Abusive power and control

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.[21] Power and control is generally present with violent physical and sexual abuse.[22]

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.[7] 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 onto the victim, or survivor, and the denigration and negative projections become incorporated into the survivor's self-image.[7]

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.[7]

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 of violent and non-violent relationships[23][3]

Power and control in violent relationships[24]

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."[3]

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.[25] 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.[26]

At its most effective, the abuser creates intimidation and fear through unpredictable and inconsistent behavior.[7] 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.[27]

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.[25] For example, threatening to use a gun or simply displaying the weapon is a form of intimidation and coercive control.[28]

An effective means of ensuring control and power over another is to control their access to money. One method is to prevent the victim 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.[25]

Emotional abuse includes name-calling, playing mind games, putting the victim down, or humiliating the individual. The goals are to make the person feel badly about themselves, feel guilty, or think that they are crazy.[25] Various studies done by psychologists, such as Angela Kent and Glenn Waller, as well as Hart and Bassard, have found more connections between emotional abuse in childhood being carried into adulthood in professional and personal lives. [29]

Another element of psychological control is the isolation of the victim from the outside world.[22] 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.[25] It can include insisting on knowing where they are and requiring permission for medical care. The abuser exhibits hypersensitive and reactive jealousy.[22]

The abuser may deny the abuse occurred in order 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.[25]

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.[25]

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".[25]

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 upon its network of informal collaborators,[30] (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".

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:[34]

1. 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 that is indicative of psychopathic behaviour, and as a new employee one might perceive the psychopath to be helpful and even benevolent.
2. Assessment – psychopath will weigh one up according to one's usefulness, and one 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 for protection against attacks)
3. Manipulation – psychopath will create a scenario of "psychopathic fiction" where positive information about themselves and negative disinformation about others will be created, where one's role as a part of a network of pawns or patrons will be used and one will be groomed into accepting the psychopath's agenda.
4. Confrontation – the psychopath will use techniques of character assassination to maintain an agenda, and one will be either discarded as a pawn or used as a patron
5. Ascension – one's role as a patron in the psychopath's quest for power will be discarded, and the psychopath will usurp a position of power and prestige from anyone who once supported them.

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 is useful to anyone trying to extricate themselves 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.[39]

Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own mental manipulation style:[40]

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.[39]

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 the source of those emotions 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 one's 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.[41]

The expression has been used to describe the tactics used by pimps and gang members to control their victims,[42] as well as to describe the behavior of an abusive narcissist who tries to win the confidence of a victim.[43][44] In 2016, Claire Strutzenberg performed a study researching "love bombing" within the young adult age group 18 to 30 at college. She found in this study that this age group tended to communicate regularly at the start of the relationship, but as the relationship went on, one of the partners tended to passively push more toward being more dominant over the other partner gradually working toward "love bombing." [45]

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".[46]

In intimate relationships, mind games can be used to undermine one partner's belief in the validity of their own perceptions,[47] often referred to as 'gaslighting'. Personal experience may be denied and driven from memory;[48] 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.[49] Both sexes have equal opportunities for such verbal coercion,[50] which may be carried out unconsciously as a result of the need to maintain one's own self-deception.[51]

A primary strategy the narcissist uses to assert control, particularly within their family, is to create divisions among individuals. This weakens and isolates each of 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.[52]