Insidious Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

i cannot truly confirm or deny if this happens to other people, but when most of us hear "domestic violence," i think our brains go to one very specific scene. someone hits their partner. something gets thrown. there's a black eye, the police get called, and everyone finally agrees something is wrong.

that scene is real. physical violence is real and it is dangerous. but that is later level stuff, and once we’re at the level of physical violence i've started thinking of it as the final boss fight. and if you're only trained to recognize the “boss fight”, you miss the seventeen levels before it; the ones most people are actually living in, including some of the people reading this right now.

i keep coming back to an old psychology experiment when i try to explain this, not because i think it proves anything, but because the shape of it feels familiar. in 1971, philip zimbardo took a group of ordinary stanford students, split them into "guards" and "prisoners," and put them in a fake prison in a basement. within days, some of the guards were humiliating and psychologically breaking down the prisoners. the study got shut down early because the harm had stopped being theoretical. zimbardo's original read was that the system did it; give people a role inside a structure that rewards control and punishes resistance, and a lot of otherwise decent people will start playing their part.

here's the part i actually find more useful, though. decades later, the tapes came out, and it turns out the guards weren't spontaneously discovering cruelty on their own. they were coached toward it. actively encouraged, nudged, told what "a good guard" does. that detail makes the metaphor work better for me, not worse… because that's patriarchy's whole vibe and energy too. men aren't born knowing how to “dominate” a partner, whatever the heck that means. they get coached. by fathers, friend groups, movies, locker rooms, "man up," "don't be a bitch," "she's just testing you." bell hooks spent decades writing about exactly this. that patriarchy requires male domination to sustain itself, and boys get trained out of empathy and into control before they're old enough to consent to the training. so yeah. it's rigged. the "guards" in this story were never neutral people who stumbled into control. they were cast, coached, and rewarded for playing the part; and i think that's the shape of a lot of relationships i’ve seen through nursing, friendships, sit with in sessions and have even been in myself.

what if it starts with someone wanting to know where you are, because they "care about you"? then they're annoyed when you see a certain friend. then why didn't you answer your phone. then your location. then your passwords. then your outfit. then you're explaining yourself every time you make plans. then you're avoiding certain people because you already know how tonight ends when you get home.

eventually you're not really asking yourself whether you're allowed to do something anymore. you're asking whether it's worth the consequences.

i think that distinction is the whole thing. the rules don't arrive all at once, so by the time you notice the difficulty setting has shifted, you've already adapted to it. and sometimes you start enforcing the rule on yourself, not because you suddenly like it, but because humans are disturbingly good at learning which version of ourselves keeps the peace.

domestic violence has a much bigger skill tree than we usually talk about, and physical violence is only one branch of it. there's sexual coercion, where "no" gets negotiated until it quietly stops functioning as an answer. there's emotional and psychological abuse. humiliation, gaslighting, deliberately messing with your sense of reality. there's financial abuse, where your money or job or transportation becomes leverage. there's isolation, where your people slowly get smaller. there's reproductive coercion. and there's digital abuse, which feels especially relevant for a generation that grew up with a phone basically attached to their body. location sharing that becomes surveillance, password-sharing that becomes an expectation, "we don't have secrets" that becomes "why wouldn't you show me your phone if you have nothing to hide."

none of that is automatically abuse. context matters, consent matters, mutuality matters. that's exactly why you look at the pattern instead of the one moment. can you say no? can you change your mind? can you have privacy without being punished for it? can you leave the room, or the relationship? sometimes the most effective control never looks like a locked door. it looks like learning that opening the door has a cost.

i will always hate the question "why didn't they just leave." by the time someone's embedded, leaving isn't just a matter of whether they physically can… there's money, housing, kids, immigration status, pets, the fear that nobody will believe them.

and there's love, which i think is the part people struggle with most. an abusive partner isn't cruel every second. things get a bit stockholm-y. they can be funny, generous, the person who gets you. they apologize. they promise it'll never happen again. for a while, they become the person you fell for again. when the person hurting you is also the person who makes you feel safest, your brain isn't running a simple good-person/bad-person equation. it's running on something closer to intermittent reinforcement… dutton and painter's work on traumatic bonding from 1981 gets at this well. sometimes you get the health potion. sometimes you get hit. sometimes it's the same person handing you both. and if the reward reliably comes after you endure enough, you get very, very good at enduring.

i also want to name why i keep reaching for gaming language here, because it's not just a bit for me. gaming is intense. gaming is often violent. and it is quite literally where a huge number of young people, especially young men, have been spending their formative hours. community, belonging, status, competition, a whole language of winning and losing, absorbed the same way any environment you spend thousands of hours in gets absorbed. i think some of that logic bleeds into how people start relating to relationships too. a partner's boundary starts feeling like an obstacle to beat. escalation starts feeling like leveling up. conflict gets run through a win/lose framework instead of a repair framework. so if that's genuinely the operating system someone's mind is running on, "the boss fight" stops being a cute metaphor i'm using for effect. in a game, the boss fight is the goal. it's the thing you're trying to get to. in a relationship, if that's the frame someone's actually thinking in, the boss fight can be the end of somebody's life, and that gap between game logic and real stakes is part of why this can go so catastrophically wrong.

in the worst version of this, the control doesn't plateau. it escalates all the way to a family annihilator, someone who would rather end the family than lose control of it. i'm not saying that to be dramatic. i'm saying it because "they'd never actually hurt anyone" is not the same claim as "we're safe."

there's another part of this i don't think gets talked about enough, which is that sometimes the friendly fire is coming from inside the party. survival strategies can outlive their usefulness and start hurting other people. hypervigilance becomes monitoring. fear of abandonment becomes control. fawning becomes resentment. two people with their own histories can collide. one gets anxious and starts checking, the other feels controlled and pulls away, the pulling away spikes the anxiety, the anxiety creates more checking. both people end up reacting to each other instead of actually relating to each other.

i want to be careful here, because "both people are toxic" can flatten real differences in power and harm, and conflict is not automatically abuse. but it is possible to have been hurt and to go on and hurt someone else. understanding where a behaviour came from is not the same thing as excusing it.

at some point the question has to move from what happened to you, to what are you doing now. that's not about shame. it's about accountability, because the other person has a nervous system too.

so how do you actually know when the game has changed? i think you skip the dramatic moment and check your autonomy instead. can you disagree, change your mind, have privacy, spend money, wear what you want, keep your friends, tell your partner something hurt without bracing for what happens next? relationships involve compromise, obviously. but that is not the same as gradually surrendering your autonomy to keep someone else comfortable, and i think that line gets especially blurry when the rules show up slowly.

you might not notice the water getting hotter. you might get so skilled at surviving a game you never agreed to play that you start calling it normal. that's the part of IPV i wish we talked about more, not just the later levels of it, but every level before it, where someone's quietly learning that control is love, jealousy is devotion, and fear is just what relationships feel like.

the answer isn't to make everyone suspicious of love. it's to teach people to recognize choice. you shouldn't have to keep shrinking your world until it fits someone else's comfort. love was never supposed to be a survival game.

ok, thanks for reading/listening again. byeee!
since i write in three’s, next up in the series: red pill training & abusive narcissistic warfare! *i’m continuing with the gaming language, it’s flowing for me with this stuff. 

References & Sources:

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105–120.

hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Atria Books.

Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford prison experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 823–839.

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: The entrapment of women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014). Trauma-informed care in behavioral health services (Treatment Improvement Protocol Series No. 57; HHS Publication No. SMA 13-4801). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

World Health Organization. (2021). Violence against women prevalence estimates, 2018. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240022256

Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. Random House.