Covert Abuse: How Abusers Dehumanize Their Victims

Abuse does not have to be overt (physical) to be damaging. It can also be covert.

Abuse is almost always about control. Abusers exploit, insult, demean, manipulate, and control. In an effort to maintain control or re-assert it, the abuser resorts to a myriad of diabolically inventive schemes and mechanisms.

I met my ex-boyfriend about six years ago through an online dating service. He was attentive, charismatic and charming. He was also manipulative. He had the uncanny ability to make me think I was the greatest person to walk this earth since Jesus, and then in the same breath, turn around and make me think I was nothing without him.

He placed the world at my feet with gifts and trips financed by his mid-six-figure salary. We'd vacation in South Beach one weekend, and enjoy a Broadway play in New York the next. I would get a full body massage at The Red Door Spa at Saks Fifth Ave. one day, and go on a $2,000 shopping spree at Parisian the next. All of that might sound exciting on paper, but I was miserable.

The gifts came at the price of my sanity. He was very disrespectful, but always made it seem like I didn't know how to appreciate a good man. The trips always included highlights of his previous visitst there with other women.

The relationship took an emotional toll to the point where I would go to work chanting, "I am not a broken woman. I am not a broken woman..." When I talked to him at night, I would hang up the phone feeling emotionally exhausted from trying to convince him that I needed to be heard more than I needed the gifts. Oh, boy. Why did I say that? "See, that's what I mean. You're not used to stuff. You're used to dating men who don't know how to treat you or do anything for you. Everybody thinks you're so strong, but you're weak. Why else would you keep having kids with a man who didn't support them then or now? And you have the nerve to talk about kicking me to the curb? How many other brothas do you know with a million-dollar house and a Mercedes? Plus, you've ditched your friends. That makes me think that you think you're too good for them now that you're with me." I didn't ditch my friends. They got tired of me being tired of him, so they distanced themselves.

I had sunk to an all-time low in my dating life. I became a shell of myself. So much so, that he even asked what happened to the person he knew with the "tight" braids and no-nonsense attitude. I wanted to know the same thing. Where had she gone?

I needed to talk to someone to regain some clarity about who I was. And it needed to be someone who wasn't caught up in the glitz and glamour of the gifts he was buying. That someone was my childhood friend, Monica. I stopped at the post office on my way to work one morning, and dialed her number as soon as I merged back onto the freeway. I needed someone who would give it to me straight, no chaser. And I knew I could count on Monica to not sugarcoat a thing.

I wanted out of this relationship, but didn't know how to leave. I needed to be real when I talked to Monica. But as soon as she got on the phone, I started hemming and hawing and couldn't bring myself to tell the whole truth. Monica asked, "Girl, is he married"? Dang, can she wait for me to get it out? I did say that I called her so she could keep it real, right?

"What is it? Is he a preacher?"

"Yes, and yes."

Monica has a discerning spirit, so there was no need for me to try to back peddle. "You need to tell him... and remember, when a man can't be anything anywhere else, he can be somebody in the pulpit."

I guess that explained my ex-boyfriend's behavior. He was a minister who had been sat down from the pulpit for adultery, which I found out later. As a result, he was now going through a divorce. In his effort to retain or get back some sort of control in his life, he needed to control me. He'd lost everything that made him somebody. And in my quest to help him see the good he still had in himself, I put up with him belittling me to make himself look like the man.

I stood at my kitchen sink the morning after I talked to Monica, with Bishop T.D. Jakes preaching in the background, "If you can give it up, you can have it all." Peace surrounded me at the thought of breaking up with my now ex-boyfriend. I even saw a white light. Yes, the white light that people describe when they cross over, and then come back from the dead. Indeed a part of me died that day. But, another part of me was born. I broke up with him that day and have never looked back.