect we’ll only date each other for now, but not “we’ll never see anyone else for the rest of our lives” at this point of time.)

Your need for absolute commitment is something abusive people will pray on: they promise you a full commitment on the first date. They say they’re “a good woman” or a “good man”, and “don’t do casual relationships”, but they’re not going to keep that promise. They’re going to simply give you the FEELING of safety and cheat on you every chance they get after they win your trust. A person who wishes to give you a REAL commitment will not commit to you straight away because they know a commitment MEANS something. They can’t give it willy nilly to someone they just met NOT EVEN if they fell head-over-heels in love at first sight. They’ll need proof that they didn’t just fall in love with the way you look, rather than the way you truly are.

Their full attention – yours

A future abuser will shower you with attention and give all their time to you. They show no signs of being insecure about YOUR feelings toward them. They want you to know they’re a catch and them showering you with love is a gift heaven-sent to you. So you’ll find yourself easily addicted to this self-confident love shown to you, as people are social and it’s NICE to have someone constantly there. You don’t even have to find them all that attractive to feel drawn to someone who gives you that much attention. We get addicted to fingering our phones, and it’s double as attractive when you have someone to text to all the time.

Ironically, abusers can also BANK that attention. You won’t complain if they’re barely around for years after, as “they must be just really busy”, right?

You’re the one who they tell their secrets to

One way of reeling you in is for them to tell you all their secrets after a considerable time spent with you. It is supposed to give you the idea of “opening up to you”, finally entrusting their true self to you. A normal person will more likely volunteer their failures to you from day one, so there’ll be no surprises later on. Not this type. They present a facade to you, the perfect Christian if you will, only so they later confess their sins to you like a Catholic after a Sunday Mass.

They make you feel like you’re the one they trust with their secrets, when in truth, they may tell everybody the same or other secrets after a while. You may forgive terrible things because you’ve spent so much time together and you feel they’re a friend now. So now they have your trust, as they’ve spent a lot of time with you, they’ve told their secrets to you. You don’t want to punish their honesty now by breaking up with them even if your true value system would demand you to. However, now it’s time to put your antennae up and wait for further proof of their true nature.

No other man/woman lives up to you

Watch your own ego here. You may be awesome, truly. It may be true that this person HONESTLY thinks you’re better than anyone else. However, make a note of how they speak of other people and if they are fair in their words. Do they give you an impression that although they hang out with this person a lot, they, deep down, despise that person and they’re doing it as a favor to them? Do you feel like telling them that everyone around them is ABUSING THEM and that they should just give up on those friendships? Do you feel like YOU are the only person who treats them right and who they TRULY love spending time with? Then watch what they say, because it may be a very colored way they speak of another person to give you a false idea of how little the other person is a threat to you.

You may also wish to make a note of what they might say about you to the people they hang out with. They will also mix their messages about the other people: “She’s a sweet girl, you know. I like her.” Then, in the next sentence describe how that person is abusing their friendship by ‘forcing him’ to take her to dinners and buying her stuff… But this can ALSO be a sign of true abuse, don’t get me wrong. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who is the abuser in a relationship, and the abuser can just as easily be a woman. Do not assume that women cannot be abusers!

Rest assured they’re also representing you in a negative light to other people. They may be the reason why you’re not a very popular person in your social circles. That person wants to be the only one who “truly sees your worth”.

Using psychology and YOUR virtue to abuse you

Abusers are also great at shaming people (men) for LEAVING a relationship by calling them “commitment-phobic” or “a quitter”, perhaps “unloyal” or “unfaithful” will lead to a situation where a person is held to a commitment or an expectation of a commitment against their true will. Don’t let your ego hold you hostage; accept the stigma of commitment phobia: There’s nothing wrong with being afraid of making a commitment to a potential abuser. It’s healthy.

When someone demands LOYALTY over everything else, you know that’s a red flag. A person who wants you to be LOYAL is a person who is already prepared for the day they mistreat you and must appeal to your loyalty to keep you around.

This goes together with “you’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you?” well before you’re actually at that fully-bonded state of true love when that’s true without it needing to be said…. and neither one is particularly the person who would do anything, but both would do anything for the other.

“Relationships are hard work!”

While relationships may be hard work at times, it doesn’t mean STAYING IN LOVE with someone should be hard work, or that relationships should be MADE into harder work than what they need to be. There are people who feel that they must BE as contentious and difficult as possible so that the relationship would be “hard work” for the other, but that’s not at all what relationships should be in order to be meaningful.

Relationships certainly shouldn’t make you feel bad about yourself or make life feel like a constant struggle. Relationships should make life worth living, and your everyday work worth doing. Relationships should be the stuff that eases your load, not the stuff that adds to it.

Relationships require hard work SOMETIMES, but if one partner deliberately makes things harder than what they need to be just to see how far you’d stretch for him or her, that’s simply abuse.

Reverse roles

An abuser can also force you into the role of an abuser if they won’t leave you no matter what. People who have not been in this position may not understand what it means when “you’re trying to break up with someone”. They go “what do you mean you’ve been TRYING to break up? Just tell them you’re breaking up with them.” When you say that you have but they won’t leave your house, or “they don’t want to break up”, they believe you’re making an excuse and you truly want to stay with that person.

When someone is SHOWING YOU they’d take any amount of abuse from you if only you don’t leave them, they believe abuse is a part of any relationship and they give you the power of abuse, and THAT should endear you to them. Obviously, if you’re a normal person, you don’t want to be in a relationship with a doormat any more than be a doormat in one.

You can’t tell them to leave because they just won’t walk out the door, you can’t make them leave by cheating on them because they cry you are in a relationship with them but you’re being a cheater (and they accept it), you can’t even beat them out of your life because they’ll just cry “deep down I know he loves me”.

This type of abuse happens, when someone wants you or a relationship in general so badly, that they cannot be chased away by any means, reasonable or unreasonable, as you’d have to literally jail them to keep them away from you.

All they need to do to get a relationship is to be completely OK with being spoken to disrespectfully, being “cheated on” (I put that in quotes because it’s not at all given the victim has ever PROMISED them fidelity or a relationship of any kind, and thus cannot really cheat on them), and being hit or punched, even kicked. And trust me, if someone refuses to leave your house and to let you live your life looking for true love, the chances you turn into a violent partner are super high if you are a REASONABLY THINKING PERSON.

To add insult to injury, in these cases, OTHERS, including the Police will join your abuser to tell you that YOU CAN’T treat your abuser that way, even though you have no way out of a relationship you possibly didn’t want in the first place.

Toxic relationships = abusive relationships

I would also wish to note that when people talk about female perpetrators, it’s often called ‘a toxic relationship’ suggesting that the male is contributing to the toxicity. That is not the right signal to send. Whether the abuser is male or female, “toxic” means abuse just the same.

Stating the obvious;

Please share this post on your social media account(s) to help me help people to have healthier relationships in the future.

Photo of Amber Heard by Mariya Butd

Approximately a Twin Flame or a highly bonded soulmate. Term belonging to Free Spirit Theory’s subsection called Personality Mirror Soulmate Typology. ↩

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*) Term changed after this post was originally written. Fractions of old terms may exist elsewhere in the post. Read about term updates.
**) Narcissists are Young Souls left alone to survive and they're doing their best. Their emotional age ranges from 3 to 17 -year old. The younger, the more severe the narcissism.

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