Pathological Dynamics in Relationships

[Turgon]

This came to mind IRT a friend who recently called me up. I've known him for quite a few years and he's been in a long term relationship for all this time and then some but what I've noticed over the years, something that I shoved under the rug, was his treatment of his girlfriend who is now his fiancé. As long as I can remember, every time the three of us are together or in some sort of social situation he talks down to her, is abrasive and basically treats her like a doormat to be stepped on.

There have been numerous occasions where he has cut her off when she's speaking, tells her to be quiet, discounts anything she adds to the conversation and easily loses his temper over the slightest things. He also seems to take for granted all the things she does like drive him around when he doesn't have a car and I get the impression that he expects this treatment rather than being appreciative of it. Hence the pathology because it's chronic and not just an occasional occurrence (at least when I'm around them). I have no idea what their relationship is like behind closed doors and I've never asked.

I pretty much ignored this for a long time because he would never get aggressive or angry with me even though it always used to bother me seeing how they interact, and he can be the same with his mom and dad. I once jokingly asked her why she let's him talk to her that way and she had said it's because she 'loves' him so she let's it go and accepts it. It wasn't until I received phone call from him just the other day where the first thing he said to me was 'Why the $&*# aren't you calling me up anymore!' that I became shocked by this. Not because he was aggressive with me for the first time but because I'm so used to seeing him like this I found it normal behaviour and simply made an off-hand remark to change the subject.

What I'm wondering about is if this is acquiescing to this kind of dynamic by not speaking up and saying something about it. I don't mean getting directly involved in other peoples relationships but standing up and speaking out against behaviour that isn't acceptable or appropriate when I'm around. It makes me wonder how often we are involved in or around pathological dynamics and accept it as normal because we are used to it having grown numb to the other person's behaviour over the course of time. And if this is what's happening, aren't we compromising our integrity and atrophying our conscience by staying quiet and looking at situations like this as normal?

 

[mada85]

This is very interesting, Turgon. The dynamics revealed about this couple in your post are quite common in this type of situation. The abuser keeps their controlling behaviour within the relationship, and behaves relatively normally to others. This shows that the abuser has their own feeding ground, so to speak, and quite possibly maintains a mask to others of protectiveness towards their fiancé, but this is only a guarding of their food source, and not the healthy protectiveness a normal person would display. Your observations do however speak volumes about the nature of the internal dynamics of your friends' relationship.

You also accurately describe the fiancé's state of enthralment with the abuser, and this is most likely a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Sandra Brown describes how this works in Women Who Love Psychopaths.

Considering what one who observes such a dynamic should say or do has its own problems. Confronting or calling out the abuser on their behaviour could make things worse for the other party in the relationship. I think these things have to be handled with care. I think your point about our acceptance of pathology is valid. We have all grown up in a pathological environment, and the 'make nice' program is so deeply ingrained in many of us that we do gloss over such behaviour. I think the first step however is seeing such behaviour in others and in ourselves.

I think that many of us with a 'make nice' program don't want to confront such abusers because we have never been taught to deal with such pathology in a healthy way. We've been taught to 'roll over and play dead'. What do you think your friend's reaction would be if you called him out on his behaviour? Do you think he would consider what you say? Or do you think he would respond with narcissistic rage?

It does sound like your friend has serious issues, even if he is not innately pathological. Even if he is not innately pathological, he is behaving pathologically. George Simon tells us that in his experience it is the behaviour that needs to be addressed. He has done this successfully. His book Character Disturbance is very helpful in educating oneself about the signs of pathological behaviours and how to address them.

After my experience of group working and living in France, it occurs to me to wonder how this sort of relationship dynamic would play out if such a couple were to live in a group of colinear people whose core values are truth and living in a psychologically healthy way. In that case, I think that the abuser's behaviour would be noticed pretty quickly. If the abuser was unable to change, or refused to change, they would be asked to leave the group quite quickly. Perhaps such a person would see a group who are living healthily, away from the mainstream of pathological society, and think that they could join the group and be accepted for who they are, without the need to change their behaviour.

You don't mention if your friend has any interest in the Work. How about the fiancé? Is she interested in those ideas? Or is she afraid to think about such things as a way to avoid the awful truth of her relationship?

I found an article on the web that describes the internal dynamics of such a relationship. It makes for interesting reading. I've posted it here.

In Women Who Love Psychopaths Sandra Brown talks about the way that the pathological individual manipulates the woman's natural capacity for bonding with her partner. This is done by the pathological individual maintaining his mask until he is sure the woman is hardly more than his possession. This of course leads to great internal friction for the woman concerned. On the one hand she has bonded to the pathological abuser. On the other, she is most likely aware at some level that she is being abused.

Brown says:

[These women - those in relationships with psychopaths or other pathological individuals] tested very high in relationship investment partly because they attach deeply. Positive sociability and relationship investment are based on the ability to derive positive feelings from relationships. These women find a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction in what they put in and what they get out of relationships. These deep attachments are a source of pleasure and satisfaction. While they may be conservative about attaching (because they may not be impulsive) once they do attach, it is with great passion and enormous depth. Attaching to a psychopath brings serious consequences.

So it seems that the psychopath or pathological individual has a 'nose' for this type of woman, and once she has bonded with him through his exploitation of her natural temperament, he is then free to manipulate, abuse and destroy her.

 

[Tracy Anne]

Exactly, you dont want to get caught up in relationship issues. If it was a one off occurrence you could let this behaviour go but he has been consistent with his girlfriend and parents......and now you.

I have had people pull me up on smaller issues and Ive been grateful for this so I could have the opportunity to change. If he is a decent person "scratching him a little" by assertively telling him that you dont like the aggressive way he is speaking TO YOU, might be a good way to gain more insight. He may be having any number of issues and may be open to changing and gaining awareness into his behaviour.

To do nothing is another option and is probably the easy road most people would take stating that it is none of their business. It is your business now as he is starting to treat you the same way as his girlfriend and his parents.

Im interested too in peoples acquiescence (cognitive dissonance?) basically if it doesnt affect them then most will take the passive approach, hell even if it does affect some, they still remain passive!

The ponerization of our society is perpetuated by people not speaking up so I guess theres only one way to instigate change.

Will be interesting to follow this thread and read what others think.

 

[luc]

It wasn't until I received phone call from him just the other day where the first thing he said to me was 'Why the $&*# aren't you calling me up anymore!' that I became shocked by this. Not because he was aggressive with me for the first time but because I'm so used to seeing him like this I found it normal behaviour and simply made an off-hand remark to change the subject.

Did he react that way towards you because you already started distancing yourself from him a bit, maybe because you noticed his pathological behavior? Even if it was not a totally conscious decision on your part?

I'm asking this because in my experience with narcissistic/pathological people, they often react aggressively (or switch to pity-mode) when they register the slightest sign that someone withdraws from them, especially if it's based on the realization that someone indeed shows pathological behavior. The point I want to make is that if you are already in the process of distancing yourself from this friend (which means "guilty" in his eyes), I think this can be a good step and means that you're already doing something about the situation. This is indeed "scratching" him a little and maybe he starts showing his "true colors" more and more - even to the point where his fiance becomes aware of the abuse taking place. I've seen it happen... Or think of it like this: Distancing yourself from him could be seen as "giving the lie what it asks for: the truth", without violating free will and other's lessons, as it could easily happen if you confronted him (or his fiance) directly.

On the other hand, if you think that he really could benefit from a "mirror", as in you tell him how insulting and off the mark his accusation towards you is, maybe that's an option. These are just some thoughts I had, it really depends on the specific situation.

And I think the link Endymion provided to the article in psychology today is really helpful to understand both sides of the dynamic. At the end of the day, I think people need to come to the right realizations and the motivation for change by themselves, but we should do all we can to not support abusive behavior by "silently accepting it". Fwiw.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Personally, I think something should be said in such a situation (both in regards to his treatment of Turgon and the girl in question), preferably in the moment, i.e. right after he has said or done something offensive. If it were a BBC production, some gentleman would say something immediately, albeit with more eloquence than most of us (I for one) could muster in the spur of the moment. The way I see it, if you don't speak up, who will? I think it can be as simple as saying how inappropriate and unacceptable it is to speak to someone like that, especially their partner. No, you can't force him to change, but you can make it clear what you think of such behavior, and that as long as he continues to act like that, you will have no part in it, i.e. refuse to associate with him. OSIT.

 

[Windmill knight]

There have been numerous occasions where he has cut her off when she's speaking, tells her to be quiet, discounts anything she adds to the conversation and easily loses his temper over the slightest things. He also seems to take for granted all the things she does like drive him around when he doesn't have a car and I get the impression that he expects this treatment rather than being appreciative of it. Hence the pathology because it's chronic and not just an occasional occurrence (at least when I'm around them). I have no idea what their relationship is like behind closed doors and I've never asked.

This reminded me of the work of psychologist John Gottman, cited in Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink'.

Since the 1980s, Gottman has brought more than three thousand married couples - just like Bill and Sue - into that small room in his "love lab" near the University of Washington campus. Each couple has been videotaped, and the results have been analyzed according to something Gottman dubbed SPAFF (for specific affect), a coding system that has twenty separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a conversation.

Disgust, for example, is 1, contempt is 2, anger is 7, defensiveness is 10, whining is 11, sadness is 12, stonewalling is 13, neutral is 14, and so on.

Gottman has taught his staff how to read every emotional nuance in people's facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue. When they watch a marriage videotape, they assign a SPAFF code to every second of the couple's interaction, so that a fifteen-minute conflict discussion ends up being translated into a row of eighteen hundred numbers - nine hundred for the husband and nine hundred for the wife. The notation "7, 7, 14, 10, 11, 11," for instance, means that in one six-second stretch, one member of the couple was briefly angry, then neutral, had a moment of defensiveness, and then began whining. Then the data from the electrodes and sensors is factored in, so that the coders know, for example, when the husband's or the wife's heart was pounding or when his or her temperature was rising or when either of them was jiggling in his or her seat, and all of that information is fed into a complex equation.

On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent. Recently, a professor who works with Gottman named Sybil Carrere, who was playing around with some of the videotapes, trying to design a new study, discovered that if they looked at only three minutes of a couple talking, they could still predict with fairly impressive accuracy who was going to get divorced and who was going to make it. The truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time than anyone ever imagined.

The six predictors of divorce Gottman found are:

1. Harsh startups. You find yourself beginning a discussion with your spouse using criticism, sarcasm, or harsh words.
2. The Four Horsemen. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling (withdrawal) invade your communication.
3. Flooding. Your spouse’s negativity is so overwhelming that it leaves you shell-shocked. You disengage emotionally from the relationship.
4. Body Language. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure mounts, and your ability to process information is reduced. This makes it harder to pay attention to what your partner is saying.
5. Failed Repair Attempts. Efforts made by either partner to deescalate the tensions during a touchy discussion fail to work.
6. Bad Memories. Couples who are "stuck" in a negative view of their spouse and marriage often rewrite their past – for the worse.

Of these, numbers 2 and 5 have the greater ability to predict the outcome of marriages. In particular, the Four Horsemen:

http://www.gottman.com/research/research-faqs/

Criticism: stating one’s complaints as a defect in one’s partner’s personality, i.e., giving the partner negative trait attributions. Example: “You always talk about yourself. You are so selfish.”
Contempt: statements that come from a relative position of superiority. Contempt is the greatest predictor of divorce and must be eliminated. Example: “You’re an idiot.”
Defensiveness: self-protection in the form of righteous indignation or innocent victim-hood. Defensiveness wards off a perceived attack. Example: “It’s not my fault that we’re always late; it’s your fault.”
Stonewalling: emotional withdrawal from interaction. Example: The listener does not give the speaker the usual nonverbal signals that the listener is “tracking” the speaker.

So, sometimes you see couples which are not obviously in disharmony - in fact, you might see them all kissy-lovey - but once in a while a contemptuous comment or gesture will slip from one or both sides (like eyes rolling, or "Oh please!", or "Shut up"), and you know there is something wrong and the relationship is not likely to last for too long. Some of the couples that attend Gottman's lab for his studies are not fighting each other; all they let slip is small facial expressions or the tone of their voices, which last less than a second and which can only be analyzed by video recording the interactions and playing them at reduced speed. It turns out that the devil is in the details, as his results show. The participants are probably not even aware that they are experiencing such destructive emotions.

 

[Jacques]

Personally, I think something should be said in such a situation (both in regards to his treatment of Turgon and the girl in question), preferably in the moment, i.e. right after he has said or done something offensive. If it were a BBC production, some gentleman would say something immediately, albeit with more eloquence than most of us (I for one) could muster in the spur of the moment. The way I see it, if you don't speak up, who will? I think it can be as simple as saying how inappropriate and unacceptable it is to speak to someone like that, especially their partner. No, you can't force him to change, but you can make it clear what you think of such behavior, and that as long as he continues to act like that, you will have no part in it, i.e. refuse to associate with him. OSIT.

I totally agree with AI.

When I am confronted with this kind of situation, I always try to remember these two quotations from Laura:

« To compromise the essence of your being in order to get along in an intimate relationship is pretty much equivalent to amputating part of yourself
because someone else doesn't like it. »

Every time you say "yes" to someone who doesn't deserve it, and go against Yourself and what you value the most, you kill a small part of your essence.

 

[whitecoast]

Personally, I think something should be said in such a situation (both in regards to his treatment of Turgon and the girl in question), preferably in the moment, i.e. right after he has said or done something offensive. If it were a BBC production, some gentleman would say something immediately, albeit with more eloquence than most of us (I for one) could muster in the spur of the moment. The way I see it, if you don't speak up, who will? I think it can be as simple as saying how inappropriate and unacceptable it is to speak to someone like that, especially their partner. No, you can't force him to change, but you can make it clear what you think of such behavior, and that as long as he continues to act like that, you will have no part in it, i.e. refuse to associate with him. OSIT.

I totally agree with AI.

When I am confronted with this kind of situation, I always try to remember these two quotations from Laura:

« To compromise the essence of your being in order to get along in an intimate relationship is pretty much equivalent to amputating part of yourself
because someone else doesn't like it. »

Every time you say "yes" to someone who doesn't deserve it, and go against Yourself and what you value the most, you kill a small part of your essence.

Same here. I, personally, would not be able to stand even being around that type of relationship dynamic. It would be too corrosive, and my inner animal in that scene can't seem to distinguish between the abstract "don't interfere with the universe" concept and the real, concrete freeze effect of not speaking up against aggression. Even if it isn't directed at you, empathy sometimes makes it hard to put the other into neat little boxes.

As for your friend's anger at you Turgon, i don't see enough data to say anything for sure, but the others may be onto something when they say you could be subconsciously more avoidant. I had a friendship that turned quite pathological, and my body picked up on this and started to conveniently confuse bus routes needed to meet with him before my mind ever got close to questioning whether we ought to have been hanging out at all.

Hope this is somewhat helpful.

 

[Jasmine]

aren't we compromising our integrity and atrophying our conscience by staying quiet and looking at situations like this as normal?

While every situation may be a bit different, and so discretion and discernment is called for as always. But overall, I think it's always best to call a spade a spade. If we don't see it as normal, and have good cause to believe it's not normal behavior, then it would be wrong to lie to ourselves and try to pretend it's normal. I think we should be true to ourself in whatever we do. And it would be wrong to lie to yourself. I would question why you still have this person as a so-called friend. When he confronted you I can understand why you changed the subject, you needed time to figure out the best way to deal with him. But if he confronts you again, you might just be doing him a favor by being very straight forward with him. Maybe it'll give him a reason to question his own behavior.

my 2 cents

 

[Turgon]

Considering what one who observes such a dynamic should say or do has its own problems. Confronting or calling out the abuser on their behaviour could make things worse for the other party in the relationship. I think these things have to be handled with care. I think your point about our acceptance of pathology is valid. We have all grown up in a pathological environment, and the 'make nice' program is so deeply ingrained in many of us that we do gloss over such behaviour. I think the first step however is seeing such behaviour in others and in ourselves.

I think that many of us with a 'make nice' program don't want to confront such abusers because we have never been taught to deal with such pathology in a healthy way. We've been taught to 'roll over and play dead'. What do you think your friend's reaction would be if you called him out on his behaviour? Do you think he would consider what you say? Or do you think he would respond with narcissistic rage?

My immediate thought when you posed this question is narcissistic rage. Not that he would explode on me or anything, but that he wouldn't 'hear' it and may hold animosity because of it. I could be wrong but I've been thinking about the years I've known him and I have really only seen either the abusive treatment of his fiancé and family and in his more friendlier states, a high strung personality of someone who's motor centre, or car is running in the red zone all the time.

From the article you posted, the highlighted portion really stood out for me.

An abuser is morbidly insecure. S/he (yes, potentially, she) has little sense of his/her own social value and makes an effort to gain or re-gain some semblance of that value through domination and control. The fear that feeds that insecurity has two fronts: fear of not being lovable, and fear of appearing weak. The paradox here is that the abuser is, in fact, weak, which is why s/he abuses -- to maintain a sense of control -- in the first place. The perceived inconsistency on the part of the abuser by the victim is that the victim is not submitting to the abuser's domination.

He has social anxiety, is highly paranoid and only sticks to a very small group of people, myself included, that he spends time with. And also, his fiancé is the main breadwinner of the two because she is the only one who has held down steady income for a long period of time. He jumps from job to job, has tried to open up a few businesses and now wants to be a teacher. So there is something to be said about the dominant behaviour and keeping a very close circle of people that he can maintain his sense of control with. So there may be a massive fear and insecurity hiding underneath the mask, which I noticed at least in the sense that because he seems an a very high arousal state that he masks but doesn't contain so I naturally pick up on that and it stresses me out a bit.

You don't mention if your friend has any interest in the Work. How about the fiancé? Is she interested in those ideas? Or is she afraid to think about such things as a way to avoid the awful truth of her relationship?

My friend, no. He's into all the government conspiracy, aliens, FEMA camp and chemtrail stuff but I've tried suggesting SOTT and more plausible theories and he doesn't seem to 'hear' it. His fiancé, maybe. She actually seems very down-to-earth, practical person and is herself, a teacher. But because all my interactions with her is through him, and based on what their relationship is like, I have no way of grokking if she'd be interested in some of the books by Sandra Brown because the process of talking to her is like going through him, first.

So, sometimes you see couples which are not obviously in disharmony - in fact, you might see them all kissy-lovey - but once in a while a contemptuous comment or gesture will slip from one or both sides (like eyes rolling, or "Oh please!", or "Shut up"), and you know there is something wrong and the relationship is not likely to last for too long.

I'm seeing a lot of contempt from him, but not her. He's the one getting angry and aggressive over very small things and his stress tolerance level is really low. She just sort of 'takes' it with what looks like a defeated look with confusion like a deer in headlights.