My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

If all else fails, the abuser recruits friends, colleagues, mates, family members, the authorities, institutions, neighbors, the media, teachers, in other words, third parties, to do his bidding.

The abuser uses them to control, coerce, threaten, stalk, offer, retreat, tempt, seduce, harass, communicate, or otherwise manipulate his target.

The abuser controls these unaware instruments exactly as he plans to control his ultimate prey.

In both cases, he employs the same mechanisms and the same devices.

And he dumps his props unceremoniously when the job is done.

One form of control by proxy is to engineer situations in which abuse is inflicted on third, another person.

Such carefully crafted scenarios of embarrassment and humiliation are meant to provoke social sanctions, condemnation, opprobrium, or even physical punishment against the victim.

Society, or social group in this case, become the instruments of the abuser against the victim.

Abusers often use other people to do their dirty work for them.

These sometimes unwitting accomplices belong to three groups.

The first group is the abuser’s social milieu.

Some offenders, mainly in patriarchal and misogynist societies, co-opt family members, friends, and colleagues into aiding and abetting their abusive conduct.

In extreme cases, the victim is held hostage, isolated, and with little or no access to funds or transportation.

Often the couple’s children are used as bargaining chips or leverage in such a dispute.

Ambient abuse by the abuser’s clan, kin, kith, or village, or neighbourhood is rampant.

The second group of unwitting or unwitting accomplices is the victim’s social milieu.

Even the victim’s relatives, his family members, his friends, his colleagues, they are all amenable to the considerable charm, persuasiveness, and manipulativeness of the abuser and to his impressive thespian acting skills.

The abuser offers a plausible rendition of the events and interpreces events to his favor.

Others rarely have a chance to witness an abusive exchange first-hand and at close quarters so as to discern between abuser and victim.

In contrast, the victims are often on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They are harassed, unkempt, irritable, impatient, abrasive, and hysterical.

Confronted with this contrast between a polished, self-controlled, and suave abuser and his harried casualties, it is easy to reach the wrong conclusion that the real victim is the abuser.

Or another conclusion that both parties are abusing each other similarly and equally.

The praise acts of self-defence, assertiveness, or insistence on her rights are interpreted as aggression, lability, or a mental health problem.

Thus we come to the third group of accomplices and collaborators, aiders and abettors, the system.

The abuser perverts the system. Therapists, marriage counselors, mediators, court-appointed guardians, police officers, judges, they all end up upholding the abuser’s version and helping him in further abusing his victims.

The abuser uses them to pathologize the victim and to separate her from her sources of emotional sustenance, notably from her children and then from her family and then from her friends and colleagues.

Forms of abuse by proxy include socially isolating and excluding the victim by discrediting her through a campaign of malicious rumors, a smear campaign.

Harassing the victim by using others to stalk her or by charging her with offenses she did not commit.

Provoking the victim into aggressive or even antisocial conduct by having others threaten her or her loved ones, colluding with others to render the victim dependent on the abuser.

But by far the victim’s children are the abuser’s greatest source of leverage over his abused spouse or mate.

There is a video in this channel dedicated to how the abuser leverages the children in his dispute with his victims. Be sure to watch it.