unillustratedadventures: Adding Insult to Injury: Stonewalling and Closure-withholding as Precursors
unillustratedadventures: Adding Insult to Injury: Stonewalling and Closure-withholding as Precursors to Reactive Abuse and the Smear Campaign I want to add another relevant point to the above quotation. The position of begging and pleading into which targets are forced by their narcissistic abusers is already both humiliating and painful. Indeed, that’s often the purpose behind the abusive baiting-and-stonewalling or baiting-and-ghosting that drives the target to beg and plead in the first place. (When the abuser’s purpose is not entirely to humiliate or hurt the target, his or her purpose is at least partly to manipulate or coercively control the target, often in order to avoid having a serious conversation, or to avoid the honesty and cooperation that would be required to resolve a standing issue in a fair and healthy way). However, to add yet more insult to injury, the abuser also tends to mock or otherwise shame the target for the begging and pleading behaviours that have come about because of his or her abusive treatment. This is called ‘reactive abuse’, since it consists in the abuser’s punishment, condemnation, misrepresentation, or gaslighting of the target’s distressed reactions to prior abuse. It is also common for the abuser to reframe and exploit the target’s begging, pleading, or general emotional distress, in order to make the target appear crazy or threatening. The abuser thereby incorporates the target’s distress (which the abuser has needlessly caused) into a smear campaign, whose purpose is to devalue and discredit the target, while simultaneously allowing the abuser to avoid any personal responsibility for his or her abusive actions. -- source link