Is It Possible to Leave "Stockholm"?

I’m not talking about the actual city.

It’s not even going to be about actual abduction, or even battered-person syndrome… I want to talk about emotional manipulation and what happens when you’re the prey of a manipulator.

I was planning to write a text that’d be neutral, exposing the mechanism of manipulation, giving examples, and then I’d explain why I was writing about that particular topic, but I think you’ll read more closely if I say from the beginning that I can talk about it because it happened to me.

It’s so incredibly easy to fall into the trap of a manipulator. It’s so devastating, and you’re so incredibly lonely.

Allow me to make another confession: I’ve been planning to write this since I started this blog, in mid-November last year, but what’s making me finally write this is that my own mother, who’s in constant denial about anything that happens to me that doesn’t fit her view of who I should be according to her, has just disparaged people (women) who stay in abusive relationships and called them wimps.

I’m not a wimp, but I was emotionally abused for eight years.

And do you know what’s the cherry on the icing on the cake? He was so cunning that I have no proof and no witness of what he did to me. He always played with me whilst we were just the two of us.

I’m not stupid – though, in my defence, I’ll say that I’d been warned against physical violence, but until I met that bloke, I didn’t even know that you can torture someone psychologically.

Everything happened in the blink of an eye, and I found myself down inside an emotional pit so deep that I no longer could see the light.

I met him at a very critical moment in my life, and I never spotted the trap. Mind you, it took me a bit of time to notice once I was in it.

I guess I just want to say that it can happen to anyone, from any kind of background. It’s like having a knife in your heart – and I’m afraid this is a very apt image, because you know that you could die if you take the knife off your chest, even if there’s a gifted surgeon nearby to help you. When you’re abused, you need to get away from your abuser, but it’s not always as easy as people who’ve never experienced that usually think it is.

I had one friend who told me to run for my life the week I met him, but it was already too late and he’d found a way through all my defences and I was already completely in his power. He found all my buttons, and it didn’t take him a full day to turn me into his pet.

Apparently, Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological state that makes a hostage feel some sort of empathy for a captor.

In fact, some people link this phenomenon to something called “Capture-Bonding”; in pre-historic times, members of other clans (usually females) were abducted, and basically, rebellion meant death for them.

I’m not going to dig deeper into the psychological studies, but there might be something deep down in our brains that, when activated, brings us back to something that’s rooted into our deepest nature. Some kind of pre-historic Pavlovian-like twist that might explain why abusers can get away with torture.

My abuser was very gifted, and he always made sure to not push me too far in order to keep me under control. His usual pattern involved his criticizing me for the smallest, slightest, most insignificant things (I remember a day when he belittled me for not being strong enough to break a nut and asking for help because I didn’t want to crush it and make a mess in the kitchen), and then he’d feed me crumbs of pseudo-affection (it could be anything from being nice and kind in public to giving me a quick hug in private) to make sure I’d stay addicted to him, and under his spell – though curse would be more appropriate.

I learnt to live on emotional crumbs.

For months after he left because he’d found a newer pawn, I kept feeling guilty.

I’m not an idiot.

In spite of what my own mother thinks, I’m not a wimp.

I was unfortunate enough, in a moment of doubt and questioning, to meet someone who was utterly twisted, and who managed to turn me into a “mouse” for his inner sadistic “cat”.

For months, I guiltily wondered why I, and I quote myself, ‘let him do that to me’.

I started truly recovering from the abuse the day I thought: ‘He had no right to do that to me. It wasn’t my fault’.

Do you know what I wanted when he clawed my heart and soul with his pettiness? I was madly (perhaps Bedlamly would work better here) in love with him, and I would have jumped off a cliff if he’d said that that would make him love me back.

Victims of abuse are not wimps.

They’re not asking for it.

They’re all people who, because of their pasts or/and their current histories find themselves face to face with a monster who slithers like a parasite to their very core and threatens their souls.

Bit extreme?

If you think so, I’m going to make the bet that you’ve never been abused, which is very good for you, but if you’re a survivor and you escaped from the hungry clutches of your tormentor, you know that abuse is akin to torture.

My abuser never laid a finger on me, but I still have bruises on my heart. Years later, there are things that I still cannot do, and my level of trust is quite low (then again, when my own mother thinks that I was free to walk out and start a new life two minutes after leaving my abuser, you’ll excuse me for being cautious and still a bit wary with people).

I know that some people are probably going to blame me for being a wimp, an idiot and a silly girl who wasn’t strong enough to walk out, but I know that it can really happen to anyone with a heart and a soul.

Abuse is a question of circumstances. If you meet the one who can plunge an emotional blade into your heart, you won’t be able to escape.

Since it can happen to anyone, blaming the victims is quite despicable. Recently, I started wondering if it meant that the ones doing the blaming were afraid that they wouldn’t survive to such an ordeal – or if they just enjoyed piling up some more abuse on the victims. I’m afraid both are really equally possible and plausible.

To conclude, we may have wi-fi and shiny gadgets, but our brains are sometimes stuck in dark caves… oh, and stop blaming the victims and stand by them if you want to deserve being called “human”. Ta!