The Cycle of Abuse: Anabel’s Story
The abuser’s tactic is always the same: groom, arouse, shame, and condemn. Once the heart joins evil in condemning pleasure and desire, the process repeats itself through an endless cycle of self-harm that leads to more condemnation and contempt. The tactic is repeated as often as it takes to entrap. What changes is not the strategy but the particularities of each story.
Healing the Wounded Heart, Dan Allendar - pg. 71
The abuse I endured was intentional, and it happened in a cyclical rhythm called the “Abuse Cycle.” However, before I can tell you about the abuse cycle, I need to explain the context and climate in which I was victimized.
CONTEXT FOR THE ABUSE
I was the most vulnerable I had ever been in my entire life while I was walking through a very traumatic divorce. My boss and pastor used my vulnerability during this excruciatingly painful period of my life to gain sexual access to me. While I thought he was offering pastoral support and care, he was actually grooming me. His grooming was like an “on ramp” that initiated the cycle of abuse.
Because my abuser was not only my pastor but also my boss, my workdays were filled with requests to get job-related tasks done. However, in addition to a normal task list, he would intersperse sexualized conversations and requests disguised as “care.” This was incredibly confusing and added to my difficulties at work.
I was aware that as a result of my emotionally-consuming divorce, I had been underperforming at work. I knew that as a soon-to-be single mom, financial security was not a luxury; it was a life-sustaining necessity. I desperately needed my job and I knew that I would have to meet the job expectations of my boss and pastor so that I could support my children.
All of this set me up for the cycle of abuse.
FANTASY
After my pastor initiated the abuse, predictable patterns developed. It would always start with preoccupation with his fantasy of us being together. He frequently wanted to talk about these fantasies. After the abuse started, he explained that the sight and smell of me would begin an irreversible process in him. He would say that he felt like Jekyll and Hyde: he would be one way when he left his house for work, then he would be another way after he was in my presence. He described it as a bathtub filling up with water until it began to overflow. At the point of overflow, he would verbalize his thoughts. The truth is that all of us are able to control what we say, but his words implied that he couldn’t.
A specific example is when I had talked about wanting to purchase a camper for my kids and myself once the divorce was final. During our casual conversations, I would show him ads that I’d found online. When the abuse started, he would explain to me, “Whenever you talked about your camper, I always thought about wanting to go camping with you.” From there, he wanted to imagine with me what an experience of camping together might look like. He ritualistically came back to this fantasy as part of the repeating cycle.
PLANNING
After spending time engrossed in fantasy, he would actively begin planning the abuse. For example, even if we were already together, he would plan for more privacy and physical closeness such as moving to a different room in the building or requesting physical comfort from me. If we were physically apart, he would call me with a plan that he had hatched up to get me in his presence. His plans were always pre-meditated and a set-up to abuse me. It could be as seemingly innocent as insisting he needed to be alone with me for a work meeting or as clearly pre-meditated as planning the steps to get me alone after office hours or off the church campus.
He would present these encounters as, “We have to learn how to be together if we are going to work together,” or say that we were “just friends” hanging out together. I was hypervigilant in trying to evaluate if what I was agreeing to would be “safe.” Sometimes I could discern safety, but other times I could not. In reality, the only safe interaction with him would have been “no contact.” However, that was not an option because I needed employment, especially as a newly single mom. It was only in retrospect that I could see the manipulation and coercion that went into his planning process.
SET-UP & ABUSE
Once he was able to get private time with me, the set-up for abuse was complete. Next came the requests. He would attempt to make physical contact by accessing my vulnerability. Among other things, custody exchanges for me were especially hard, and he knew that. When I would show up out-of-sorts, he would offer to comfort me with a hug. Initially, I was under the impression the hugs were intended to do what hugs do: comfort a friend. However, a well-established pattern began to develop where my boss and pastor would ask for a hug and then push sexual boundaries resulting in sexual abuse.
GUILT
After each overtly abusive interaction, he would articulate an overwhelming sense of guilt. It was not true guilt for what he had just done to me. Rather, it was false guilt, or remorse, as he verbalized the possible consequences of his actions. As part of this, he would make attempts to ensure “we” would not be found out by checking and double checking that there was no evidence left behind. He was consumed with fear about what could happen to him and his life. I had taken on the role of his emotional supporter because he had told me that is what I needed to be for him. It was literally written into my job description and so I felt that it was my responsibility to soothe his discomfort.
RATIONALIZATION
Guilt would then be followed up by rationalization. He would justify his behavior by displacing blame. He would say things like, “How did ‘we’ let this happen again?”, or “You just need to tell me ‘no’ when I ask you for those things.” He made all the blame mine to hold. I would leave the encounter confused and falsely frustrated with myself for “letting it get to that point” (even though I hadn’t actually wanted or asked for any of it). He acted like he had no control over his impulses and regardless of the intentional, incremental boundary pushing, I was in charge of stopping him. He explicitly told me this was my job. One time in particular, he told me that I just needed to “be mean to him” so that he wouldn’t like me and wouldn’t want me. I cared about him as a person; so, I wanted to help him find his way out of this self-destructive cycle. I now recognize the impossible expectations I put on myself: I just needed to try harder; I needed to be firmer. I did not want to feel objectified in this way. Why couldn’t I make him stop?
After each episode, I would replay what had happened and try to figure out where I should have said no. I would try to pinpoint specific behaviors, for instance, the hug that I let go too long. I was blaming myself and taking the responsibility to fix the situation, even though the truth was that he was the one doing the harm. It was his responsibility to maintain appropriate boundaries with me.
NORMAL
Following his rationalizations, life would go back to normal. This is the last phase in the cycle. We would have work related conversations and talk about the fun plans each of us had coming up. He would continue to support me through my difficult divorce. This period of normalcy could last for a half hour or a day or two. It all depended on his access to me. If we were spending a lot of time together for work, the time between episodes was short. If not, things would stabilize, and the reality of the abuse would leave my awareness for a while. I would disassociate from my experience until his premeditation and fantasies brought me back to the beginning of the cycle.
For six months, this was my daily reality. In the morning, he would show up explaining that he was clear headed and had resolved to not ask for anything. Then, upon sitting in a meeting with me, the cycle would begin again. It was like clockwork. The fantasies would start, and his resolve would dissipate.
To say that I felt consumed and objectified by my boss would be a gross understatement. My body and soul did not feel like they belonged to me. The only way out would be to leave my job, and I had no idea how to do that and meet the financial needs of my newly structured family. When abuse survivors say that they don’t feel like they have agency, this is why. My personhood was now for his consumption.
Over time, I began to find ways to make the abuse less frequent and less severe. I learned how to intervene in the cycle as a way to manage his daily requests. I began to anticipate what he was asking and find ways to shut down the abuse. I started to agree to a hug, but it could only last to the count of 10. I would feel like I had accomplished safety if I could leave work having only been groped from a sexualized hug while preventing the “bigger violations” from happening.
This was a hostile work environment. No employee should have to go to work every day to navigate these dynamics, especially from their pastor. The pastor whom they have relied on to provide spiritual care during a season of utter devastation. To be sexually abused by one who represents God creates a profound spiritual wound. It is a wound that may never entirely heal.
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