What if someone you knew was mistreating someone else you knew? You would realize it. Right?

And if someone close to you was abusing you, no question. You would know … Wouldn’t you?

In both cases, likely not.

Abusers live and breathe deception.¹

– Jimmy Hinton

We expect to see illusionists in magic shows, entertaining us. We know how adept they are at distorting reality, how determined to deceive us. Yet still we fall for their tricks.

We don’t expect to find illusionists in our everyday lives, betraying us. Yet anywhere it pays for abuse to hide behind an abuse-free image, voila!

Abusers
and abusive systems
use illusion
to hide in plain sight.

Unveiling abuse

Much in our culture tells us:

• Abuse consists of individual episodes of really bad behavior.
• Real abuse, serious abuse, involves physical or sexual violence.
• Abuse is easy to spot.

Yet none of that is accurate.

Much abuse does include physical or sexual violence. Yet also, much real abuse does not.

And if we think we can always spot violence, we have no idea how subtly it can start, how imperceptibly it can intensify, how fully even the most blatant violence can be cloaked.²

What’s more, we rarely regard assaults on the human spirit as violent. Yet they are, and in a particularly damaging way.

Scornful looks, shaming words, treacherous acts can devastate the targeted person – especially when the insidious is ongoing, and hidden from others, or made to seem acceptable, cute, good. Two examples:

Bullying in the church, school or workplace slams those who experience it. (I’ve described that here.)

Coercive control turns intimate relationships into nightmares.

[It’s] like being taken hostage … entrapped in a world of confusion, contradiction and fear.

– “What Is Coercive Control?”

Day in, day out, one person chips away another’s: Freedom. Confidence. Power to choose. Relationships. Joy. Being. The effects are cumulative and brutal.

Your money is no longer yours; your time is no longer yours; your space is no longer yours; your body is no longer yours. You begin to have less and less say over your life.

– Christine Scott-Hudson

Violence is a hallmark of abuse. But much that is violent will appear nonviolent if we do not know:

There are two common components of all violence: viewing someone impersonally as an ‘object’ or ‘role’ and the crossing of a boundary with the desire to control.³

– Joann S. Peterson

Unmasking abusers

Anyone can act abusive on occasion. Abusers do so as a matter of course.

Typically, also, abusers act without empathy, without taking responsibility, without remorse.

And they abuse in order to control. They manipulate and intimidate in order to dominate. They believe it’s their right to do so.

Yet the fog surrounding abuse can be thick – the fog the abuser creates.

Until we experience it firsthand, it seems completely unbelievable that the same person who we love, admire, and trust could also be capable of deceiving and betraying us on such a deep level right in front of our very eyes. But they do, and they get more and more brazen as their skills progress.

– Hinton

Tactics designed to control

It’s striking how often abusers use tactics from the same playbook – tactics laced with deception and designed to control.

Clare Murphy at speakoutloud.net lists 16 of these tactics.⁴

• One-sided power games. Ranging from blatant to very subtle, these ploys communicate: “You’re supposed to focus on me and to do what I want. I’m supposed to do what I want too, and to make all the rules, and all the big decisions. I may not say any of that out loud, but I will find a way to get you to comply.”
• Mind games. Coercive, manipulative, crazy-making, these “games” accomplish brainwashing and mind control. One example: using “innocent sounding communication” to convey that the victim “is the guilty party and their viewpoints are irrelevant or pathetic, and need to be realigned to the viewpoint of the perpetrator.”⁵
• Inappropriate restrictions. Rules and punishments that treat adults like children and human beings like pawns.
• Isolation. Emotionally and physically separating the abused from other important relationships. Creating cliques. Covertly inciting shunning.
• Over-protection and “caring.” Think smothering. This one is especially devious. How can a person believe – much less convince anyone else – that someone so attentive is literally, deliberately, “killing me with kindness”?
• Emotional unkindness and violation of trust. Abusers train the abused to accept dishonor and betrayal as normal and even right. This tactic may be used in tandem with oppressive “kindness.” Taken together, they deliver a stunning one-two punch.
• Degradation and suppression of potential. Abusers train the abused to accept assaults on their humanity and identity as normal and even right.
• Separation abuse. The abuse continues and even escalates after the victim leaves.
• Using social institutions. Routinely, abusers manipulate the legal system, the church and other institutions to further victimize the victim.
• Denial, minimizing and blaming. Wielding words to create the illusion that the abuse (a) isn’t happening, (b) is not a big deal, and/or (c) is the victim’s fault.
• Using the children. Without any hint of conscience, exploiting one’s own children in order to further victimize one’s spouse or other family members.
• Economic abuse. Controlling, withholding and hiding money, for the purpose of maintaining “power over.”
• Sexual abuse. May involve blatant aggression and rape; may also be extremely coercive and dehumanizing in much more covert ways.
• Symbolic aggression, such as threats, stalking, intimidation.
• Domestic slavery. Yes, this is happening today. And, like everything else abusive, we may see it, and not know it.
• Physical violence. Any act of physical violence is abusive.

Techniques magicians use

Even when we have learned their tactics, abusers can be incredibly hard to spot. Jimmy Hinton observes:

Abusers are highly skilled at pretending to be someone they are not.⁶

They are literally using the same techniques magicians use to keep [people] blind to the abuse.

They hack our “want to believe system” and show us exactly what our brains expect to see, hear, feel, and think.⁷

Abusers know how to regroup and “re-seduce” when their bad behavior has gone too far.

This process … has the appearance of sorrow and the veneer of making amends.

– Don Hennessy

The goal is to charm the abused into ignoring the abuse, “to return the relationship to the status quo.”⁸

Abusers lack empathy and scruples, but they can look like they are honest, truthful, godly, caring, good. They live to control, but they can make it seem like they’re the ones getting jerked around.

We may think we know them, but we do not. They know us, though. They learn what we love, what we long for, what we fear, what we’re ashamed of, what we will overlook. They use that knowledge to craft the narrative, the promises, the threats that keep us all under their spell.

Never forget

The book, Sleights of Mind, explores ways magicians fool us. Its authors are neuroscientists. They conclude:

If there is one thing we’ve learned from becoming magicians, it’s that your attention, awareness, intuitions, and assumptions are fair game.⁹

In other words, the mental powers we think would alert us to the truth, illusionists use against us, to trick us.

Never forget! Abusers can be illusionists.

When it’s needed to succeed, they master deception and misdirection. They present illusion as reality and discredit what is true.

Abusers work most freely within abusive systems. Why?

Their lives are spent identifying victims to abuse, but they also need to find a community who will remain blind to the abuse.¹⁰

Abusive systems can be illusionists too.

A system is a whole, that functions by the coordinated working of its parts. In a social system, the “parts” have to do with people and relationships.

Family is the primary social system. Other social systems abound, as people group around different connecting factors and cultivate common beliefs, practices and norms.

Just as all people are not abusers, all systems are not abusive.  

Further, many people in abusive systems have no clue what’s going on. So, identifying a system as abusive is not to say everyone in it is an abuser.

Yet such systems do trick people:

• to live with abuse, without realizing it;
• to participate in abuse, without admitting it, even to themselves.

Uncovering abusive systems

Simply put, abusive systems defend and align with abuse. As a matter of course, such systems:

• protect and support abusers;
• vilify and silence victims;
• betray the trusting;
• manipulate the members;
• target the truth-seekers.

Inside such systems: People’s boundaries are crossed routinely with intent to control. Persons are viewed impersonally as an ‘object’ or a ‘role.’

What’s more, every role contributes to abuse. Actively or passively, wittingly or unwittingly, people participate in causing harm, to others and to themselves.

Any type social system may become abusive. But evil takes particular delight in infiltrating and corrupting the church, the living system filled by the Breath of God, to function like this:

We will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.

From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Eph. 4:14-16)

Leaders and followers

Controlling leaders dominate abusive systems. In the church, such leaders may appear to be godly, to preach truth.

Some come across as strong, in charge, not to be messed with. They wear their power on their sleeve. Others may seem charming, or nice, or enigmatic, or rogue. They keep their power in the shadows. A system can become particularly toxic when overt and covert controllers work in tandem.

Lone-wolf abusers are drawn to abusive systems. How much easier it is to find victims, and to get away with abusing them, when a whole community has been trained to “remain blind to abuse.”  

Everyone else is taught unquestioning loyalty to the system: Follow the ringleaders; obey our rules; play your assigned role. In the church, that’s equated with following God.

Most people who know abusers don’t know they know abusers. Most people in abusive systems don’t see through the fog the system creates.

I was one among them for a very long time.

Illusion and collusion

Inside such a world of smoke and mirrors, it can be incredibly hard to believe, “What’s happening to me is abuse.” It can be harder still to see that the harming is intentional and orchestrated. It can be hardest of all to recognize who the primary abuser is.

Those who try to speak up about mistreatment they’re experiencing may be shocked to find:

The people around me, who I thought would stand with me, are acting in ways that are deeply confusing and further abusing. And not just a few people. Pretty much everyone.

Few of us have been taught:

An entire community of people can function collectively as an abuser does.

With its leaders leading and its followers following, the system as a whole uses the same techniques and tactics an abuser uses.

If we don’t know about toxic systems, or don’t think our community could possibly be one:

• We may see an abuser in action, and recognize what is happening.

YET we may see an abusive system in action, and keep being shocked and confused.

• We may become frustrated when people refuse to believe that abusers are abusers (because they’re trusted, often charismatic, often powerful and have cultivated an image of being good).

YET we may be fooled by abusive systems, for the same reasons.

• We may tell people, “Explaining and explaining to abusers, to try to get them to see, does not work, because they are determined not to see, and will use what you’re saying against you.”

YET we may keep trying to get abusive systems to see how they are hurting people.

• We may tell people, “Abusers rarely change.”

YET we may keep trying to change a relentlessly abusive system.

Dear one, trusting an abusive system to protect the people being abused within it is like telling an abusive husband, “Abuse is happening under your roof. Here are the signs. Here are the tactics. Here’s what to do if you see abuse. Go be vigilant, and protect your wife.”

Freedom and life

Magicians can fool a whole audience of people who know they’ve come to a magic act. Abusers and abusive systems can fool a whole lot of people who do not know they’re being deceived.

When that happens in the church, next-level trickery and very dark magic are at work. Yet people can and do break free from hidden abuse, and from abusive systems. Hardest of all is getting the toxic mindsets out of us.

Knowing all this, the Father sent the Son,

to say to the captives, “Come out,”
and to those in darkness, “Be free!”

He who has compassion on them will guide them
and lead them beside springs of water. (Isa. 49:9, 10)

The Son sent the Spirit to open our eyes to illusionists who ravage us – and to expose the truth when an entire system oppresses us.

The God we serve is able to deliver us. (Dan. 3:17)

Much freedom and life hinge on our cooperating with him, as he shows us what has been hidden from us – as he works within us, to loose us from the abusers we have not seen.

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It’s a journey. August 30, 2019, I published a post titled, “The abusers we have not seen.” July 2021, I revised and reposted it. Then, summer 2023, I realized I needed to start fresh to try to put into words all that I continue to learn. Now, I’ve retired the old post and written this new one. Lord, help us see! Set us free!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

More about abusive systems in the church

• They punish by shunning.
• They coerce by bullying.
• They are characterized by cliques.
• They treat adults like children.
• To stay in control, they may appear to embrace repentance and change.

More about abusers in the church

• They are masters of misdirection.
• They deal in treachery.
• They hate any threat to the system and their place in it. See The world in church clothing.
• They may work in tandem, like Ahab and Jezebel. See Spiritual schizophrenia and the two-headed snake.
• They do damage control, not repentance. See Is the SBC capable of Caring Well? and Beth Moore and LifeWay: The ploy, for glimpses into damage control in one abusive system.
• They seek to manipulate, intimidate, dominate, which is witchcraft.

More about seeing and freedom and life

• I choose light
• Defender of the forsaken
• Bucking the system: Shunning, submission and Jesus
• #SilenceIsNotSpiritual – except when it is
• Loving one-anothering
• The blessing of rest

Footnotes

1. The Devil Inside: How my minister father molested kids in our home and church for decades and how I finally stopped him. Unless otherwise noted, quotes of Jimmy Hinton in this post are from The Devil Inside, page 101. ↩︎
2. Jimmy Hinton stresses how completely abusers can hide their violence. One heartbreaking example: “U.S. Olympic doctor Larry Nassar … sexually abused nearly all of his hundreds of victims with one or both of their parents in the same room” (Devil Inside, 100). ↩︎
3. From Anger, Boundaries and Safety, Joann S. Peterson, The Haven Institute Press, Third Printing, 2006, 27. ↩︎
4. Clare Murphy’s overview article, “A new power and control wheel,” is accompanied by separate blog posts exploring each of the 16 abuse tactics. ↩︎
5. Clare Murphy, “Tactic #2 – Mind Games.” ↩︎
6. Devil Inside, 85. ↩︎
7. “Why Sexual Abuse Goes Unnoticed,” jimmyhinton.org (TW). This post, published January 31, 2018, first introduced me to the stunning likenesses between abusers and magicians. ↩︎
8. The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser: How He Gets into Her Head, Don Hennessy, 103, 107. I highly recommend this book. ↩︎
9. Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, et al., 256. ↩︎
10. Devil Inside, 85. ↩︎