Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Your Defensive Identification with the Aggressor (Abuser)

1. 00:02 There is a short story by France Kafka titled Metamorphosis.
2. 00:08 The protagonist of the story, one Ggo Samsa, wakes up one morning to find
3. 00:14 himself transformed into a cockroach. The realization of his transformation
4. 00:21 dawn on him only gradually based on the responses, the reactions by his
5. 00:28 horrified family members. The same thing happens to victims of narcissistic abuse. One morning or one series of mornings
6. 00:39 they wake up, they find themselves transformed into their abusers.
7. 00:45 They find themselves identifying with the beliefs and the values of the abuser, imitating the abuser’s
8. 00:53 behavioral patterns, defending the abusers, the abuser, justifying the abuser’s misconduct, finding all kinds of contexts and
9. 01:05 narratives within which the abuser is perfectly right, upright, and righteous.
10. 01:12 This process has been documented a long time ago by one of the pillars of the
11. 01:18 psychoanalytical movement fency. He called it identifying with the
12. 01:24 aggressor. Now it’s important to realize that identifying with the aggressor is an
13. 01:30 unconscious mechanism. It’s not that the victim wakes up and says, “From today,
14. 01:38 I’m going to be like my abuser or from today I’m going to be the abuser. No one
15. 01:44 is going to abuse me ever again.” That’s not how it goes. It’s gradual. It’s incremental. It creeps on you. It’s unconscious.
16. 01:55 An individual identifies with someone who poses a threat. and by identifying
17. 02:01 with the source of the threat removes the threat in his or her own mind. Of
18. 02:07 course, it’s childish, infantile even. Of course, it’s a form of magical
19. 02:13 thinking. If I agree with my abuser, if I support my abuser, if I justify my
20. 02:21 abuser, if I collaborate with my abuser, if I become accomplice, an accomplice, the abuser is going not going to hurt
21. 02:27 me. There’s no such ethics in abuse. But magical thinking heals all wounds and victims deceive themselves into
22. 02:38 believing that should they emulate and imitate the abuser, should they adopt the abusers’s modeling, then they’re safe, which of course is
23. 02:50 not true. Similarly, people identify with opponents who
24. 02:56 cannot be mustered. people who are perceived as beyond
25. 03:02 control, beyond punishment, beyond ro rules and laws and regulations.
26. 03:10 At that point, the only option is submission. The only way not to incur the wrath of such an opponent is by collaborating
27. 03:22 with with him or her by becoming a psychopant or an acolyte or a satellite
28. 03:30 an extension of the of the of this indomitable opponent.
29. 03:36 Identification with the abuser may involve adopting the aggression or emulating other characteristics of the
30. 03:42 aggressor. It’s not only about aggression. In majority of cases, the imitation
31. 03:49 involves externalized aggression. When the abuser is verbally aggressive, the victim becomes verbally aggressive.
32. 03:56 Verbally abusive. Where the abuser is physically um um you know abusive, then
33. 04:02 perhaps physical violence may creep in. But there are other facets and other
34. 04:08 aspects and other dimensions and other characteristics of a typical abuser and the victim may choose to imitate those because they present less of a
35. 04:20 problem. They they don’t create dissonance. They are not egoistonic. They’re not alien to the nature and the character and the self concept and the
36. 04:31 self-image and self-perception of the victim. The victim says, “I can’t be aggressive. It’s against who I am. It’s not who I am. It’s not my core identity. But I can be other things which the aggressor is. I can imitate the
37. 04:47 aggressor’s behavior in other ways which do not involve aggression.”
38. 04:54 And so this has been observed in cases of hostage taking and in other extreme situations. For example, in concentration camps with couples, couples who imitated actually SS
39. 05:05 personnel, SS guards. In psychoanalytic theory, identification with the abuser
40. 05:11 occurs on a developmental level when the child identifies with a rival, the
41. 05:17 father or the mother towards the end of what it came to be known as the erdipal phase.
42. 05:23 It was first described by Anna Freud in 1936. Anna Freud was a child psychologist, a genius in her own right.
43. 05:32 She was Ziggman Freud’s daughter of course. And she described identifying with the aggressor in the context of the
44. 05:39 Edipus complex where for example a boy child, a male child would tend to be
45. 05:46 attracted sexually and otherwise to his mother and the father would become a competitor and so the child would
46. 05:52 identify with the aggressor would identify with the father and it it remained largely confined to
47. 05:59 this until ferency came along and expanded the framework dramatically.
48. 06:06 Now, today we use the phrase defensive identification. Defensive identification is a process by
49. 06:14 which the victim of abuse psychologically identifies with the perpetrator of the abuse. Pay attention.
50. 06:21 There may not be behavioral manifestations. The victim’s behavior may not may not
51. 06:28 change at all, but internally the victim would find herself more and more
52. 06:34 attracted to the aggressive and abusive elements and behaviors in her abuser.
53. 06:41 She would identify with the abuser. She would begin to admire or justify or crave to be or emulate internally, psychologically.
54. 06:52 It’s the abuser doesn’t have to be an individual. Could be a group with which the perpetrator is identified. And it’s a defensive strategy against
55. 07:03 continuing feelings of vulnerability and helplessness and a way to fend off
56. 07:10 further victimization by pretending to be um by pretending to be powerful, by
57. 07:16 pretending to be the abuser. So defensive identification, identifying
58. 07:23 with the abuser, identifying with the aggressor is magical thinking in the sense that the abuser’s power is
59. 07:31 appropriated by the victim magically psychologically. There’s a spa fantastic
60. 07:38 space of imagination. There’s a paracosm within which the victim
61. 07:44 transmogriies into is transformed into metamorphosize into the abuser thereby
62. 07:52 appropriating the abusers’s power and preventing the abuser from any further
63. 07:59 abuse or victimization taking away the abusers’s power.
64. 08:07 In the classical psychoan analytical theory of Zigman Freud the defensive
65. 08:13 identification was an integral part of the identification process. Uh in his work a child identified with a
66. 08:21 parent. In his in his actual work it was the father identifies with a parent who
67. 08:27 is perceived to be powerful threatening punitive. So child identifies with this
68. 08:33 figure and it’s a form of identification that develops as the child’s defense against punishment by the parent
69. 08:39 evolves. The child is terrified of punishment of adverse outcomes of
70. 08:47 consequences of misbehavior and so on. And one way to cope with this is to identify with a punitive parent with the source of the punishment. And again the identification
71. 09:00 is not a kind of transsubstantiation. It’s not like becoming the father. It’s
72. 09:06 just taking away the father’s properties, the father’s qualities, the
73. 09:13 father’s traits, father’s characteristics and appropriate them. appropriating them and assimilating them thereby becoming in
74. 09:24 effect a proxy father or a a pseudo father or a replica of the father. And
75. 09:30 this this applies to victims of abuse as well. That’s what they do.
76. 09:36 They in their minds develop a narrative, a narrative space or a fantastic space
77. 09:44 where they increasingly and gradually are becoming the abuser, their abuser.
78. 09:50 They’re being abused from the outside by a potent, threatening, cruel,
79. 09:56 um, unbridled, merciless figure. And the only way to
80. 10:02 cope with this is to say, well, I’m going to be the same. I’m going to be the same. And by appropriating these
81. 10:10 qualities, by taking away this power from my abuser, I am going to prevent my abuser from
82. 10:17 further hurting me, further harming me. Of course, it’s as you see, it’s highly
83. 10:23 infantile. It’s highly childish. And it involves magical thinking, merger, fusion. Essentially the victim and the
84. 10:30 abuser in the victim’s mind develop a symbiotic state. The victim merges with
85. 10:37 the abuser, fuses with the abuser thereby digesting the abuser, assimilating the abuser and and in a way preventing the abuser
86. 10:48 from having any degree of freedom uh limiting the abuser’s capacity to
87. 10:54 act. Now this is one type of identification the defensive identification. We have many other types of identification in
88. 11:05 psychoanalytical theory and later in object relations theories. And one of them is the anacy analytic uh
89. 11:13 identification. Again Ziggman Freud was the first to describe it. He said that analytic identification is the first phase of the identification process. It’s rooted in the child’s initial
90. 11:25 dependence. this time on the mother as well as later on on other caregivers.
91. 11:31 The child needs a mother for basic biological needs, emotional needs and so on so forth. So the child acquires the mother’s characteristics in the service
92. 11:42 of becoming their own source of reinforcement, nourishment and comfort. In other words, because a child begins to realize that mother is an external object, that mother has a life of her own, that she might sometimes be absent
93. 11:58 or non-responsive or frustrating. What the child does, the child creates a
94. 12:04 representation of the mother in his or her own mind, in its own mind and then
95. 12:10 continues to interact with this representation of mother because this representation of mother is always
96. 12:16 there, never abandons, never absent and always responsive, always caters to the
97. 12:22 child whims and wishes and needs. So the child provides itself uh with comfort self soothes the self
98. 12:33 soothing via the avatar or the internal object that represents the mother the
99. 12:39 real mother the external object and this is the initial phase of the identification process. If the mother is not only with uh frustrating but is
100. 12:51 withholding, is a dead mother, is uh is a cruel
101. 12:57 mother, is a neglectful mother, is an abusive mother, a traumatizing mother, then in this case the child will not only create an internal representation of a mother,
102. 13:09 but he will create an internal representation of the mother that he can control that the child can control. The
103. 13:16 child can own direct because when the mother is a dead mother
104. 13:22 or a bad mother or a frightening mother or dangerous mother or traumatizing or abusive internalizing the mother as she
105. 13:30 is would be would create enormous dissonance and anxiety in the child.
106. 13:36 Child cannot internalize the mother as she is. He internalizes the mother as
107. 13:42 the child is. He internalizes the mother as an integral part of the child
108. 13:50 so that the child becomes the mother. In this case the mother is excluded completely altogether and the interaction continues exclusively with the represent representative mother with the internal object the maternal internal object. So let’s summarize this
109. 14:08 part. It’s very important. When the mother is okay, a good enough mother to use Winnott’s language, the child would
110. 14:14 create a representation of the mother in its mind and continue to interact both with the real mother in the external world, the separate mother and with the
111. 14:25 representation of the mother with the internal object of the mother when the mother is up when the real mother is
112. 14:31 absent. So when the mother, the real mother, the external mother, the physical mother, the the separate mother, when she’s really there, the child would prefer to interact with her. When she’s out of the room, when she’s
113. 14:43 absent, unavailable, frustrating, the child will go inwards and continue
114. 14:49 interaction with a representation of this good enough mother. However, when the mother is bad and dead and horrible
115. 14:56 and absent and selfish and narcissistic and psychopathic and traumatizing and abusing and instrumentalizing and
116. 15:02 parentifying and you name it, when she’s the wrong kind of mother, the child cannot create an internal object which
117. 15:10 would genuinely and authentically reflect the real mother because that would create enormous anxiety and
118. 15:16 dissonance internalizing a bad object. So what what the child does
119. 15:23 the child creates a representation of of mother and then he misattributes the
120. 15:30 representation to itself. The child becomes the mother. The child becomes their own mother. The child from that moment on continues to interact
121. 15:41 only with the internal mother, only with the internal object, only with the introjection and excludes, cuts off the
122. 15:50 frustrating, threatening, abusive, traumatizing external mother, which is of course a great description of the psychological development of pathological narcissism. It’s exactly
123. 16:02 what narcissists do. The child also incorporates the mother
124. 16:08 into the super ego. The it’s actually clinically speaking it’s the ego ideal
125. 16:15 but okay let’s call it the super ego and later on the child incorporates other significant figures into the super ego teachers role models influential
126. 16:26 peers and so on. So we all we all starting in childhood we
127. 16:36 all incorporate we all internalize we all introdict we all you know identify
128. 16:42 ourselves with other people starting with mother then father then influential peers then teachers role models and so on so forth we all all we do this all the time all the time we maintain this zoo
129. 16:58 of internal objects that represent real people out there. External objects.
130. 17:06 The problem begins when the external object is threatening, abusive,
131. 17:12 traumatizing, cruel, hurtful, damaging. Internalizing such an external object is not an option. And so the only way is to
132. 17:24 create a representation of that external object and then merge with it, take over
133. 17:30 it, fuse with it, become one with it. And that is identifying with the
134. 17:36 aggressor. We see it most commonly in what used to be called
135. 17:43 the Stockholm syndrome. I’m saying used to be called because the Stockholm syndrome has been disputed and largely
136. 17:49 debunked in the scholarly literature especially as of late but still there are a few interesting observations there. The Stockholm syndrome was described as a mental and emotional
137. 18:01 response in which a captive, a hostage displays loyalty, even affection, even
138. 18:08 falling falling falls in love with the hostage taker, with a captor, with a criminal, with a person, the very person who has taken away the victims of the hostages freedom and perhaps sooner or later the victim’s life. And yet there
139. 18:25 is loyalty. There’s love, there’s affection, there’s collaboration and complicity.
140. 18:31 The captive comes to see law enforcement, police, rescuers as the
141. 18:37 enemy because they endanger the captor and they threaten to break the the newly
142. 18:43 emergent the nesscent bond between the hostage and the hostage taker. And Stockholm syndrome derives from the case of a woman who was held hostage in 1973 during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. She became so emotionally
143. 18:59 attached, actually infatuated with one of the robbers, with one of the bank robbers that she broke her engagement to
144. 19:06 another man and remained faithful to her former hostage taker, to her former captor during his prison term. The term was coined by Swedish psychiatrist and
145. 19:17 criminologist Nils Beger. So even though the Stockholm syndrome is no longer accepted as as real,
146. 19:28 it is true that identifying with the aggressor is not only an intellectual
147. 19:34 exercise. It’s not only saying unconsciously saying this person is a
148. 19:40 danger to me, this person threatens me. This person abuses me. This person has power over me and there’s nothing I can
149. 19:47 do to this person. This person is untouchable, indomitable, invulnerable. Nothing I can do. So the only way is to
150. 19:56 digest this person, assimilate this person, absorb this person. The only way is to take over this person, to merge
151. 20:04 with a person, to fuse with a person, to become one with this person. The only way to avoid future abuse, future
152. 20:11 maltreatment and victimization is to not play the role of the victim
153. 20:17 but to become one with the abuser. So this is the intellectual part. But it’s true that there are emotional correlates
154. 20:24 there there’s emotional involvement in this process. Identifying with the abuser is not only identifying with the
155. 20:31 behaviors of the abuser. It’s identifying with the abuser as a personality, as a human being, with a personhood of the abuser. And so it could lead to
156. 20:43 infatuation or lirance. It could lead to compassion. It could lead to protectiveness, being protective of the person. It could lead to constant justification of this person. It could
157. 20:55 lead to to lying for this person. could lead to a panopia of beh of behaviors which are emotionally motivated and in
158. 21:03 this sense there is a kernel there is a grain of truth in the Stockholm syndrome
159. 21:10 identification with the aggressor is a psychological defense mechanism the
160. 21:16 victim adopts the traits and behaviors of the abuser in order to cope with trauma to gain sense of safety to reduce
161. 21:24 imminent threat and fear the process involves internalizing the aggressor’s
162. 21:30 characteristics and in some cases adopting an aggressive
163. 21:36 posture, aggressive behaviors, aggressive mannerisms. Um there’s also the kind of incipient uh
164. 21:46 subtle subterranean belief that if I become similar to the abuser, the abuser is
165. 21:53 going to like me. I’m going to become the kin and kith of the abuser. I’m going to become a member of the clan of the abuser. And so then the abuser will change his behavior, will no longer abuse me. Actually,
166. 22:04 exactly the opposite. Will will will admire me and will protect me. There is
167. 22:10 a belief that it’s like abandoning abandoning camp. It’s like deserting from the army and and going over to the
168. 22:18 enemy. It’s like if I’m no longer the enemy of the abuser, if I’m no longer perceived as a target of the abuser, but I’m an extension of the abuser, I am a replica clone of the abuser or I am the
169. 22:30 abuser himself, then the abuse will stop. And so this internalization leads to
170. 22:37 behavioral changes. And the aim, the purpose of the behavioral changes is communication. The changes in behavior, the victim, the changes in the victim’s behavior, the
171. 22:48 victim becomes more aggressive, more abusive, more assertive,
172. 22:54 more dominant. The aim is not to compete with the abuser. The aim is to communicate with
173. 23:00 the to the abuser. Look, I’m becoming like you. I am you. I am your offspring.
174. 23:07 I’m your a member of your clan. I am your kin and Keith. I’m I support you. I believe in you. I justify you and so on. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t victimize me. Don’t abuse me anymore
175. 23:19 because I’ve deserted. I’ve abandoned my camp. The camp of the victims. I am now
176. 23:25 one of the abusers. I’m now one of yours. It’s a communication thing.
177. 23:32 It’s a survival strategy during abuse. Identifying with the abuser can persist after the abuse is over and it can negatively impact mental health and future relationships.
178. 23:45 So outwardly when you observe such a victim in the transition from victim to abuser when you observe the impacts the the the oent ostentatious observable impacts of
179. 24:02 the action of the identification with the abuser mechanism. What you see initially
180. 24:09 is that the traits of the victim are changing. the victim begins to mimic the
181. 24:15 aggressor’s negative or feared traits and diminish minimize or even eliminate
182. 24:23 the positive aspects of the abuser. So in a way the victim becomes a caricature of the abuser becomes more abuser than
183. 24:31 the abuser more perpetrator than the perpetrator. And we see this a lot in when we have
184. 24:38 couples who commit crimes together. Bon Bony and Clyde types or or the famous uh
185. 24:44 cases of serial killers, a woman and a man working together as serial killers. We we see this happening
186. 24:52 and the traits are exaggerated. They’re caricatured. The victim becomes a caricature of the abuser and the victim
187. 25:00 replaces her own thoughts and feelings with the aggressor’s uh postulated speculated feelings and
188. 25:08 thoughts. The victims ask yourself what is the abuser thinking? What is he feeling? I have to think and feel the
189. 25:14 same. And that way the victim becomes what the attacker or the perpetrator
190. 25:20 needs them to be in their own mind. The whole thing takes place in the mind of the victim. It’s not real to the abuser.
191. 25:28 Abusers don’t perceive this as uh they they perceive
192. 25:34 uh such behaviors when the victim changes. The victim tries to emulate and imitate the abuser. The abuser perceives
193. 25:41 it as a show of weakness, as submissiveness, as obscuriousness,
194. 25:48 as the victim trying to pluckate the the abuser, cowtowing, you know, and and so on. So,
195. 25:57 the abuser doesn’t perceive this as a change of allegiance. It perceives it as a signal of vulnerability and frailty
196. 26:05 and uh and reacts with even enhanced or increased aggression. Actually having emulated the traits of the
197. 26:16 abuser, having changed their own minds, their own subjectivity
198. 26:22 is about seeking safety and control. By identifying with the abuser, the victim gains a sense of safety, empowers
199. 26:30 herself because she now aligns herself with the source of the threat and now
200. 26:36 the situation paradoxically feels more manageable. Now she is in control.
201. 26:42 So a molested child might seek to become her uh sexual abuser’s partner.
202. 26:51 You you see situations in child sexual abuse where the child plays the role of a spouse or a partner
203. 26:58 and becomes highly eroticized and highly seductive and flutatious. It’s a way of
204. 27:05 catering to the expectations of the abuser by essentially transforming
205. 27:12 the child transforms itself from victim to fullscale collaborator and accomplice
206. 27:19 or um a child who is constantly
207. 27:25 henpecked and constantly criticized and attacked and humiliated and mocked and ridiculed by by the father. So this kind
208. 27:34 of abused child might become a tough guy to gain approval from the abuser.
209. 27:41 These are enduring defense mechanisms. Identifying with the abuser continues to affect victims long after the abusers ended or the abuser has died or exited their lives. And it has adverse mental health effects. The defensive reaction can lead
210. 27:57 to um various negative incomes. For example, uh it’s been associated with
211. 28:03 depression and and anxiety and substance use disorders. The term as I as I said was expanded on by Anna Freud and applied to child psychology, but it is introduced by uh Shando Ferny
212. 28:21 and it was Shando Ferny who applied it more generally. So identifying with the aggressor is a
213. 28:29 psychological defense mechanism. The victim of abuse unconsciously adopts the traits and behaviors of a threatening
214. 28:35 figure. The idea is to cope with fear, gain a sense of control, survive intimidation by becoming the source of
215. 28:42 the threat by somehow taking over the source of a threat and absorbing it, assimilating it. It’s magical thinking. It’s infantile and but it results in a strong bond with the abuser.
216. 29:00 When you become the abuser, how can you let go? You’re letting go of yourself.
217. 29:06 So there is self infatuation, self cathexis. There is an investment in
218. 29:12 the self, what Freud called narcissistic cathexis. And it’s a strong bond with the abuser
219. 29:20 because now there’s a common narrative. The abusers’s narrative is now the victim’s narrative as well. And they are
220. 29:28 complicit in maintaining what is known as a shared fantasy. And this is this is
221. 29:35 really really bad because when the abuser is removed from the victim’s life, the victim experiences grief
222. 29:43 and a complete disorientation and a disruption in a sense of continuity and core identity.
223. 29:51 She feels a drift. She feels um dead, unalived. She feels the victim
224. 29:58 feels uh distraught. And because by taking away by removing the abuser from
225. 30:05 her life, the narrative that was the organizing principle of her life, the narrative that made her life made sense of her life, imbued her life with meaning, purpose and direction, that
226. 30:17 narrative has been shattered. Now identifying with the abuser as I’ve
227. 30:23 mentioned involves multiple um psychological mechanisms many of them infantile like internalization or introjection identifying with the abuser is definitely a form of
228. 30:35 introjection. It’s a process where a person takes in an experience or trait from another person and appropriates
229. 30:43 makes them their own. In this case, the negative or fear traits of the aggressor are adopted. And you’re beginning to see, of course, the interface with narcissism. Narcissists are people who have been
230. 30:55 abused and traumatized in early childhood. And what they’ve done, they have created a representation of their abuser, a representation of the traumatizer, a representation of
231. 31:07 perpetrators, usually caregivers like mother and so on. They’ve created representations of these people. And
232. 31:13 then they identified with these representations. They became one with these representations. Consequently, they lost the capacity to tell the difference between external objects and internal objects. And they remain
233. 31:24 grounded in the fantasy of being an omnipotent godlike figure, the false
234. 31:31 self, which essentially is the abuser. Because children perceive their parents
235. 31:37 as godlike, as infallible. And by creating godlike, infallible
236. 31:43 internal objects, they the children become godlike and infallible. And
237. 31:49 that’s lifelong. It’s an unconscious process. And um
238. 31:56 the mind the mind tries actually to protect itself, to defend itself, to protect
239. 32:03 itself from danger and from mental anguish and from extreme dissonance and the anxiety that it provokes. And of
240. 32:10 course all this this is the reason all this is happening unconsciously
241. 32:16 when it comes to consciousness when it’s brought to consciousness there’s a major crisis and and usually we usually
242. 32:24 clinicians handle these situations in therapy very frequently.
243. 32:30 The thing to understand is identifying with the aggressor is a survival strategy. And in this sense, in this
244. 32:36 very limited sense, it’s a positive adaptation. By identifying with the aggressor, the person seeks to
245. 32:42 understand, to anticipate, to make sense, to predict and to minimize the
246. 32:49 threat, to gain a sense of order and meaning in the world, to g to assert a
247. 32:55 modicum of control, to reestablish an internal locus of control. So in abusive relationships, victims may develop empathy for the abuser or act in ways that the abuser demands in order to
248. 33:07 survive or comply with the abuser’s expectations even when these expectations are not pronounced, are not made clear, promulgated. In childhood
249. 33:18 abuse, children who are abused internalize the perpetrator’s experience and behavior. They try to cope with the
250. 33:25 inability to escape or to prevent the abuse by saying, “Okay, I’m not actually being abused. It’s fun. It’s a fun game. I’m I’m participating in it willingly.”
251. 33:36 And I mentioned the Stockholm syndrome. identifying with the aggressor is seen um uh is seen as as a way to co-opt the
252. 33:44 aggressor to kind of bring the aggressor to your camp to or to be on your side.
253. 33:51 And all this leads to maladaptive coping. It serves a purpose in the short term, but identifying with the aggressor
254. 33:59 is a maladaptive defense. It can worsen the victim’s situation in the long run. It can perpet per perpetuate the cycle of abuse. As I’ve explained, the abuser does not perceive this as a kind of uh
255. 34:14 uh amilaration of the of the abuse. abuser doesn’t perceive when the victim identifies with the abuser. Many abusers react with aggression and violence because who are you to be me? Many abusers are narcissistic. So like who
256. 34:29 are you the victim to assume that you’re like me or that you are me? And also they perceive it as as a weakness. So
257. 34:37 the outcomes are never good. In other words, it’s it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It contributes to the continuation and exacerbation of the cycle of abuse. And the more the victim becomes like the
258. 34:49 aggressor, the more potential for conflict there is. And it often deteriorates to the point of verbal
259. 34:57 exchanges and physical violence. And in some cases, unfortunately, murder,
260. 35:04 the defense mechanism, this defense mechanism always results in lasting negative impacts on the victim’s mental health without mitigating the
261. 35:15 abuse or the victimization even in the short term. So while it is a positive adaptation in the sense that the victim can deceive
262. 35:26 itself into believing that everything will be okay. There’s this magical thinking. If I just wish it strong and
263. 35:34 strongly enough it will happen. Uh if I become the the abuser then we will be
264. 35:40 two abusers not not an abuser and a victim. All these are magical narratives which are typical of children.
265. 35:48 Uh so in this sense it’s a positive adaptation because it does reduce anxiety. It’s anxolytic
266. 35:54 but in reality it doesn’t work. It leads to much worse outcomes both in the
267. 36:02 relationship and in the psychology of the victim. As I said the abuser
268. 36:08 perceives all this the changes in the victim when the victim becomes more like the aggressor. The absu abuser perceives
269. 36:16 this as either an attempt to manipulate him which enrages him or
270. 36:23 um there’s a grandio reaction. Who are you the victim to be like me? I’m much superior to you. Where why are you so
271. 36:31 presumptuous to assume that you could be like me? or as a manifestation, an indication of extreme vulnerability and weakness, which in for example psychopathic and narcissistic abusers
272. 36:43 triggers um abusive abusive behaviors because they leverage in leverage
273. 36:51 vulnerabilities, frailties and weaknesses in order to further manipulate, take over, punish and modify
274. 37:02 behaviors of victims. So it’s a no-win situation and yet it is
275. 37:09 grounded in early childhood. It is unconscious and so in many cases the victim is not
276. 37:16 aware that this is what’s happening unless and until people from the outside alert the victim that there are changes
277. 37:24 in the victim’s behavior and identity which are irreconcilable with how the
278. 37:30 victim used to be, who the victim used to be. But then most victims are isolated. The
279. 37:37 abuser cuts them off from family and friends, denies them social network, support,
280. 37:45 sakur. So there’s no feedback. It’s an echo chamber and the victim descends further
281. 37:53 and further into the reverberations of her own in growing insanity
282. 38:00 because there’s no one out there to calibrate her to wake her up to put a
283. 38:06 mirror to her and to alert her that something really bad is happening within the hall of mirrors and the shared fantasy of the abuser. The victims become becomes nothing but a
284. 38:18 reflection in multiple convex mirrors
285. 38:25 distorted more and more to the point of vanishing.