What I Tell You Three Times is True

Lewis Carroll is generally known more for his bizarre jaunts into cleverly written psychedelic fantasy than for deep psychological truths (despite being a logician, mathematician, and philosopher of some note in his day), but one line in his poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ stands out as weirdly fundamental to the human psyche. “What I tell you three times is true” may or may not have been intended as an incisive understanding of human perception, but the fact remains that we are susceptible to repetitious teaching. If someone in authority tells you something frequently enough, you start to believe it. Of course, if you subsequently find out that it is not true, you begin a whole painful, complicated process of cognitive dissonance and what is known as ‘deprogramming’ – but I’ll get to that later.

This post is not really about the wit and wisdom of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, though that certainly bears discussion – I may give him a post to himself at some point – but about the effects of emotional and psychological abuse on the self-perception of the survivor.

Yes, I said survivor, not victim. Coming out the other side of abuse means that you have to work to overthrow the effects, and that includes re-creating yourself in your own image. To be a victim bears the connotations of helplessness, depression, and lack of agency or control. A victim has their control stripped away from them by the abuser. To be a survivor, one must take back the control that has been stolen, and become a stronger person, psychologically speaking, than the aggressor. I will therefore here use the term ‘victim’ only when talking from the abuser’s perspective, and ‘survivor’ otherwise.

 

Firstly, I should point out that abusers do not always perpetrate abuse through active malice or hatred. Some abusers, especially caregivers (I will be speaking partly from experience here, so will mainly deal with caregiver-abuse in this post, though this applies to other types of relationship-abuse too), truly believe that they love their victims and are doing everything ‘in their best interests’. They tell themselves this pleasant, conscience-appeasing little mantra until they believe it, and anyone who tries to shake that belief will be met with a barrage of vicious emotional retaliation. The abuser will take the high ground and project their own true motivations onto the accuser without even being aware that they are doing so. Failing all else, they will fall back on the comfortable assumption that they know their victim best, and that therefore nothing anyone else says can have any possible bearing on this particular situation. This allows them to do two things:

1. Feel good about themselves (I am a righteous warrior for my child/ward)
2. Ignore everything that is said to them and place blame on the accuser (They don’t know what they’re talking about, they don’t know my child/ward like I do, they’re trying to separate us, they’re malicious, etc)

This is a self-perpetuating cycle. The more they are accused of hurting the victim, the more they tell themselves that they are in the right and that everyone else is either imagining things or actively lying. From this we see that even repetition of false information inside a person’s own mind is capable of cementing belief even when the reality of the situation is blatantly obvious to onlookers.

Now to the really difficult part – the repetition of belief does not stop inside the mind of the abuser. In order to keep the victim under their control (which, don’t forget, is often the way they believe the victim will be kept safe) they must create a reality that extends beyond their own belief. Already accustomed to the process of repetition-belief-truth, they use this same process on their victim. Especially when the caregiver is a parent abusing a child does this process work most efficiently. A child is genetically programmed to receive their most basic knowledge of the world from their parent/s in their formative years. A child who grows up with psychological abuse has no point of reference from which to challenge the concepts and beliefs they are being conditioned to accept.

As the child grows up, the caregiver understands only too well that their days are numbered as regards direct influence (in abuser-belief-speak this translates to “I have only a few more years to directly protect my child”). In order to keep the control for as long as possible, they resort to twisting the child’s inner understanding further and creating an entirely false self-perception in the victim.

Example #1:

A young teenager is told on multiple, frequent occasions that they have a “bad attitude”, that they are “defensive, insolent, angry, and hurtful” when they are not behaving in the exact way their abuser wishes. As the teenager reaches adulthood, this belief becomes deeply ingrained. Whenever they are not actively happy and cheerful they feel that they have been bad-tempered and hurtful to people around them. As a mature adult they often apologize to friends and lovers for being “angry” or “grumpy”, only to find that those around them have noticed no such behaviour.

Example #2:

A child is constantly told that they make mistakes “all the time”, and as they grow this continues and increases until they become convinced that they are “useless”, “hopeless”, and incapable of surviving in the world without the ‘help’ of the abuser, and even that nobody outside of the caregiver-relationship will ever truly understand or love them because they are so “difficult” and incompetent as a person. This exacerbates their anxiety until they become agoraphobic and depressed.

 

The self-perception of the survivor must undergo a fundamental change once they break free from the cycle of abuse. This includes learning to listen to the people who truly love them.

If your loved ones (post-escape) tell you that you are not a bad person, that you are not hurtful or angry by nature, you must learn to hear and take on board these new truths. Recognize that you have the right to re-create yourself as a survivor. This will be a long and difficult process, and sometimes extremely painful. It is hard for a person to come to realize that almost everything they were conditioned to believe about themselves is untrue, a reality woven by an abuser to keep them under control and not question their need to be ‘looked after’ and ‘helped’.

“What I tell you three times is true” might be How to Abuse Your Child 101, but it also works in reverse. As a survivor of emotional and psychological abuse, you need to write your own, new mantras. Tell yourself you are not a failure or a victim any longer. You are strong. You are complete. You are a good, loving person with huge potential. You are important. You are loved. You are you.

Deprogramming from conditioned abuse can take years. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. But there is always hope as long as you keep telling yourself the truth – that you are capable of winning, and that you deserve to win.