I’m writing this in May of 2022 and the world is currently burning with a constellation of dumpster fires, one of these being the obsessive interest in the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation case. This is not going to be my focus here but rather an attempt to analyse what happens in an abusive relationship. For anyone who has only been in relationships with normal people, it is very difficult to understand how anyone would either be unable to recognize abuse or be able to tolerate it. I would never fall for that they think, and possibly they’re right.
Chapter two of Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza begins with ‘Five words sum up every biography. Video meliora probogue; deteriora sequor.’ Roughly translated, I see what the right thing to do is and I do the worst. No one at all plans a life of suffering for themselves and yet still they walk eyes open into situations that guarantee pain.
I was one of the people who fell for someone who did not have my best interests at heart. What makes me staying with him even more difficult to understand is that quite early on I was able to draw a lucid portrait of him. Here is the opening paragraph of a text I wrote a full 15 years before ending the relationship.
The absolutely watertight is a fearsome enemy, not because there’s no chink in his armour but because there’s no chink in him. The usual range of emotions is simply not present. We are all our own reference points so we cannot even imagine him, but he is dangerous to us because he cannot imagine us. He is like a robot…. Pre-programmed for the optimal running of his own systems.
First of all, notice the cold, analytical language, as if I’m trying to mimic the emotionless being I’m describing. I identify him as a fearsome enemy in the first sentence, and in the second as dangerous. I note that he lacks the usual range of emotions. I admit the failure of my own imagination to be able to conceive of what he is and then compare him to a robot.
Later in the text I write that he has no empathy, no conscience and only one identifiable emotion, anger, which he uses as a controlling strategy to shut down conversations he doesn’t want to have. His mind, always in a state of ‘flat calm’ allows him the ease of being able to ‘understand the workings of those around him, analyse the components of their systems and devise models based on behaviour patterns… incapable of emotional spontaneity, his moves are all planned and nothing is left to chance.’ Half-admiring, I suggest that he has all the attributes of a master manipulator.
I describe a person who is so far removed from those around him that ‘it amounts to being of a different species’
But how do his circle of family and friends and lovers share their lives with a man who has no intimacy? Ask the wives of killers or presidents. Men whose systems go down so deep that the movements of love and sympathy are like weather above a city - they change nothing.
I am so close. I see it and yet I do not see it. I don’t have the word I need.
Rumpelstiltskin
In the famous fairytale, a miller boasts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. To test this the king locks the girl in a tower with a mound of straw with the instruction to turn it into gold before the next day. Obviously this is an impossible task for a mortal but that’s the situation her father’s social climbing and the king’s callous greed have put her in. An imp with the improbable name Rumpelstiltskin appears and offers to perform this task in return for her necklace. She gratefully agrees, and he spins the straw into gold. Not content with a small room full of gold, the next night the king puts her in a larger one to fill, which the imp does, this time in return for the girl’s ring, however, when the king puts her in a still larger room on the third night, she has nothing left to exchange. The price of success is the king’s hand in marriage, and if she fails, it’s death.
Rumpelstiltskin offers her a deal. He will fill the large room with spun gold in return for her first born child. What could she do but agree?
She marries, one has to wonder how happy she was in a marriage made on those terms but ‘eh different times’, and gives birth to her first child. The imp now reappears for his prize. She tries offering him all kinds of riches in the hope of keeping her baby but Rumpelstiltskin is not interested. He likes riches, of course, but more than that he likes to play with people, so he offers her the chance to keep her child, if she can guess his true name.
With fairytale luck she wanders into the woods that night and happens upon his camp where she overhears him singing, ‘tonight, tonight, my plans I make, tomorrow tomorrow, the baby I take. The queen will never win the game, for Rumpelstiltskin is my name.’
When he comes to collect the baby, she toys with him for a while by guessing wrongly then calls him Rumpelstiltskin. On hearing he’s been outwitted he goes into such a rage that in some versions of the tale he manages to rip himself apart.
In European folk tradition magical creatures never divulge their real names because to know a fairy’s name was to be able to command him. I’m not talking here of the pretty Victorian versions of fairies that gracefully danced among the bluebells and foxgloves but of the baby-stealing, milk-curdling, riddle-loving wee folk that my Scottish ancestors feared.
What I realized when I connected Rumpelstiltskin to abuse is the power of a true name. I like the French word ‘emprise’ meaning within the hold of someone, or under their spell. To be in an abusive relationship is to be under a spell. You abandon your own power to another and you break it when you are able to name it for what it is.
The fairytale tells an archetypal truth. The girl gets into her predicament through a lapse in judgement or immoral behaviour, in this case, that of her father. An abusive partner (The Tinder Swindler on Netflix is a good example of this) works his way in by playing on a moral weakness like vanity, desire for the high life or to be made to feel special. At first that all-too-human moral compromise seems to pay off. An abuser will raise the person into an extraordinary seeming life, where the regular or mundane have been banished. We, the chosen ones, must live magically. Not a single red rose but 60 and a trip to the florist to buy their biggest vase, not a weekend trip to the sea, but a 5 star tour of Asia. This is the creation of a debt. I pulled you out of the mundane world, I lavished you with attention and gifts and now… well, you belong to me. Now, you pay.
How do you pay? You must play a game with either no rules or ones that change according to the needs of the imp at any given moment. You have paradoxical commands ‘be spontaneous’, ‘believe in something’ or ‘I wish you would buy me a present without me having to ask’. Thinking to please them, you buy the gift and are told that you only bought it because of their complaining so there is an argument. Of course, had you not bought one, you would be guilty of never buying spontaneous gifts, and so there is an argument. A thousand injunctions to spin straw into gold, and when you can’t, another debt is added to the tally.
You get locked into a loop, never able to satisfy the changing demands of the other person, growing ever more exhausted and confused until you are barely able to think at all. This is known as brain fog by therapists and is compounded by the long term cognitive dissonance that goes with believing someone who hurts you constantly also loves you.
Like the miller’s daughter I wandered into the forest and overheard singing at a campfire. In my case, the forest was YouTube and the campfire song was a woman talking about her marriage to a man with NPD, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It was truly uncanny and I was transfixed. It was as if she personally knew my partner. I began to follow the trail and went deeper into the digital forest of signs and found official lists descriptions of NPD, along with others for sociopaths and psychopaths.
What was the list of characteristics that identified a psychopath? Here are a few…
Lack of empathy.
Lack of a full range of emotions;
Robotic behaviour.
Manipulative and controlling behaviour
Fearlessness
No conscience
A virtually identical list to the text I’d written all those years before. This would have been striking enough but there were many other particularities that I recognized, such as rapid switching from one ‘emotion’ to another, where the person is furiously angry then totally calm again seconds later, a lights on lights off sleeping pattern where he or she awakes without any transition, eyes open and alert like an alligator, lack of creativity and inability to understand or appreciate art, strategic and often lavish gift giving to create debt and obligation in others, inability to think ahead, lack of remorse or regret, disdain and contempt for average people, a love of routine punctuated by risk taking, the idea that rules don’t apply to them….
There are others but these characteristics, which I mistakenly thought were unique and particular, turned out to be markers of a general type.
I had Rumpelstiltskin’s name and the spell was broken. To see that I was dealing with a psychological phenomenon (an imp of sorts) that was outside the normal range of human interpersonal problems released me. I had called it love but it wasn’t, it was the game. While I called it love, nothing made sense and I ran myself psychologically ragged trying to make it make sense, but when I called it the game, all the pieces fell smoothly in place like a perfect Tetris and I saw the whole picture. The reason my attempts at peace-making hadn’t worked was because they never could. He didn’t want peace. The game was war. The reason it had lasted so long was because it was inconceivable to me that someone could be without the capacity for love and actually consciously seek conflict as an experience. I sought a thousand explanations for our problems but none of them fit. Someone constitutionally without love but who offered a simulacre was not in my human pattern book and so I could not recognize it.
The 8 of Swords
Even if you have not been in a this kind of relationship personally, or under the control of something or someone that brought you harm, you have no doubt been in a position of psychological blindness to something you needed to pay attention to. In tarot this is well represented by the 8 of Swords.
In the card we see a woman, blindfold and bound surrounded by a ring of 8 swords planted in the ground.
Symbolically, the sword is connected to the element air and is linked to the mind and psychological processes. The sword is an instrument of discernment representing keenness of perception and the capacity to dissect and analyze of a sharp mind. There’s a clear contrast with the major arcana Justice card where Justice is portrayed as having a sword in one hand and a scale in the other. She is blindfold but only so as not to be led astray by bias and seeming. She is armed with her own objectivity and so trusts in a wisdom beyond appearances.
The woman in the 8 of Swords is unable to hold the sword of her own mind. It appears as something external to her making her believe that she’s the victim of circumstances. She doesn’t understand that she has placed the locus of control outside and that her powerlessness is a question of perception. In fact, the situation she’s in is not impossible to get out of, she’s quite loosely bound, the swords are widely enough spaced that she could get through, but she can’t see that, and until she does, she’s stuck. We’ve all had the experience of listening to someone describe a situation that is perfectly clear to everyone but him or her. ‘He cheated on me with my best friend last year and now I think he’s started to flirt with another of my friends, I just don’t know what to think.’
It can refer to a situation of self-blinding. The only way not to see the perfectly obvious is to make sure you can’t see anything. The fear being that if you are made to confront things as they are, you will be unable to cope and so paralysis seems a better solution. It doesn’t need to refer to interpersonal relationships. It can be a job that’s draining the life out of you but you prefer not to allow that realization to fully dawn on the mind to protect you from the insecurity of being back on the job market. It can be all the imagined obstacles between yourself and an action that you are failing to take, even knowing it’s what you must do.
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
Romans 7:15
It’s possible to spend years, decades, even a lifetime in the knowledge you’re in the grip of something
With the 8 of swords often you know but you don’t know and we’re back to the woman who writes out a description of someone who can’t love her and persists in believing that he does.
The way out of a mental prison is not only in the magic of a name. People who smoke cigarettes know full well they have an addiction and that the habit is expensive and has serious health risks ( I also smoked for 15 years) but knowing you have an addiction is not the same as breaking one.
To say someone is addicted is actually only to describe a set of behaviours. It sheds no light on why. Is it self-soothing? And self-soothing of what? What is the smoke a replacement or ‘medicine’ for? When you have the answers to several layers of questions, you are close to the ah ha moment that is naturally cycle breaking.
But there are situations where you’re not able to identify your problem. You know there is one but none of it adds up to a recognizable pattern, and sometimes you don’t even know that there’s a recognizable pattern to look for but instead assume that your circumstances are unique and particular.
Giving something a name, and understanding the power of a name is an act of metacognition in a sense. You are not trying to solve a problem at the level at which it was created causing you to spin in an endless loop. I see it as momentary access to the script or source code allowing the actor to become the playwright and write his or her way out of trouble.
An example of this is my limited capacity for lucid dreaming, meaning that when, on the rare occasions I have a nightmare, I’m able to change the story. The first time it happened I was being pursued by a murderous gang, I ran, skillfully evading them for so long until I ran right up to the edge of a high cliff. Certain death ahead, certain death behind. The panic suddenly gave way to a realization, I was dreaming. I could just erase the canyon and the people and switch into another dream. I laughed and did exactly that. Since then I have managed to do the same in every bad dream.
That was also the great lesson of my relationship, the waking within waking that allows you to see things as they are. The fairy story teaches us that pain and challenges have a function, they initiate you and show you a truth that a comfortable life might have concealed.
Ultimately the victim in the 8 of Swords understands that she isn’t one.