Stockholm Syndrome Explained

When your love for your abusers can only surpassed by your abysmal self-loathing

Stockholm syndrome is the psychopathy of loving your abuser for the occasional kindness he graces you with in between vicious abuses; the indignity of his condescending mercy may even be worse than the humiliation of the actual abuse.

This is how abusers enable and perpetuate their abusive relationships: by hinting at better behavior, thus giving false hope that they can change.

Sound familiar?

Your abuser berates you, shames you, guilt-trips you, and passive-aggressively treats you like dirt until you come to believe you are dirt. But you insist on making excuses for him, somehow.

He beats and humiliates you every day, yet you focus only on the rare exceptions of his faux, pretentious kindnesses, or at least the pauses between bouts of abuse.

“He isn’t like that all the time,” you pathetically tell yourself.

“See? He can be good sometimes,” you naively hope.

You allow your abusers to take your dignity and self-esteem, then you rationalise it all because deep down you know it is all your responsibility. You choose to tolerate the abuse, and to avoid owning up to that fact, you make up excuses for the abuse; you make light of it, and even justify it.

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In the case of government (mass-scale abuse), your abuser extorts from you your labour under the threat of lethal violence, then tosses for you on the floor the scraps from the feast it stole from you… And then you thank it as you diligently lick them off a dirty carpet. We are brutalised by the government daily, yet we keep making up excuses for it to hide our complicity in our humiliation ritual. We justify the abuse we receive because we are too cowardly to confront ourselves first, and our abusers second.

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We rationalise the abhorrent behaviour of our abusive parents, making excuses for them, justifying their cruelty, and then coming up with the insane claim “My parents used to slap me around, but I turned out alright.” No, you didn’t turn out alright. You justify the abuse of children. You most definitely didn’t turn out alright. You are dangerously traumatised, and you are doomed to repeat the abuses of your parents with your own children.

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Your abuser rapes you every day, but you love him for being “kind enough” to hand you a towel to wipe yourself after he’s had his way with you.

Disturbing image? Not as disturbing as the mind of the Stockholm Syndrome afflicted.

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Why do people love their abusers?

When people who seemingly overpower us abuse us, our sense of self suffers due to the trauma of humiliation. When we are abused, we lose our integrity, our dignity, and our self-regard. We dissociate from everything, including our identity and self-image. It’s the literal death of self.

To mitigate this, since we can’t stand up to our abusers, we rationalise the abuse. We make it so in our heads that we are being justly abused, or that our abuser is, in reality, kind at heart, so that his abuses feel righteous, and thus, not as traumatic.

For example, a visit to the dentist does not traumatise us (not too much at least) because we see it as a “necessary” evil without it being intentionally painful. There is no evil intent or humiliating conclusions attached to medical suffering. But with suffering from humans with agency and vitriolic ill intent towards us, lasting mental trauma occurs. This is because our subconscious draws conclusions from intentional suffering: If other people believe you deserve to be abused, then perhaps you do universally deserve to be abused, right? Your identity will then be warped towards weakness, inadequacy, and unlikeability.

If we believe the lies of the abuse, then we conclude we are loathsome and we deserve to be abused. This makes our abusers benevolent, like a biblical deity dispensing “justice” on its flawed creations, which it deliberately created to be flawed and subject to brutally cruel judgment.

So, we see our abuser as someone who has the right to abuse us because we must be abused. We deserve it, or we must be put in our place, or he knows best, or he must be in charge.

We thus desperately look for clues to rationalise our abuser’s “good nature”, since the abuse is somehow “justified”. Any, no matter how insignificant, good action by our abuser, we take and magnify. It doesn’t matter if his abuses by far eclipse his sporadic little acts of pretentious faux kindness.

We keep focusing on “the good things” about our abuser. This also increases our tolerance of the abuse, since, if our abuser is “good”, then perhaps being systematically bullied by him isn’t that painful, right?

The irony is that we begin to disrespect ourselves even more when we start loving our abusers. The irony is that loving our abusers makes us even more loathsome to everyone (especially to ourselves), but we don’t see it. Just like the ostrich buries his head in the sand to mitigate his crippling fear, so do the Stockholm Syndrome afflicted willingly blind themselves to danger, thus exposing themselves to even more danger. In the victims’ effort to stop hating themselves, they deludedly “love” their abusers, but this perpetuates the abuse and creates more reason for them to hate themselves.

More often than not, the knee-jerk reaction to something is at best counterproductive, and at worst, fuel in the fire.