Breaking the cycle of abuse is one of the primary goals of preventing abuse, but we must know the reasons for this pattern. How do victims resort to harming others?
Abuse can happen over a short period, or it can last for years. Either way, it’s unfair. Sometimes, it is difficult to distinguish between the victim and the attacker. But the point here is to understand why victims become abusers later in life.
Why does the pattern persist?
Healing from abuse, whether physical, emotional, or otherwise, requires strength and perseverance. It is easier than you think to adopt negative traits from an abuser. Let’s take a look at why victims sometimes become abusers.
- Unhealthy thoughts of love
Many people who were abused as children and for long periods of time have an unhealthy view of love. If you have been physically abused in the name of love, it is common to have a skewed view of love in adulthood.
Relationships often set the stage for physical and emotional abuse. If your parents were physically abusive to you, it may seem normal if your partner is physically abusive to you as well.
If you find all of this normal, you may become abusive to your children in this way, thus continuing the cycle of abuse based on your idea of love.
- Defense
Abuse has a way of creating shame, but then when you get stronger, you may develop defensiveness. Again, looking at relationships and abuse can shed light on how defensiveness grows from previous submissive behavior.
During abuse, fear can keep you humble. But after escaping abusive situations, your outward appearance may become rough. When in a healthy relationship, you can become abusive to your partner out of fear.
Instead of waiting for the next abuse to happen, you are already angry and frustrated. You become the abuser.
- Lack of trust
Most of the time, the abuse involves being lied to by friends, family, or co-workers. As an adult survivor of abuse, you may have difficulty trusting.
Sometimes this distrust manifests itself in an inability to believe the flattering statements of others. You have been subjected to emotional abuse so severe that you always think there is a malicious motive behind the nice things people say. While sometimes compliments are indeed empty, not all of them are.
However, victims of abuse have difficulty distinguishing between the two, and over time, they develop a lack of trust and can display abusive behavior in response.
Statistics show that half of people who experience abuse will also experience domestic violence in relationships later.
- Stuck in a victim mentality
Victims of abuse can become stuck in a victim mentality if they have difficulty healing. Even though they have been abused in the past, their feelings of being wronged by their abuser can turn into entitlement.
When you feel entitled as an adult, you can begin to use that entitlement to get what you want – you use manipulation. As we know, manipulation is a behavior that appears in cases of emotional abuse. Thus the victim becomes the aggressor, and the cycle continues.
- Normalize negative reactions
Another way victims can become abusers is by normalizing behaviors such as negative reactions. Some families who have been verbally abused will continue to use the same verbal usage and describe it as a solution to normal reaction or successful parenting.
If you yell at your child all the time because that’s how your parents raised you, you are continuing this abusive pattern. You may even normalize overreacting when your parents and grandparents used this behavior.
But it is not normal to overreact or scream during confrontations. In fact, it is harmful.
- False justification
Abuse of any kind can be wrongly justified by cause-and-effect explanations. For example, if a child throws a tantrum, the abusive parent may say that physical violence is an appropriate punishment.
In the mind of the aggressor, the only way to get a point is through harsh physical means, but this is not true. Victims of physical assault often use the same justification to punish others as well.
This cycle of physical abuse can continue for many generations if it is not confronted and corrected.
