Abuse Warps Our Sense of Self

January 26, 2021 Helena Knowlton

If you feel like the emotional and psychological abuse you’ve survived has warped your sense of who you are, or left you hardly knowing who you are and if you can trust yourself, you’re not alone. That’s what abuse does to us and it’s devastating.

Being married to an abuser destroys our inner world in ways that we don’t even recognize while we are in it. Our perceptions of reality are changed.

Why does this happen?

Because abusers systematically manipulate our emotional responses and our whole psychology by using mind games such as gaslighting, evasion, feigning ignorance, analyzing your faults, blaming you, rewriting history, playing the victim, accusing you of being suspicious, word twisting and on and on. We were actually being brainwashed by him with these tactics into accepting his version of reality and his narrative about who we are.

Abusers are incredibly perceptive and they study us and learn our insecurities, our beliefs about ourselves, our values, and our desires, and they bring doubt to our areas of weakness, confuse and destroy our sense of self, and undermine the foundation of what makes us who we are, and even what gives us joy.

This is how Don Hennessey author of How He Gets Into Her Head describes how this happens:

“He is able to invade her inner life and remove her capacity to protect her own emotions and thoughts. Her thinking is contaminated. She blames herself for how she feels and acts. She loses trust in her perceptions, her feelings, her thoughts, her gut, her intuition, her instincts, and her inner voice. And she loses track of who she is, of what she’s feeling, and of what and whom she can trust.”

As you well know this subtle brainwashing was very hard to detect, nearly impossible to describe, and we didn’t even know it was cutting us to the core. We thought our husband was like us inside so we tried to understand him rather than protect ourselves from him.

In addition to the brain washing, the trauma and the completely unpredictable situation we were living in caused our brain to dysregulate, interfering with our ability to interpret our experience.

Psychologists say that this is what gives us a sense of self:
~ being able to label what’s going on around us correctly
~ being able to trust our perceptions and memories
~ being confident that we know what’s real
~ knowing “This is what I think and feel,” and “This is what is going on with me.”

Think about the years you spent going around and around:
~ “Is it me?”
~ “What did I do to cause that reaction?”
~ “Maybe it’s not as bad as I think and I’m just oversensitive.”
~ “Am I an abuser?”
~ “Maybe he didn’t mean it.”
~ “What if I’m wrong and he’s not an abuser?”
~ “Maybe he’ll change.”

And after you left:
~ “How did I get into that relationship?”
~ “How did I miss the signs?”
~ “Why didn’t I leave sooner?”
~ “Why do I still feel so unstable?”
~ “Was I at fault in some way?”
~ “Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember.”
~ “I should have known better.”

We’ve been living in a warped inner world of confusion, self-doubt, anxiety, and cognitive dissonance. We don’t trust ourselves, our intentions, our conclusions, our decisions, our instincts, our memories, and even our suffering.

We blame and condemn ourselves.

Because our life had no clarity and reality, we ruminated on our part, and since we have no part in the abuse, it’s was a never ending hamster wheel. Unfortunately this rumination kept signaling those trauma tracks in our brain and re-triggering the trauma. That’s why if you are still ruminating, it’s so important to stop trying to analyze your part in the marriage or try to understand why he acts/acted the way he does/did.

He acts that way because he’s an abuser.

Not only can we never understand an abuser while we have a traumatized brain, it’s impossible to understand them with a healthy brain. There is no rationale or logic to it. It doesn’t make sense to a loving person.

Remember, you had no part in the abuse – it was all him.

Our broken trust in ourselves even affects our ability to heal.

Before the abusive marriage, many of us felt we had the ability to handle life and its stresses.

Then we married an abuser.

In the past we may have been discerning about people, yet we were fooled by him.

In the past we were loving and loyal, but this got used against us.

In the past we worked hard at relationships, but NO amount of work could help our marriage because he was doing nothing but continuing to abuse.

In the past we were resilient, but the abuse shattered us.

No one is capable of handling a character disordered, narcissistic abuser, or managing the unmanageable, no matter how strong or smart they are.

But we didn’t know that. We had no idea what we were dealing with, so we blamed ourselves. We thought it was our lack of strength, our lack of trying, our lack of ability to bounce back, and our inability to figure out how to make the marriage work.

We ended up thinking we couldn’t count on ourselves anymore and we’ve even doubted our strength and our ability to recover. Thankfully those are lies.

Can you see why it’s such a long, rough road to get free from abuse? Can you see why you feel like you lost yourself and became buried under lies about who you are.

Healing involves uncovering those lies, finding truth, regaining reality, and bringing who you are back into the light. And it involves healing the trauma and how it has deeply affected us.

Nothing will distort your view of yourself faster than believing an abuser’s opinion of you. They love to project who they are and what they are doing onto you, accusing you of being self-centered, selfish, unstable, deluded, oversensitive, high maintenance, ungenerous, and uncaring.

Remember you can never see yourself clearly if you are believing another’s abuse, manipulation, control, destruction, or hatred of you, even if they spoke one grain of truth.

Abusers opinions of us really don't matter. They are lies. Other people’s opinions of us don’t matter. You are a separate person who’s allowed to have opinions and choices and to be who you are, growing and changing.

To find our real self we have to shovel off all the garbage and lies, and sort through the brainwashing and our warped and wrong perceptions of ourselves.

As we remove the garbage, we unearth ourselves again and find the woman that God created, the new creation in Christ under God’s grace, who is very good, not perfect, but a whole lot more wonderful than you probably think you are right now.

I know how amazing you are and what it takes to survive each day. And so does God, and He is holding you close and loving you as His beloved.