Category: Healing

If someone defines you, even in subtle ways, they are pretending to know the unknowable.  There is a quality of fantasy to their words and sometimes to their actions.  Even so, they are usually unaware of the fact that they are playing “let’s pretend.”  They fool themselves and sometimes others into thinking that what they are saying is true or that what they are doing is right.

When people “make up” your reality — as if they were you — they are trying to control you, even when they don’t realize it.

When people attempt to control you they begin by pretending.  When they define you they are acting in a senseless way.  They are pretending. . . .

We know that they are pretending because in actual fact, no one can tell what you want, believe, should do, or why you have done what you have done.  No one can know your inner reality, your intentions, your motives, what you think, believe, feel, like, dislike, what you know, how you do what you do, or who you are.  If someone does pretend to know your inner reality: “You’re trying to start a fight,” they have it backwards. People can only know themselves.  It doesn’t work the other way around.

Since only you can define yourself, your self-definition is yours.  It isn’t necessary to prove it or explain it.  It is, after all, your own.  Self-definition is inherent in being a person.

Despite the evidence, it is difficult for many people to realize that the person who defines them is not being rational.  They feel inclined to defend themselves as if the person defining them were rational.  But by trying to defend themselves against someone’s definitions, they are acknowledging those definitions as valid, that they make sense, when they are, in fact, complete nonsense….

Millions of people try to defend themselves from abuse and describe the altercations as arguments.  Are they?  I think not.  I see them more as a struggle to retain one’s own reality when someone else has stepped into it.

— Patricia Evans, Controlling People, p. 58-59

[Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 3, 2014]

People who indulge in verbal abuse want to keep real people out of their pretend world.  They want to turn real people into pretend people.  They feel they have succeeded if they can get the real person to try to explain him- or herself.  If the real person tries to explain and argue against what the abuser is saying, the real person is acting as if the abuser’s world is the real world, instead of a pretend one.  It is a “win” for the abuser because he or she has gotten someone to take his or her pretend world seriously.

It is better to say, “Nonsense!” to verbal abuse (since it is nonsense) than to try to deal with the abuser in a logical way.  In other words, explaining why something said to you is wrong doesn’t keep the verbal abuser from abusing you.  When people indulge in verbal abuse, they are not being logical.  They are being irrational.  Verbal abuse is all pretend talk….

Thinking about it, we know that no one lives inside another person, so no one knows our inner world.  But when someone tells us who we are or how we feel, or anything else about our inner world, our identity, how we do what we do, or how successful we’ll be, most of us feel as if we want to set them straight, correct them, or give them an explanation.  In other words, we want to talk to them as if they were in the real world with us.  But they are in a pretend world.

— Patricia Evans, Teen Torment: Overcoming Verbal Abuse at Home and at School, p. 21-23

Realizing that verbal abuse is not rational, it becomes clear that the man indulging in it can’t hear a rational response from his partner.  But it is difficult for the partner not to respond with a rational explanation.  For instance, she may say she didn’t deserve to be yelled at, or she didn’t do what she is being accused of, even when she knows that rational explanations just won’t work.  It takes enormous conscious effort for the partner not to explain herself to her mate.  It usually seems to her that he is rational and will apologize and not do it again.

Women often talk about how hard it is to remember that there is no point in their ever responding rationally to verbal abuse, even when they know that verbal abuse is a lie.  However, it is important for you to keep in mind that since the verbal abuse is a lie, it is incomprehensible.  You must decide to see it as so untrue, so unimaginable, so unreal, that you simply say, “What?” or “What did you say?” or “What are you doing?”  This may gently prod him toward hearing himself if he starts defining you in any way.

— Patricia Evans, The Verbally Abusive Man, p. 108