Whether one or both partners in a toxic relational dynamic or toxic relationship are abusive, how can the focus that is put on the abuser (or other abuser) in these codependent and enmeshed relationships help anyone? Love isn’t meant to be a struggle for power and control.

Toxic relationships are relationships in which the love known is a very painful brand of love. It’s actually a toxic type of dysfunctional love that can be much more about hate than it anything to do with what love really is.

In many of these relationships, the toxic dynamic unfolds to the point where both partners are being abusive to one degree or another. Even if you find yourself being abusive in what seems to be a reactionary way – a reaction to your partner’s abuse, focusing on the other partner (or other abuser) will have the same effect of keeping you stuck in the toxic relational pattern.

Are you focusing too much on the abuser, or are you not focused nearly enough on the abuser? Or is it some awkward combination of the two? Does it matter, do you think? What’s the difference? Is there one? What we focus on expands. What we focus on is what we end up knowing and living. What we focus on has our energy and attention and that can be trapping.

Whether the abuser abuses verbally emotionally, or physically, to just focus on the abuser and his or her wants, demands, tirades, and/or moods is not going to help anyone. What it will assure is that the cycle of abuse, in a toxic relationship continues.

Verbal abuse is often a warning sign of other types of abuse to come. Verbal abuse is abuse and many make the mistake of thinking, well, he doesn’t hit me so it can’t be that bad, right? Wrong! Often verbal abuse is a precursor to physical and/or domestic violence. Verbal abuse needs to be taken very seriously.

Toxic relationships, far from being about love, are about power and control and the need to get power and/or control through someone else when one feels powerless or out of control inside of him or herself.

Toxic relationships, even if they involved only one toxic person to begin with, end up being toxic to the victim of abuse as well. It is important to learn and understand as much as you can about dealing with difficult and toxic people so that you can take care of yourself.

Does the victim focus on the abuser to try to stop the abuse? Or does the victim of abuse want to rescue, or feel some need to be the rescuer of the abuser? Putting so much focus on the abuser is the way that anyone being victimized will keep themselves enmeshed in this unhealthy way of relating.

Perhaps the victim of abuse believes that he or she can find the resolution long-sought after from an abusive parent in the legacy of an unhappy childhood (usually more subconsciously than consciously) by saving, changing, or redeeming his or her current partner who is an abuser? In the meantime  this leaves the victim of abuse in harms way, suffering, and living a very painful life.

Fear of being alone and/or loneliness often makes the choice of ending the relationship feel impossible. Many who are abused, especially those who come from very dysfunctional families, are more used to the poor treatment of an abuser and have come to believe that even the most painful of familiar feelings means that someone cares and is better than being alone. This is just not true, however.

Real change and personal growth does not require the victim of abuse to change the abuser. It requires that the victim of abuse learn to focus on his or her needs and on getting help to ensure his or her emotional/psychological and/or physical safety. Issues left over from abandonment wounds left unresolved from one’s childhood can definitely play a large role in these types of relationships.

It is so important to understand, however, if you are being abused, that you cannot change the abuser and that you cannot rescue the abuser. The rescue needed is that you need to rescue yourself. The change needed that matters most is the change that you need to seek in the resolving of unresolved wounds from your childhood.

Abusers in the active throes of abusing do not know what love is. To them, love is power and control. Love is all about them. Love is your allowing them to treat you with disrespect and to demand from you what they really need to learn to provide for themselves.

The reality of the focus placed on abusers is that, in their own narcissistic false-sense of entitlement they injure others with little or no regard to or for them. They lack empathy. They are erratic. They can be charming and then they can be demanding, raging, screaming lunatics. They are wounded children in adult bodies. They need help. You cannot help them. All the focus in the world put on an abuser by his or her victim can’t help the abuser and won’t help you either.

The reality of the focus on abusers is that the victims of abuse must ever be on guard for that moment, any moment, out of the clear blue sky when an abuser will “go off” and paint the sky red in his or her life.

The truth about the focus on the abuser is the victim needs to focus much more on him/herself and what he/she needs. The victim needs to get clear about what action he/she needs to take and how to be safe. This is more important than the self-defeating and self-negating focus on the abuser.

How many victims of abuse are over-focusing on their abusers without even realizing it? That is not way to live. It is not way for children to have to live either. It is detrimental to the victim to not focus more on his/her own needs and safety along with his/her own mental health.

Abusers focus more than enough on themselves. They don’t need anyone else’s equal focus lest they usurp every waking moment, thought, and feeling from their victims. We live in a world, whose individual societies find that the more they focus on the proliferating reality of wide-spread abuse, the more tolerated the intolerable seems to become.

We have lost our way. We need to focus on that. We need to focus on the two-sided solution – the one that will keep victims safe and help them focus on themselves and the one that will help abusers come to understand the abuse they perpetrate, get help, and stop the abuse.

Remember, we do, in fact, teach people how to treat us. No, we don’t say “hey abuse me”, but if we happen to be abused and we don’t set a firm boundary that either is up-held or we will remove ourselves from the situation and not tolerate another episode of abuse, we are – no matter how unintentionally – telling that abuser that we aren’t prepared to stop his or her abuse so why should he or she feel the need to stop the way they are abusing?

This is all an abuser needs, that, and “unchallenged privacy and secrets” to continue to abuse with impunity. Perhaps we need to focus more clearly on this?

© A.J. Mahari, January 25, 2009