The Subtle Emotional Abuse That Happens in Intimate Relationships

Hermes Solenzol
3 hours ago
7 min read

The nasty details of emotional abuse

Thunderstorm over an islet in the Caribbean. Photo by the author.

Monsters in Love

I am reading Monsters In Love (Menakem, 2023) a book recommended to my wife by her therapist. My wife bought the ebook on Amazon and somehow it ended up in my kindle.

Monsters In Love, by Resmaa Menakem, is one more book about how to heal relationships in trouble. However, it takes an original approach to this, disagreeing with much of the conventional advice on couples therapy. The main thesis of the book is that relationships are en endless source of trouble—hence the title—but that this needs to be accepted as a fact and used as an opportunity for personal growth.

I started reading the book and was immediately hooked. I like unconventional ideas, and the main thesis of the book is consistent with my personal experience in 34 years of marriage and several polyamorous relationships.

Another thing that I like is that the author refrains from blaming any particular gender, a breath of fresh air in the midst of a gender war in which either men are blamed for every evil under the sun, or women are pushed into their traditional submissive roles. In fact, many of the example as same-sex couples, both male and female. The author also emphasizes that most abuse in relationships is mutual, which agrees with the evidence I have seen.

It’s not that I agree with the author on everything. For one thing, he disapproves of ethical non-monogamy (ENM), seeing as a way to bail out of the noble, altruistic struggle that for him should be at the core of any relationship. He probably has no experience with ENM or polyamory, either personally or as a couples therapist. Regardless, his book is full of great ideas that can be applied to relationships between any number of partners. I am using it to improve my relationship with both my wife and my newly found lover.

Clean pain and dirty pain

I will not discuss the entire book here, just chapter 15, Monsters Operate on Vibes, which I found particularly illuminating.

Another central idea of the book is that relationship problems generate pain, but we have a choice between clean pain and dirty pain.

Clean pain happens when we choose to confront the basic problems of the relationship and stay with them, using them to understand each other and achieve personal growth. I am halfway through the book and, so far, I haven’t found a clear explanation of how to do this. However, it fits with my life philosophy of the Way of the Warrior, which consists in using any problem in life to understand and improve myself; or, in the lingo of the Way of the Warrior, to gather personal power.

Dirty pain is explained more clearly. It’s what happens when we push our partners to change according to our wishes, using all kinds of dirty tricks to coerce, bully or blackmail them. This entails acts of subtle cruelty in the relationship, some of which are described in chapter 15.

Sliming

The first of these acts of sliming:

“We send our partner a vibe that conveys disrespect, devaluation, or dismissal, but without using nasty words or negative tone. […] Then we feign ignorance, pretend that we did nothing, and accuse our partner of overreacting. […] Sliming messages are often communicated with an ambiguous gesture or look or tone.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

This agrees with a common idea in relationship therapy: that the worst sign of trouble in a relationship is mutual contempt. What is new here is that this contempt is often expressed in subtle ways, so subtle that they would be missed by people outside the relationship.

Unlike the commonplace assertion that couples have trouble because of problems in communication, Resmaa states that most couples communicate perfectly well. The problem is that they don’t like what is being communicated. They have many years of close interaction in which they have perfected understanding each other’s words, voice tone and body language, to the point that non-verbal messages become more important than what it’s actually said. These non-verbal cues are the ones used for sliming.

“Sliming is a classic form of commonplace cruelty in committed relationships. No direct physical harm gets inflicted, but psychological and emotional harm do.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

Overpowering

“Overpowering involves being so assertive or repetitive or over-communicative with your partner that they become uncomfortable. This commonly includes bullying, nagging, overexplaining, lecturing, or simply talking too loudly or slowly, as if your partner has a hearing disorder.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

One version of this is what I call the wall of words: speaking continuously for a long time, not to convey some complex idea, but to overwhelm your partner and not let them speak. Once, an administrator at my work, an ex-cop, used the wall of words on me, talking over me every time I tried to say something. When he started throwing in threats, I just walked out of his office, never to come back.

In more benign cases, people use the wall of words because they become anxious and talking non-stop is a way to stop what they fear their partners are about to say.

In other cases, overpowering is a way to express contempt or to establish dominance over your partner. It reinforces a nasty dynamic in a conversation in which each person is struggling to say their piece instead of listening to the other person. The conversation becomes a power struggle and it’s likely to escalate into a nasty fight.

Underpowering

“Underpowering involves giving your partner only part of what you know they want or need, especially in conversations.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

What they may want from you is a sign that you care about them, that you are willing to listen to them.

The most common forms of underpowering are changing the subject to something you care about, doing something else while your partner is trying to talk to you, giving non-verbal signals that you don’t care about what they are saying, or ending the conversation prematurely or, even worse, right after you say your piece, without giving them an opportunity to respond.

“People often respond to overpowered messages with underpowered ones, and vice versa.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

Optimistic gaslighting

“Optimistic gaslighting is a faux sense of positivity that one partner performs for the other in order to avoid a very real conflict or challenge.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

The way this usually goes is your partner comes to you with a fear or a concern, not about you, but about something that happened to them and you play it down, minimizing it. Often, the response is patronizing, implying that you are getting overly upset about something that is not really all that important—hence the term gaslighting: this is something that is just in your mind, it’s not real.

Optimistic gaslighting may be done as a way to protect us from the anxiety of what happened to our partner. We don’t want to take on their fear. This is the opposite to empathy and compassion—we refuse to suffer with our partner. They are left with the feeling that we don’t care.

Another reason for this is to avoid having to take action to help our partner with their problem, particularly if we are part of that problem. It’s a form of abandonment. Or maybe we chose to be in denial.

Spirit murder

This is one the worse forms of emotional cruelty.

“Sprit murder, the most toxic of those moves, is a vibratory challenge to someone’s value or existence, often expressed (or accompanied) by words of contempt. The energetic message of spirit murder is: You’re worthless or subhuman. You don’t belong. You don’t deserve to belong.” Resmaa Menakem, Monsters In Love.

As a scientist, I don’t like words like “vibratory” or “energetic” because they sound like a New Age abuse of physics. However, the author explains in the book that he refers to the mapping of emotions in the body, which is a sound theory espoused by prestigious neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio (Damasio, 1999).

If sliming conveys contempt in an indirect way, sprit murder does so directly. It goes straight for our self-esteem, which is the form of emotional abuse most likely to cause emotional damage.

Spirit murder feels like a punch in the gut.

We may think that we can simply disregard spirit murder… “He’s just trying to hurt me.” But it’s not that simple.

Shame is an emotion that evolved in humans so we can be controlled by others and compelled to cooperate with our tribe (Martens et al., 2012). Shame acts as a warning of changes in our social status, which in hunter-gatherers tribes was essential for our survival and reproduction. The control that shame has on us happens unconsciously and involuntarily. Therefore, when somebody shames us, there is little we can do to keep this from affecting our self-esteem, particularly if it is done repeatedly by someone emotionally close to us.

Spirit murder is aptly named because it is psychologically toxic.

The challenge of loving ethically

Living ethically a romantic relationship is one of the hardest challenges that we face in life.

It’s just too easy to fall into the temptation to emotionally manipulate our partner.

Our fears, possessiveness and instinct of self-preservation continually prod us to bully, blackmail and berate the person we love the most. We need to constantly question our motives and our feelings, opting to be our better selves, to act with the utmost integrity.

References

Damasio AR (1999) The feeling of what happens : body and emotion in the making of consciousness, 1st Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Martens JP, Tracy JL, Shariff AF (2012) Status signals: adaptive benefits of displaying and observing the nonverbal expressions of pride and shame. Cognition & emotion 26:390–406.
Menakem R (2023) Monsters In Love - Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy—and What You Can Do About It. Las Vegas, Nevada: Central Recovery Press.