Over the years I have kept asking myself how could I not have seen what Jack, my ex, was doing to me. I couldn't forgive myself for missing it, and I couldn't understand how I hadn't seen Jack as he really was and how he was manipulating me.
There's a phenomenon in humans in that we tend to notice things in others that we really dislike about ourselves. Recently my mom and I read about a father who was sure that the woman his son wanted to marry was conniving and mercenary. It became clear later in the story that, although the prospective fiancee was neither conniving nor mercenary, the father certainly was.
This led my mother to say to me, "I believe this is why you didn't see why Jack was so toxic. You aren't deceptive or controlling, so it never occurred to you to look for those thoughts and motivations in another person."
This phenomenon of not seeing Jack's behaviors and motivations explains another shift I have seen in my life since the realization that Jack is fundamentally different from me. Once I finally saw that Jack's actions are always motivated by selfishness, by his need to be in control, and by gaining and wielding power, I started to see that some of the other people that I know in my life might also have less than pure motivations for their behaviors. Up until that point I had ascribed the kindest motives possible to their sometimes less-than-stellar behaviors. But with a different lens, I could suddenly see that there were other possible motives that in fact were more likely than the motives I had ascribed. I started to feel as if I had been contaminated by Jack. Why would I suddenly have such unkind thoughts of people that I had known my whole life? Was my brain flawed somehow? How could this have happened?
I recently read a book to Kitty in which the mouse father of the protagonist mouse brings home a "squirrel". Kitty immediately laughed because the creature that the father had brought home was not a squirrel at all: it was a cat. She thought the father mouse and his daughter mouse were very stupid for having invited this creature into their home. But were they?
Was I "stupid" for not knowing what Jack was? A predatory human was outside my experience. Jack lied about why he did what he did. Society at large lies about why people are abusive and has a tendency to make excuses for people doing bad things to others. It encourages us to forgive and forget, and to ascribe good motivations for bad behaviors. There is also very little in the mainstream advice about how to learn to analyze social interactions for motivations. I know because I've looked. In a way I was very much like that father mouse. I talked to a predator and believed it when it said it was a mouse like me. I was set up. I was conned. I am struggling to forgive myself.
But even more salient than the fact that Jack is a predator is the fact that he is not a cat. He is a human being, like me. Now that I recognize that human beings in my everyday life can be predators, I have a different perspective on every human being I see. I can now see that there is a potential for them being deceptive and manipulative for their own benefit at my expense and I can't unsee that.
Jesus said something along the lines of, "Take the plank out of your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from your friend's eye", so I started to think that perhaps the niggling questions I was having about the people in my life were because Jack had somehow contaminated me, that I had become evil or insane, or that perhaps that I was jumping at shadows. But having looked more closely at the people in my life who set off my radar, I have decided that what is more likely is that when I started to see the patterns in Jack's behavior and he revealed his motivations in subtle ways, I started to see some of the same patterns in other people that they were using to disguise themselves as harmless. It's not that I am seeing things that aren't there; it's that I am no longer as blinded by my ignorance of what deception and manipulation look like.
I think I have an answer to the riddle of why I was so completely taken in by Jack: it was because I would never act that way or think that way and I had no idea that the people around me would. I knew that there were people with bad motivations in the world; it just hadn't occurred to me that someone I knew could be hiding bad intentions behind their smiles and words.
Emotional abuse is, for all intents and purposes, invisible in our society. We don't know how insidious, how seemingly harmless it looks at the outset; how we are fooled and then fool ourselves further; how we forgive and forgive and forgive the abuser worse and worse behaviors because we are told that is the right thing to do; how an abuser can reshape us over time into a weapon against ourselves, until we find ourselves trapped in a nightmare.
I imagine that when that mouse father runs into another cat he will not be deceived if it pretends to be a squirrel because he is no longer hampered by his own ignorance.
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