I recently had a run-in with someone who turned out to be totally emotionally abusive. I had a few warning signs, but I waited to see how they would play out. For example, she would ask me the same questions over and over, apparently unknowingly. A simple short-term memory problem? Or was it significant that they were almost invariably questions about whether I had done something she asked of me – that it seemed almost as if she was incapable of hearing that I was holding up my end of things?

Then in one incredible, gloriously insane conversation, she laid all my doubts to rest. We had been trying to arrange a time and place to meet. She, perhaps in order to offer another warning, had said she would find a midpoint between our locations and then promptly chose a cafe near her house. I had to reschedule, and that really made all her warning signs hit the fan.

I asked if we could meet someplace central to us both when we rescheduled, and she took the position that if I wasn’t willing to travel 20 to 30 minutes then I didn’t want it bad enough. She demanded a list of reasons that I didn’t want to take the bus or drive in rush hour traffic to get there, and then told me she didn’t want to hear my excuses. She began cutting me off every time I tried to say anything, telling me again that she didn’t want to hear excuses and then launching right back into haranguing me. She free-associated at length about how crystal meth addicts will go to any lengths to get a fix (the implication, I guess, being that I should be just as willing to get something healthy). She demanded to know what “too far” really meant, whether Guerneville (90 minutes a way) or New York (3,000 miles) were “too far”. When I answered in the affirmative, she accused me of being sarcastic. Oh, the fun we had together! (See? That’s sarcasm.)

She gave me an incredible gift that day. I realized that I hadn’t had a conversation that triggering since I last spoke to one of my abusers, and went over the conversation repeatedly to figure out what was wrong. I realized I could identify specific abusive tactics she had used:

* The Bait and Switch. In this case, saying that she would come up with a central location, then choosing a place right by her and browbeating me at length when I asked her to change it.

* The Repeating Rant. Repeating her problem with me, or her argument, over and over and over. Especially when paired with:

* Stonewalling. Shutting someone down completely when they try to talk. When paired with the Repeating Rant, you could call this The Filibuster. Making up names for things is fun!

* Projecting. Casting someone in an old role and dumping all the baggage from that relationship on them. Especially when refusing to allow them to be anyone else (like themselves). Like by pairing it with The Filibuster! In this case, it became clear that her inability to hear that I was doing my part, and her insistence that I was unwilling to “do whatever it takes,” resulted from projecting some old difficult relationship onto me to the point that she couldn’t even hear me anymore.

* Boundary Rejecting. The whole conversation started out with me saying that this location wouldn’t work for me. That’s a boundary. She did the exact same thing that my abusive former co-parent used to do when I said I couldn’t have our kid some specific extra night: keep asking me why not, keep arguing with every reason, and then come up with an exaggerated or extreme reason behind it (you don’t want this badly enough, you don’t actually care about the kid, et cetera).

* Changing the Rules/Changing the Story. All of a sudden, we can only work together if I am willing to go meet her at this one particular place and time. All of a sudden, the story is that I am challenging her, or that I don’t want to work together, or that I have blocked her a thousand times. It’s usually a bad sign if you have a story you’ve made up about something that’s going on and you’re still in the middle of it. Like, you’ve been talking to someone for two minutes and you suddenly are introducing a brand-new story about how they are resisting you and they don’t want it bad enough and crystal meth addicts and the first step and they should do this and that or else nothing? Maybe come back to the present. You know. Just for a minute.

* Make Crazy Stakes. If I stuck to my guns, my ex-co-parent would respond by telling me that she didn’t want people around our child who weren’t supportive of both of them so if I wasn’t willing to support her by having him that night then maybe I just shouldn’t get to see him anymore. Ridiculous for a number of reasons: she had a lot of other support people who would take him, I was already being supportive by providing bedroom/meals/clothes/tuition/time, and also just because it’s emotional blackmail. It’s a ridiculous imaginary zero-sum power game: if you’re not willing to do this small thing, then you get NOTHING. If you’re not willing to do everything that I say, down to this small level, then you lose EVERYTHING.

It’s taking it very quickly from the smallest detail to the biggest possible level to totally bewilder people and throw them off guard. If you can convince them, even briefly, to go with you into this insane world where that is at all a reasonable way to look at it, then of course they have to choose to do what you say. I don’t visit that world anymore.

My boss was having similar problems recently with a presenter who liked to filibuster to hide her bait and switch, and I realized that these labels were as helpful to me as I had hoped. I noticed the bait and switch immediately, and it alerted me to look for other evidence that she was being emotionally abusive. And boy, did we find a lot. So next time, we’ll look at how this works on real examples of phone calls and emails from deep-seated emotional abusers. Same bat-time, same bat-channel!!