Identifying with Your Abuser: Abuser-Victim Relationships

It is difficult to discuss the behaviors associated with victims towards their abusers in a manner outside of professional journals and workshops. But, the situation in the United States today warrants a close look at abuser - victims behaviors that are in a sense, mentally speaking, adaptive. The popular television shows Survivor and other such imitative programs are in a sense behaviors of victims when no longer being abused.

The victims behavior towards his abuser is one of identification. The abuser has deep seated psychotic urges that are uncontrollable. His avenue of escape is to focus in on a weak or dependent person. His attacks produce similar feelings of euphoria as a mass killer. But the euphoria is only short term and therefore the abuse continues for as long as the victim survives or the abuse is left uncaught. Regardless of who eventually dies, gets caught, or escapes, the victim will without much trouble begin to duplicate his abuser's personality, likes, wants and actions. Victims identify with their abusers because their abuser had wielded power over them and were therefore powerful. Victims who escape want to be as powerful as their abusers.

A popular Alfred Hitchcock thriller, Psycho, builds on that premise of psychotic identification through abuse with one's abusers. The hotel owner's son imitates his mother to the point of dressing like her and talking like her. His violent attacks against the woman in the shower were his mother's rage at the thought of her son being with a woman other than herself, sexually. The son has obviously been abused by mother from the moment of birth, probably. The assumption is easy to make since Hitchcock portrays him as secretive, amiable, party manners , professional in his tasks, and surviving mentally with the anguish of conflicting emotions. His mother did, of course, abuse him, but, she was such a refined lady and taught him all the refinements of keeping a hotel. Somewhere she must have also told him of the impropriety of sleeping with your mother, but she also told him of her disgust at the thought of his sleeping with another woman. Such are the conflicting patterns of behavior that form a psychotic maniacal killer. The victim identifies with his abuser because his abuser is more powerful, smarter, than he.

While the popular genres of television and media play on that theme repeatedly, the real world of political futures is almost dependent on it. But in that arena we have what is called getting over it and not holding a grudge. Not only that , we have in the political arena scrutiny from agents, and other media that make it difficult for the abused victim of a political event to duplicate his abusers behaviors in quite the same way as a Psycho or a Survivor contestant.

Here is where the point of this article is going, are we being made to bear the brunt of a victim or of a personage who mentally identifies with being a victim using all the powers at his disposal once he perceives himself free of any control from his perceived abuser? Okay, I am looking at the erratic almost bizarre stock market and the billions digested by it with no accountability and CEO's playing the part of freed victims swiping whatever they can get their hands on and get away with. It is like Survivor gone mad.

I find it very disturbing to view victims fawning over their former abusers. I think that those of us in the United States who have not had a bath in George Orwell's 1984 leap into the future or who are not indoctrinated by Survivor mentalities should be very cautious when dealing with those who are obviously exhibiting those behaviors.