I barely slept last night. I was up all night weeping inconsolably, as I do on occasion. My fault; I did something which I should have known would be triggering.
If you ever find yourself in an abusive situation, there are three things you must do.
- Run.
- Don't engage. Don't even look back.
- Don't put yourself in an abusive situation again.
Last year, a few days away from her birthday, my former spouse texted me out of the blue.
"Hey. Wanna chat?"
"Sure. What's up?"
"Nothing. Just feel like a chat."
The last time I'd seen her, we'd parted on amiable terms, so like a fool, I thought "Oh, how sweet!"
I was in the library at the time so went out into the street, and sat on a bench to call her. It started well. She asked me how I was and what I'd been up to, and I set off on a little potted history of the prior couple of years, which had been good to me. After a while, I heard noises and realised she was crying. "Oh!" I thought, "she's happy for me."
Not quite. She collected herself and launched into a stream of savage invective on the theme of how, for motives or advantage mysterious to me, I had maliciously wasted two decades of her life, and carried on in this vein for something like twenty minutes before eventually realising how unhinged she sounded and petering out suggesting, now somewhat regretfully, that I would probably like to hang up now, wouldn't I?
I certainly did, and then spent a further twenty minutes sitting out in the street hyperventilating and resisting the urge to throw up, marvelling that this was the way I used to feel every day when I was married, and I used to think nothing of it.
This year, a few days before her birthday, she texted me again.
I didn't respond.
The standard abuser's narrative runs something like this:
You are so hopeless and vulnerable that I don't know what you would do without me. It's a good thing I'm so selflessly loving and patient. Nobody understands you like I do. I'm the only person you can trust to know what's in your best interests. Goodness know what trouble you'd get into if I weren't here to look after you.
This narrative builds up gradually over time, and each small step in the evolution of the story seems so reasonable that before long it feels quite indisputable that if you were left to your own devices you would be completely helpless. You lack the confidence to make the smallest decision, and each time a decision is taken out of your hands you are relieved.
Eventually you become so guilty about the awful burden you are placing on your abuser that you are a constant mess of anxiety. It's hardly surprising that they are so moody. Indeed perpetually rushing about to placate and flatter them seems the very least you can do, under the circumstances. You find yourself regularly falling into crippling depressions.
You rarely leave the house because your friends are clearly so irritating, ill-mannered, and such bad influences, and your interests so inappropriate and juvenile, that it's best just to forego them all to keep the peace.
Your life gets smaller and smaller, your depressions so frequent, your shame and guilt so overwhelming, that your conviction in your own utter uselessness is your sole remaining comfort. There is one person you can trust and depend on, but if you lost them your life would be over.
I had no idea how bad the situation was until it was nearly too late. One evening, a bit over a decade ago, I was sitting outside with my cat Jack on my lap. My spouse was inside, phone in one hand, glass of vodka in another. She was draining a bottle a night at this stage, and my main concern was getting to bed, in the "spare" room, before she switched into Very Unpleasant Mode. I was sipping cardboard box wine and listening to a podcast with one ear, while the other was alert to potential signs of a mood swing occurring indoors.
Every now and then Jack would hop down to go to the middle of the yard, pee like a fire hydrant, fill his belly with rainwater from a bucket, and then haul himself up to my lap again. His kidneys were failing, and if I could achieve nothing else of use for anybody, I was determined to make his last months as comfortable and full of love as possible.
This particular evening, perhaps occasioned by pre-emptive grief, I had an unprecedented moment of clarity: I need to get out of this situation, or I'm going to die soon as well. Other epiphanies followed over the ensuing months (some of them more surprising than others), but this night was the turning point.
I was morbidly obese (around 140kg), had high blood pressure, and suffered regular attacks of gout, among other symptoms of chronic self-neglect. Years later, my psychologist told me that the first time I walked into his office he took one look at my shambling bulk and dead eyes, and thought "Oh dear, this one's not long for this world."
Organisations can be abusive in this way as well. If they are obviously so, we tend to call them cults. School is another example. There's a right way to be a girl and a right way to be a boy, and all other ways of being are wrong. You are a constant disappointment, and your entire future hinges on the institution's opinion of you — both formally and in the playground.
Earlier this year I was introduced to a further example. It was nominally a trans social/support group (both online and offline), and it gave me the heebie-jeebies like nobody's business, but I couldn't put my finger on why. There were a couple of people in the group I liked. (One in particular I adored and sincerely thought of her as my adopted niece. — What do you mean? How is that peculiar?) A few more seemed bright and interesting. But something in the vibe wasn't right. When it became apparent that several of them had made the group the centre of their whole lives, to the exclusion of practically anything else, I was even more unsettled.
I asked around on the fediverse, and received some confirmation of my discomfort. "Yeah," one person said (I'm heavily paraphrasing), "There are some nice people in the group, but the core of it is basically a Mean Girls clique."
I had to watch the film to get the cultural reference (I wouldn't recommend; it's an uncomfortable watch), but yes, that was the very thing hiding in plain sight: the conformity was striking. There were exceptions, but among the most active participants it was unusual to be anything other than Anglo, thirty-something, middle class, very employable (at least in principle), femme dialled up to eleven, and gay.
The vibe was school playground, and as with the model on which it was based, inclusion was defined by who was excluded. The banter was largely around standards of comportment found to be hilariously inadequate, ridiculous, or distasteful. This was dressed up with gushing expressions of mutual concern, but the drumbeat of expectation was hard to ignore. There is one right way to be trans, and so, so many wrong ways. Once seen, it was difficult to un-see. It was positively giddying in its nasty, petty oppressiveness.
I am not saying that every individual's contribution to this dynamic was deliberate, or even that they noticed it. If the environment you're in was made to suit somebody very like you, you are not necessarily going to see how unpleasant or even hostile it can be for somebody else. If you're happiest in your own company and a homebody, you may not recognise how living in car-dependent sprawl can be hellish for others; you may even assume that they simply have a tendency to overdramatise their trivial irritations: This is the perfectly natural and normal way to live, and certain people are just born complainers.
I had at least already recognised that the more time I spent with these people the worse I felt about myself. Still, concern for people one cares about tends to outweigh concern for oneself, so I kept checking in on them and consequently feeling awful about myself.
Eventually I cracked. Somebody posted something that was pure misandry, and that particular somebody was the online moderator and founder of the group. This seemed to me to actually be a marvellous opportunity to be tactful; to say to that person, discreetly and in private, that they may want to reconsider the sort of discourse that qualifies as fitting the nominal brief of the group as welcoming and inclusive, without pointing the finger at some gauche young girl who would in time grow to cringe at the things they said in their youth.
Except no. It turns out that I was the problem here. The in-group is by definition good and kind and selfless to a fault, so the only conceivable kind of criticism is illegitimate criticism by the sinister out-group who hate us for our fundamental goodness. I have written about this kind of thinking before in a different context.
Refusing to deal with the substance of the criticism by taking the well-worn "if you were offended" tack (which Girl on the Net has so gloriously skewered), I was presented with a litany of explanations for why I might have so irrational a reaction:
- I have no sense of humour. (Hmm. I freely admit that most of the time I make people laugh it's unintentional, but I myself laugh quite a lot. Just not at shameless bigotry. I'm funny like that.)
- The group tends to skew younger and more femme, for some reason (Gosh! I wonder why?), so naturally I wouldn't properly understand the nuance of things that are said, as I am so tremendously old and drab. (You kids, get your polycules off my lawn!)
- My aberrant (in this context) sexuality actually makes me "mainstream", and frankly it's shocking to see somebody wielding that hetero-normative privilege as a cudgel like this. ("Mainstream"? You have no idea what I had to go through to achieve the modest level of social comfort I currently enjoy. I have layers of peculiarity whose number and depth you could not begin to fathom. Somebody who looks and sounds for all the world like a suburban real estate agent really shouldn't be flinging that accusation around.)
- I am clearly carrying a lot of unprocessed trauma. (Well, yes. I am trans and it's 2026. Who isn't?)
- She and the group have the best intentions in the world, but they ultimately have only so much to give, so maybe it would be best if I sought professional help. (I have it, thank you.)
- Ultimately, it appears I am just a poor "cultural fit" (her term) for the group, and it would be best if I buggered off (my term). (I quite agree.)
Wait. You're trying to gaslight me (pretty feebly, I may add)? I was married to a world class practitioner of the gaslighter's arts. Your clumsy novice moves won't work on me!
So this group's stated purpose and its actual purpose are a world apart. It's a social group consisting of (somewhat younger) near-clones of its founder. It's a congenial place to be if you are in the target demographic, and if you find people who happen to be unlike yourself to be distasteful or frightening. Which would be fine if it weren't pretending to be something more than that, and if it wasn't leveraging the insecurities of freshly de-closeted trans people as a recruiting tool.
When someone comes to you saying "This is all too overwhelming. Tell me how to be trans!" a responsible reply would be something like "We can't tell you how to be yourself, but we can try to help you find out who that is." A totally irresponsible reply would be "Oh, that's easy. We are the trans community, after all. Just be like us or face complete and merciless social ostracism. But it would be for your own good. We are the only people who can ever understand you. Without us, you are nothing."
So I buggered off, with a considerable sense of relief. The problem is that, even when you can readily identify it, gaslighting works.
Those of us who have been bullied and manipulated over and over again will have buttons that were installed by abusers now long gone. We absolutely know when someone is pushing our buttons. We intellectually recognise what is happening and why. Unfortunately the buttons continue to work — in fact it almost feels like the more you understand what is being done to you the better they work. Once absorbed, even after being subsequently intellectually rejected, the abuser's narrative has an intuitive attraction.
Aspiring abusers can see at a glance which buttons are available to push and can play you like an accordion. As I said, don't engage with them. Just run.
I started with a sliver of self-doubt and spiralled down over the following days and weeks. I hadn't had a single depressive episode since that evening with Jack a decade earlier, which was remarkable given that I used to have them several times a year. It isn't the past trauma alone that causes depressive episodes; it's past trauma plus having people in your life who are willing to use it to their advantage (or just for their amusement).
It lasted for months and was deeper and more harrowing than anything I'd experienced in my entire life. It was utterly devastating. I had to drop out of the class I was doing at uni. I didn't speak to anybody from one week to the next, couldn't work at all. I just lay in bed weeping and hated myself and wanted it to end. I came as close as I've ever been to calling a helpline. I've always stayed clear of the line between self-destructive and suicidal, but this time I was not even confident I could manage that.
I'm a couple of months out of it, and I'm still not sure that it has been banished. Every time I've had the slightest emotional dip recently, I've thought "Is this it back again? Is this the time it does me in for good?"
I've lost friends because of the toxic nature of this group. I can't bring myself to seriously consider the question of whether they are unwitting victims or cheerful abusers (not mutually exclusive categories), because I don't want to know. The grief of those losses will always be with me regardless.
The lesson that I want to convey to anybody who well knows their own potential but feels continually hamstrung by low self-confidence and high self-loathing is that this isn't necessarily something that just happens. Someone may be doing it to you. Work out who they are, and then:
- Run.
- Don't engage. Don't even look back.
- Don't put yourself in an abusive situation again.