Abusive power and control
Abusive power and control is the way that an abusive person gains and maintains power and control over another person in order to subject that victim to psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse. The motivations of the abuser are varied and can include devaluation, envy, personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, or just for the sake of the enjoyment of exercising power and control.
Controlling abusers use tactics to exert power and control over their victims. The tactics themselves are psychologically and sometimes physically abusive. Control may be helped through economic abuse thus limiting the victim's actions as they may then lack the necessary resources to resist the abuse. The goal of the abuser is to control and intimidate the victim or to influence them to feel that they do not have an equal voice in the relationship.
Manipulators and abusers control their victims with a range of tactics, including positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, intermittent or partial reinforcement, psychological punishment and traumatic tactics.
The vulnerabilities of the victim are exploited with those who are particularly vulnerable being most often selected as targets. Traumatic bonding can occur between the abuser and victim as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change and a climate of fear. An attempt may be made to normalise, legitimise, rationalise, deny, or minimise the abusive behaviour, or blame the victim for it.
Isolation, gaslighting, mind games, lying, disinformation, propaganda, destabilisation, brainwashing and divide and rule are other strategies that are often used. The victim may be plied with alcohol or drugs or deprived of sleep to help disorientate them.
Certain personality types feel particularly compelled to control other people.
Personality psychology
In the study of personality psychology, certain personality disorders display characteristics involving the need to gain compliance or control over others:- Those with antisocial personality disorder tend to display glibness, giving them a grandiose sense of self-worth. Due to their callous and unemotional traits, they are well suited to con and/or manipulate others into complying with their wishes.
- Those with borderline personality disorder tend to display black-and-white thinking and no sense of self-worth.
- Those with histrionic personality disorder need to be the center of attention; and in turn, draw people in so they may use their relationship.
- Those with narcissistic personality disorder have an inflated self-importance, hypersensitivity to criticism and a sense of entitlement that compels them to persuade others to comply with their requests. To maintain their self-esteem, and protect their vulnerable true selves, narcissists need to control others' behavior – particularly that of their children seen as extensions of themselves.
- Those with sadistic personality disorder derive pleasure from the distress caused by their aggressive, demeaning and cruel behavior towards others. They have poor ability to control their reactions and become enraged by minor disturbances, with some sadists being more severely abusive. They use a wide range of behaviors to inappropriately control others, ranging from hostile glances, threats, humiliation, coercion, and restricting others' autonomy. Often the purpose of their behavior is to control and intimidate others. The sadistic individual are likely rigid in their beliefs, intolerant of other races or other "out-groups", authoritarian, and. They may seek positions in which they are able to exert power over others, such as a judge, army sergeant or psychiatrist who misuse their positions of power to control or brutalize others. For instance, a psychiatrist may institutionalize a patient by misusing mental health legislation.
Control freaks
In terms of personality-type theory, control freaks are very much the Type A personality, driven by the need to dominate and control. An obsessive need to control others is also associated with antisocial personality disorder.
Psychological manipulation
Braiker identified the following ways that manipulators control their victims:- Positive reinforcement: includes praise, superficial charm, superficial sympathy, excessive apologizing, money, approval, gifts, attention, facial expressions such as a forced laugh or smile, and public recognition.
- Negative reinforcement: involves removing one from a negative situation as a reward, e.g. "You won't have to do your homework if you allow me to do this to you."
- Intermittent or partial reinforcement: Partial or intermittent negative reinforcement can create an effective climate of fear and doubt. Partial or intermittent positive reinforcement can encourage the victim to persist.
- Punishment: includes nagging, yelling, the silent treatment, intimidation, threats, swearing, emotional blackmail, the guilt trip, sulking, crying, and playing the victim.
- Traumatic one-trial learning: using verbal abuse, explosive anger, or other intimidating behavior to establish dominance or superiority; even one incident of such behavior can condition or train victims to avoid upsetting, confronting or contradicting the manipulator.
- a strong need to attain feelings of power and superiority in relationships with others
- a want and need to feel in control
- a desire to gain a feeling of power over others in order to raise their perception of self-esteem.
Emotional blackmail
Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own mental manipulation style:
| Type | Examples |
| Punisher's threat | Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you. |
| Self-punisher's threat | Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself. |
| Sufferer's threat | Eat the food I cooked for you. I was saving it for myself. I wonder what will happen now? |
| Tantalizer's threat | Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get a really yummy dessert. |
There are different levels of demands – demands that are of little consequence, demands that involve important issues or personal integrity, demands that affect major life decisions, and/or demands that are dangerous or illegal.
Silent treatment
The silent treatment is sometimes used as a control mechanism. When so used, it constitutes a passive-aggressive action characterized by the coupling of nonverbal but nonetheless unambiguous indications of the presence of negative emotion with the refusal to discuss the scenario triggering those emotions and, when those emotions' source is unclear to the other party, occasionally the refusal to clarify it or even to identify that source at all. As a result, the perpetrator of the silent treatment denies the victim both the opportunity to negotiate an after-the-fact settlement of the grievance in question and the ability to modify his/her future behavior to avoid giving further offense. In especially severe cases, even if the victim gives in and accedes to the perpetrator's initial demands, the perpetrator may continue the silent treatment so as to deny the victim feedback indicating that those demands have been satisfied. The silent treatment thereby enables its perpetrator to cause hurt, obtain ongoing attention in the form of repeated attempts by the victim to restore dialogue, maintain a position of power through creating uncertainty over how long the verbal silence and associated impossibility of resolution will last, and derive the satisfaction that the perpetrator associates with each of these consequences.Love bombing
The expression has been used to describe the tactics used by pimps and gang members to control their victims, as well as to describe the behavior of an abusive narcissist who tries to win the confidence of a victim.Mind games
One sense of mind games is a largely conscious struggle for psychological one-upmanship, often employing passive–aggressive behavior to specifically demoralize or dis-empower the thinking subject, making the aggressor look superior; also referred to as "power games".In intimate relationships, mind games can be used to undermine one partner's belief in the validity of their own perceptions. Personal experience may be denied and driven from memory; and such abusive mind games may extend to denial of the victim's reality, social undermining, and the trivializing of what is felt to be important. Both sexes have equal opportunities for such verbal coercion, which may be carried out unconsciously as a result of the need to maintain one's own self-deception.
Divide and conquer
A primary strategy the narcissist uses to assert control, particularly within their family, is to create divisions among individuals. This weakens and isolates them, making it easier for the narcissist to manipulate and dominate. Some are favoured, others are scapegoated. Such dynamics can play out in a workplace setting.In an intimate relationship
Background
The power and control "wheel" was developed in 1982 by the Domestic Abuse Program in Minneapolis to explain the nature of abuse, to delineate the forms of abuse used to control another person, and to educate people with the goal of stopping violence and abuse. The model is used in many batterer intervention programs, and is known as the Duluth model. Power and control is generally present with violent physical and sexual abuse.Control development
Often the abusers are initially attentive, charming and loving, gaining the trust of the individual that will ultimately become the victim, also known as the survivor. When there is a connection and a degree of trust, the abusers become unusually involved in their partner's feelings, thoughts and actions. Next, they set petty rules and exhibit "pathological jealousy". A conditioning process begins with alternation of loving followed by abusive behavior. According to Counselling Survivors of Domestic Abuse, "These serve to confuse the survivor leading to potent conditioning processes that impact on the survivor's self-structure and cognitive schemas." The abuser projects responsibility for the abuse on to the victim, or survivor, and the denigration and negative projections become incorporated into the survivor's self-image.Traumatic bonding occurs as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change.
Tactics
Controlling abusers use multiple tactics to exert power and control over their partners. According to Jill Cory and Karen McAndless-Davis, authors of When Love Hurts: A Woman's Guide to Understanding Abuse in Relationships: Each of the tactics within the power and control wheel are used to "maintain power and control in the relationship. No matter what tactics your partner uses, the effect is to control and intimidate you or to influence you to feel that you do not have an equal voice in the relationship."Coercion and threats
A tool for exerting control and power is the use of threats and coercion. The victim may be subject to threats that they will be left, hurt, or reported to welfare. The abuser may threaten that they will commit suicide. They may also coerce them to perform illegal actions or to drop charges that they may have against their abuser. Strangulation, a particularly pernicious abusive behavior in which the abuser literally has the victim's life in his hands, is an extreme form of abusive control. Sorenson and colleagues have called strangulation the domestic violence equivalent of waterboarding, which is widely considered to be a form of torture.At its most effective, the abuser creates intimidation and fear through unpredictable and inconsistent behavior. Absolute control may be sought by any of four types of sadists: explosive, enforcing, tyrannical, or spineless sadists. The victims are at risk of anxiety, dissociation, depression, shame, low self-esteem and suicidal ideation.
Intimidation
Abused individuals may be intimidated by the brandishing of weapons, destruction of their property or other things, or use of gestures or looks to create fear. For example, threatening to use a gun or simply displaying the weapon is a form of intimidation and coercive control.Economic abuse
An effective means of ensuring control and power over another is to control their access to money. One method is to prevent the abusee from getting or retaining a job. Controlling their access to money can also be done by withholding information and access to family income, taking their money, requiring the person to ask for money, giving them an allowance, or filing a power of attorney or conservatorship, particularly in the case of economic abuse of the elderly.Emotional abuse
Emotional abuse include name-calling, playing mind games, putting the victim down, or humiliating the individual. The goals are to make the person feel bad about themselves, feel guilty or think that they are crazy.Isolation
Another element of psychological control is the isolation of the victim from the outside world. Isolation includes controlling a person's social activity: who they see, who they talk to, where they go, and any other method to limit their access to others. It may also include limiting what material is read. It can include insisting on knowing where they are and requiring permission for medical care. The abuser exhibits hypersensitive and reactive jealousy.Minimizing, denying and blaming
The abuser may deny the abuse occurred to attempt to place the responsibility for their behavior on the victim. Minimizing concerns or the degree of the abuse is another aspect of this control.Using children and pets
Children may be used to exert control by the abuser threatening to take the children or making them feel guilty about the children. It could include harassing them during visitation or using the children to relay messages. Another controlling tactic is abusing pets.Using privilege
Using "privilege" means that the abuser defines the roles in the relationship, makes the important decisions, treats the individual like a servant and acts like the "master of the castle".In the workplace
A power and control model has been developed for the workplace, divided into the following categories:Bullying
An essential prerequisite of bullying is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power.Workplace psychopaths
The authors of the book ' describe a five phase model of how a typical workplace psychopath climbs to and maintains power:Caring professions
According to anti-bullying author and activist Tim Field, bullies are attracted to the caring professions, such as medicine, by the opportunities to exercise power over vulnerable clients, and over vulnerable employees and students.Institutional abuse
Institutional abuse is the maltreatment of a person from a system of power. This can range from acts similar to home-based child abuse, such as neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and hunger, to the effects of assistance programs working below acceptable service standards, or relying on harsh or unfair ways to modify behavior.Human trafficking
The use of coercion by perpetrators and traffickers involves the use of extreme control. Perpetrators expose the victim to high amounts of psychological stress induced by threats, fear, and physical and emotional violence. Tactics of coercion are reportedly used in three phases of trafficking: recruitment, initiation, and indoctrination. During the initiation phase, traffickers use foot-in-the-door techniques of persuasion to lead their victims into various trafficking industries. This manipulation creates an environment where the victim becomes completely dependent upon the authority of the trafficker. Traffickers take advantage of family dysfunction, homelessness, and history of childhood abuse to psychologically manipulate women and children into the trafficking industry.The goal of a trafficker is to turn a human being into a slave. To do this, perpetrators employ tactics that can lead to the psychological consequence of learned helplessness for the victims, where they sense that they no longer have any autonomy or control over their lives. Traffickers may hold their victims captive, expose them to large amounts of alcohol or use drugs, keep them in isolation, or withhold food or sleep. During this time the victim often begins to feel the onset of depression, guilt and self-blame, anger and rage, and sleep disturbances, PTSD, numbing, and extreme stress. Under these pressures, the victim can fall into the hopeless mental state of learned helplessness.
Children are especially vulnerable to these developmental and psychological consequences of trafficking because they are so young. In order to gain complete control of the child, traffickers often destroy physical and mental health of the children through persistent physical and emotional abuse. Stockholm syndrome is also a common problem for girls while they are trafficked, which can hinder them from both trying to escape, and moving forward in psychological recovery programs.