Abusive partners and their red flags
A reader asks what red flags signal an abusive partner and why people stay in abusive relationships?
The first question can be rephrased as, what red flags signal an abusive partner, or tenant, or employer, or employee or “friend?” All the same clues: abusers often start out charming, because charm is a terrific way by which to control others. It later turns to abuse only after the person has sucked in the victim, or “mark,” as it did in the Robert De Niro movie based on the Tobias Wolff story, “This Boys Life” and countless other stories of psychological, physical and financial abuse.
Other red flags include belittling remarks about someone else (including “friends,” family or employer–or a class of people), intense mood swings, a “rules don’t apply to me” attitude and numerous others clues discussed in my book, “How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics.” The reason for listing and describing the clues in a book about alcoholism is because that’s what’s usually driving it: alcohol or other-drug addiction.
People stay in abusive relationships because (a) we want to believe the addicts promises of “they will never do it again” (and recovering addicts readily admit to being the world’s greatest liars, so we cannot _not_ believe them); (b) because normal people (non-addicts) who make such promises keep them, so we expect promises to be kept; (c) we may be used to the behaviors because a parent was an addict, so it is in its own perverse way “comfortable”; (d) the addict may be supremely successful in the early stages of the disease and so by enabling we keep our positions of stature, income, wealth and prestige; and (e) we see a (usually) good person through the muck of addiction.