How Abuse Creates Mental Illness!

So what is abuse? I like to think of it as abnormally using someone, we are social animals of course we need each others in order to meet our needs. The problem appears when you have an uneven exchange like a win-lose dynamic.

The purpose of abuse is to get something from someone or make someone do something for you without giving anything back or giving a lot less than it would be considered fair. If you are being hold at gun point in a dark alley it is because that person wants to make you do something you won`t do either-ways like give him all your money without getting anything back. 

Whenever you are trapped in a situations in which you are being abuse frequently this will lead you to develop bad self sabotaging habits.

The only instance in which human beings fell emotional pain is when they lose something, like when someone close to you dies, you end a relationship, or you lose a sum of money. Because you experience abuse frequent enough you are constantly self sabotaging yourself and the body responds automatically to the loss with chronic pain. And the chronic emotional pain becomes mental illness over time like addiction, OCD, anxiety, depression etc. With the exception of the genetic ones of course.  

Below there is a flow chart with the mechanism of abuse as well the consequences that being abuse on a chronic basis creates:

The 3 Steps of Abuse

There are three main steps of abusing someone:

1. External control

This generally happens through violence either more direct forms like physical violence or passive aggressive violence. The scope of it being to control someones emotions and behaviors. Any form of external punishment and reward is an attempt to replace someones personal agenda with your own agenda.

2. Confusion

There are more obvious form of abuse like the previous example i gave in the introduction of this blog post where is kind of obvious that you are getting abuse, however most abuse is a lot more subtle than you would think and equally toxic and painful for the victim. In punishing good or normal behavior or emotions the victims gets confused and accepts the abuse and often this allows the abuse to happen multiple times until things become clear.

A simple definition of confusion is perceiving wrong things as being wright and wright things as wrong.

3. Self sabotage

The purpose of all this is to make the victim to self sabotage and create a win lose dynamic. This causing the victim emotional pain and if is allowed to happen for a long time this will lead to mental illnes and other complications.