outlier
I’ve experienced a phenomenon that I haven’t witnessed anyone else talk about or make media about. Would love to see it explored as a plotline somewhere.
I once met this very shy, quiet, self-hating, very self-conscious person when she was 25. She didn’t think any of her thoughts or opinions were worth saying or listening to, she thought she was ugly and unlovable. She thought she didn’t deserve anything. She almost cried at anything and couldn’t even get herself to enter a lecture hall because of all the people. Here and there, it she hinted there were issues in the family, bullying at school, too. I had the impression I was talking to yet another person unfairly attacked and abused, as I had met many.
Through love, time, encouragement and other changes, she started blossoming. You could really tell that she now felt safe to be who she really is, and share things she was too ashamed to say before.
Unfortunately, the person she truly was wasn’t pleasant or nice at all. She was manipulative, physically abusive, a liar, and badmouthed people behind their back terribly. I found out that her parents didn’t abuse her; it was her terrorizing the home until she was put in a boarding school. I could also now see that she wasn’t necessarily bullied by people, but that they didn’t want to be around someone so mean and cruel, and who would overexeggarate normal rejection and criticism to look like the victim.
It wasn’t a case of bully becoming bully, the abused becoming the abused once they felt safe; no, I genuinely feel like with my encouragement, I had accidentally freed a dragon. It was like all the feedback of people who genuinely just couldn’t stand her unacceptable behavior shut her up, and my misguided “you’re great, you should be yourself, be confident” behaviors brought out what she had locked away.
Of course, she could have and should have found a middle way. You’re an asshole and get feedback about that? Just improve, instead of becoming a complete socially anxious recluse who is afraid to speak. It’s the other extreme of the spectrum. Likewise, if people encourage you and tell you you’re loved, no reason to go back to the other end of being an asshole.
I felt conned, in a way. I still can’t believe it. I just never saw anything like that. You usually meet people who went through some awful stuff, and they either just plainly admit it or even downplay it. Never before had I met someone whose brain twisted normal criticism around so hard that it caused a complete 180 and created a person full of shame and anxiety. I don’t even think she did it on purpose, I guess; she really thought she was being unfairly treated.
It’s harrowing to think about for me that maybe sometimes, what people think is abuse actually wasn’t and they really were too sensitive. I was biased because when she hinted at the familial abuse, I compared it to my shocking abuse. Only later did I find out she found being calmly sent to her room as punishment for acting out abusive. Was it dumb for me not to ask for specifics? I don’t know. Feels invasive. People should share on their own accord.
I don’t know, it’s still unbelievable to me. That yeah, I now understand why others did the things they did to you, that it was you who was wrong and needed to change, and that deep down you probably know it because why else would you be so anxious and full of self hatred and shame?
I felt like my love undid years of keeping someone absolutely messed up in control, even if it was a prison of their own making. The moral of the story obviously isn’t “what if victims deserved to be bullied?” or “never help someone love themselves more, they could secretly be awful and you’re encouraging their nasty side”, but, I don’t know.
I know there are many stories of people switching up in a relationship after a few years, after engagement, marriage etc., because they think the other person won’t run now, but this felt decidedly different. She didn’t put on an act for the first year, she was genuinely suffering. She didn’t hide her true self to keep me, it was genuinely locked away by her or shamed into submission by others. Her switch up wasn’t tied to a milestone or a dependency, and it was a slow transformation too. And while we both wanted to break up, she brought it up first, so this wasn’t about pretending long enough to get someone to stay before letting it out.
I could suddenly understand the other side of the very limited times she described a conflict to me, and could understand what likely actually happened. I could now understand what her parents meant. I could now understand that she was the abusive one in her relationship with her parents.
She was also the one to make me become critical about group therapy. Her group therapy was toxic people encouraging each other while the therapist said nothing to challenge it. When she told me about her sessions, it was always them encouraging each others’ worst nightmare scenario, paranoia etc. like that everyone hates them, that so and so stole from them, that their partner was cheating… how is that helpful? It was so irresponsible. She told them the most biased and twisted stuff about me and they did the same to her too, convincing her I had cheated when I hadn’t.
The crazy thing is, she was in that group for 5 years when we met, and she told me the therapist said she only started making progress when she met me. So it was really not a random change. It was me encouraging her.
It’s a crazy story, but I don’t really talk about it because it’s so easy to misconstrue it into me saying that I think people deserve bullying or to not believe abuse survivors. Obviously that’s not what I mean. She was probably just an outlier.
Unfortunately I have someone else in my vicinity that plays normal disagreements up like this, but luckily I am not dating them. They often go on about how toxic and abusive their family is and as an example say “When I told them to turn down the TV volume they were a bit grumpy” and when I asked if they did turn it down then, they apparently did. So??? What was the problem? My mum was never just a little grumpy, to say the least.