Abusive relationships where the abuser is a transparently horrible monster don’t tend to last long, because it becomes obvious to the victim very quickly that they need to head for the door. The ones that last are the ones where the abuser is an adept manipulator, who is able to elicit sympathy and attachment in the victim while constructing a prison of mental narratives in their head.
The hardest of these to escape from is the “nice guy” abuser, the kind of abuser whose manipulations revolve around framing themselves as good and virtuous while squeezing the psychological noose on the victim tighter and tighter. These are difficult to escape because by design they are hard to recognize as abusive while you’re in them, even while you’re being drained of life, liberty and happiness to the abuser’s benefit.
To escape from a nice guy abuser, it helps to actively push for things that they can’t say no to without blowing their cover. If he presents himself as a woke and sexually liberated feminist, for example, you can begin disrupting the web of nice guy narratives by saying you’d like to stop having sex with him, or that you want financial independence. Anything they desperately want to control but can’t say “no” to without the nice face mask slipping off. Their desperate attempts to manipulate you back into the position you were in previously will expose them, and make it much easier to find your way to the door through the fog of manipulation.
The escape route from the nice guy fascism of liberal narrative managers operates in much the same way...........read more.........
