Techniques of mental abuse

I do not intend to get involved with endless (and pointless) academic debate about the meanings of particular words. This page is intended to help people who may be suffering mental abuse.

Most men are familiar with the "I'm not going to tell you why I'm angry with you, you've got to work it out for yourself" technique. What is going on here? It is designed to maximise his emotional suffering, while maintaining the moral high ground for herself. When contrasted with a direct confrontational approach of walking up to someone and saying "Why did you leave the toilet seat up?", the passive approach maximises the victim's emotional suffering in at least three ways. Firstly by prolonging and dramatising the dispute, it magnifies the seriousness of it. Secondly, the victim will probably attempt to discover what the issue is, and this will cause him to spend time dwelling upon all of his own perceived shortcomings and guilty secrets. He may even inadvertently confess to other 'crimes' in his efforts to discover what the issue is, and these can then be used against him in the future. Thirdly, the victim will feel helpless. He knows that he is being punished, but he doesn't know why, so he is not sure what he can do about it. As such, this can be a very effective instrument of interpersonal coercion and control.

In fact this is only a particularly blatant case of a more general phenomenon, which I am going to refer to as passive-aggressive hostility, or passive-aggressive manipulation. One of the main benefits of the passive-aggressive method is the fact that the victim never really knows precisely what is going on. He always has a vague feeling that something is wrong, for example that rumours are being spread about him behind his back, but the precise extent of the situation is never clear. In a group situation such as a workplace, it is never precisely clear who has been told, or what exactly has been said. It may not even be clear who is behind the vicious gossip. Make them suffer - keep them guessing. This situation, as I know from personal experience, can be very stressful, can produce feelings of extreme psychological discomfort, and over time may make the victim paranoid, defensive and distrustful of others, thus increasing their social isolation. The intention is to create a vague feeling of unease which is hard to pin down, and then to allow the victim to dwell and brood on this over a long period. One of the things I have to admire about passive-aggressive bullying, properly executed, is that the victim can end up socially isolating themselves.

By means of techniques such as those described here, it is possible to maintain a campaign of low-level psychological harassment against someone for years on end at virtually no cost to yourself. The idea is to create an atmosphere in which the victim constantly feels tense and uncomfortable, but there is nothing they can do about it, and no blame attaches to you. They cannot complain or even confront you about it, because you can simply deny it.