Abusive power and control (also controlling behavior, coercive control and sharp power) is the way that an abusive person gains and maintains power and control over another person, as a victim, in order to subject that person to psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse. The motivations of the abuser are varied, such as personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, devaluation, envy or just for the sake of it as the abuser may simply enjoy 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 (such as praise, superficial charm, flattery, ingratiation, love bombing, smiling, gifts, attention), negative reinforcement, intermittent or partial reinforcement, psychological punishment (such as nagging, silent treatment, swearing, threats, intimidation, emotional blackmail, guilt trips, inattention) and traumatic tactics (such as verbal abuse or explosive anger).
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 and divide and rule are other strategies that are often used. The victim may be plied with alcohol or drugs to help disorientate them.
Certain personality types feel particularly compelled to control other people.
Manipulators and abusers control their victims with a range of tactics, including positive reinforcement (such as praise, superficial charm, flattery, ingratiation, love bombing, smiling, gifts, attention), negative reinforcement, intermittent or partial reinforcement, psychological punishment (such as nagging, silent treatment, swearing, threats, intimidation, emotional blackmail, guilt trips, inattention) and traumatic tactics (such as verbal abuse or explosive anger).
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 and divide and rule are other strategies that are often used. The victim may be plied with alcohol or drugs 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 and a grandiose sense of self-worth. Due to their shallow affect and lack of remorse or empathy, they are well suited to con and/or manipulate others into complying with their wishes.
- Those with histrionic personality disorder need to be the center of attention; and in turn, draw people in so they may use (and eventually dispose of) 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 malevolent. 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
Control freaks are often perfectionists defending themselves against their own inner vulnerabilities in the belief that if they are not in total control they risk exposing themselves once more to childhood angst. Such persons manipulate and pressure others to change so as to avoid having to change themselves, and use power over others to escape an inner emptiness.
When a control freak's pattern is broken, the controller is left with a
terrible feeling of powerlessness but feeling their pain and fear
brings them back to themselves.
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 (crocodile tears), 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.
Manipulators may have:
- 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
Emotional blackmail is a term coined by psychotherapist Susan
Forward, about controlling people in relationships and the theory that fear, obligation and guilt (FOG) are the transactional dynamics
at play between the controller and the person being controlled.
Understanding these dynamics are useful to anyone trying to extricate
from the controlling behavior of another person, and deal with their own
compulsions to do things that are uncomfortable, undesirable,
burdensome, or self-sacrificing for others.
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.
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.
| Gain trust | Overinvolvement | Petty rules and jealousy | Manipulation, power and control | Traumatic bonding | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The potential abuser is attentive, loving, charming | > |
The abuser becomes overly involved in the daily life and use of time | > |
Rules begin to be inserted to begin control of the relationship. Jealousy is considered by the abuser to be "an act of love" | > |
The victim is blamed for the abuser's behavior and becomes coerced and manipulated | > |
Ongoing cycles of abuse can lead to traumatic bonding |
Tactics
Tactics of violent and non-violent relationships
Power and control in violent relationships
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:
- overt actions
- covert actions
- emotional control
- isolation
- economic control
- tactics
- restriction
- management privilege
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 Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work describe a five phase model of how a typical workplace psychopath climbs to and maintains power:
- Entry – psychopath will use highly developed social skills and charm to obtain employment into an organisation. At this stage it will be difficult to spot anything which is indicative of psychopathic behaviour, and as a new employee you might perceive the psychopath to be helpful and even benevolent.
- Assessment – psychopath will weigh you up according to your usefulness, and you could be recognised as either a pawn (who has some informal influence and will be easily manipulated) or a patron (who has formal power and will be used by the psychopath to protect against attacks)
- Manipulation – psychopath will create a scenario of "psychopathic fiction" where positive information about themselves and negative disinformation about others will be created, where your role as a part of a network of pawns or patrons will be utilised and you will be groomed into accepting the psychopath's agenda.
- Confrontation – the psychopath will use techniques of character assassination to maintain his/her agenda, and you will be either discarded as a pawn or used as a patron
- Ascension – your role as a patron in the psychopath's quest for power will be discarded, and the psychopath will take for himself/herself a position of power and prestige from anyone who once supported them.
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 (often children or older adults) 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.
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner.
Zersetzung
The practice of repression in Zersetzung comprised extensive and
secret methods of control and psychological manipulation, including
personal relationships of the target, for which the Stasi relied on its network of informal collaborators, (in German inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or IM), the State's power over institutions, and on operational psychology. Using targeted psychological attacks the Stasi tried to deprive a dissident of any chance of a "hostile action".
Serial killers
The main objective for one type of serial killer is to gain and exert power over their victim. Such killers are sometimes abused as children, leaving them with feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy as adults. Many power- or control-motivated killers sexually abuse their victims, but they differ from hedonistic killers in that rape is not motivated by lust (as it would be with a lust murder) but as simply another form of dominating the victim. Ted Bundy is an example of a power/control-oriented serial killer. He traveled around the United States seeking women to control.
Law
In December 2015, controlling or coercive behavior in an intimate or family relationship was made illegal in England and Wales.
