Thread by @wademullen

Abusers engage in a process of dismantling a victim's sense of trust in their external and internal worlds, often in subtle and undetected ways operating behind the scenes of more familiar grooming behaviors like gift-giving.

Here's a thread on this lesser known set of tactics:

Prior relationships, perspectives, hopes, and values are carried by the victim into the sphere of the abuser. These serve as important anchors to people and beliefs the abuser has had no hand in creating or controlling. So the abuser gets to work at dismantling these worlds.

An attack on their external relationships involves deceptive messages that dissuade the victim from maintaining other relationships.

“They don’t really care about you."

"Why do you listen to them?”

"You don't need them."

Soon the victim comes to distrust others.

This persistent distrust of others is then leveraged by the abuser to control the victim until they are isolated from these necessary and important support systems.

The abuser erects barriers between the victim and the outside world and will become protective and domineering.

The abuser might also attack the victim's confidence in their own identity. This can start with something as seemingly innocent as ascribing a nickname to the victim.

It is a form of control that replaces the victim's given name with a name chosen by the abuser.

Given names serve as important anchors to our sense of self-worth. Exchanging that name with another without that person’s consent can demoralize the victim. Such naming is often committed against the most vulnerable – those least likely to object because of their powerlessness.

We even do this at a societal and institutional level when people use language to demean entire groups of people. When left unchallenged and uncorrected, people are set up to more readily accept similar attacks from those in their life who seem them as occupying a lowly status.

The abuser dismantles the victim's self-confidence through humiliation, perhaps by pressing for intimate details that makes the victim feel uncomfortable.

The abuser isn't interested in genuinely knowing the person, but is on a hunt for information that can be easily exploited.

The abuser functions as a collector of information that he/she sorts out on the basis of usefulness.

Unbeknownst to the victim, the abuser is collecting discreditable, humiliating, or vulnerable information that can be weaponized against them.

Abusers in religious settings often reshape the victim's beliefs in the supernatural.

In the worst cases, abusers convince their victims they are demonically influenced and need the abuser's help to be delivered.

Spiritual teaching can be used to intimidate a victim.

Like other grooming behaviors, the abuser wants to discover what they can get away with, constantly testing boundaries until a complete dismantling of trust in others and trust in the self is accomplished so the victim struggles to make sense of what's normal and what's abuse.

Once the abuser has control of these external and internal worlds, other humiliations might follow like:

1. Invasion of privacy.
2. Withholding help to force submission.
3. Controlling how the victim speaks to the abuser.
4. Forcing the victim to engage in humiliating behavior.

Then enters legalistic and overly strict rules. Here, the focus turns to defining and controlling specific roles and actions taken while being enveloped in the abuser’s world.

The victim slowly lose their agency - their ability to choose for themselves.

All of these tactics, and others, work in concert to dismantle the victim's confidence in themselves and in others.

At the same time, the abuser is likely trying to establish the victim's trust in the abuser.

These twin processes serve the same goal of abusive control.