Even when she knew things would get worse, Jen Rollins writes that she held onto the hope that the caring and loving man of their early relationship would return.
Source: How I, a strong, confident woman, became the victim of intimate partner violence | CBC News
Opinion:
Normally I don’t post stories like this but here we have a well-written, concise account outlining how abusers ramp up their abuse bit by bit.
The relationship usually starts off great but soon after little signs begin to appear. The husband doesn’t want to have a simple dinner with the wife’s family and refuses to discuss important issues—things like that.
If he’s a professor, for instance, he’s too busy preparing a lecture or ‘all-important’ paper on some obscure topic that nobody cares about. He needs to make that deadline. Rather than organize his schedule to include time for his wife’s family, he uses work as an excuse to try to eradicate them from his world.
Why?
Because the professor knows the family can see through him, even if the wife cannot. And that’s a real threat to him and his abusive agenda.
This example is a purely hypothetical one from the world of academia, but the general pattern of incremental abuse seems almost universal.
Take Russia and Ukraine, for example. Putin waits many years for his moment to pounce. But it really wasn’t a sudden attack. He’s been steadily clamping down within Russia and hassling Ukraine for many years. People in Ukraine say the last decade has been like living in an ongoing state of limbo or purgatory, if not outright hell.
Now it’s definitely hell throughout Ukraine. And that was Putin’s plan all along, despite his b.s. claim that he wasn’t going to invade Ukraine (note he also recently said the invasion was going “according to plan.” Huh?)
Putin aside, I wonder about our hypothetical professor’s wife… and any other women or men who have been victims of a slow, steady and deliberate attack on their well-being, freedom, and personal safety.
Most of us can recall moments in life where we lost our temper due to unusual amounts of stress or some unarticulated problem in a relationship. But the real abuser watches, calculates, and makes cold-hearted assessments on how to not only abuse but to abuse effectively.
Is there any word for this other than devil?
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