The Abuser-Victim Dyad: Central to Understanding Our Times

Adobe stock image by Yuri, licensed by Ravi Chandra

We are born into relationships. Psychiatrist John Bowlby wrote, “There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.” Our actual relationships and how we think about them give us our foundation. They help us find our way in life, develop values, and reckon with deep and as yet unresolved questions of safety, vulnerability, insecurity, precarity, and belonging. We are who happens to us and what we make of the happening. If we’re lucky or even privileged, we get a good shake. If we’re not so fortunate, trouble, trauma, and damage ensue.

Most of us have a mix of healthy, difficult, and “good enough” relationships. The culture obviously has biases, delivering better relationships and advantages to some, and more challenging relational and identity experiences to others. Because relationships are so central to our well-being, the abuser (or perpetrator)-victim dyad is likely the most pervasive and understandable cause of suffering. Everyone can relate to the injustice of being abused. Relating to this dyad as it is expressed in our world is a central question for politics, culture, society, and mental health. The abuser-victim dyad can be the cause of legitimate fear, understandable or ungrounded paranoia (“they’re out to get us”), futility and hopelessness, or deeper compassion and relationship to the challenges of being human in an interdependent world beset by factional, self-centered, and abusive actors.

We are receiving a worldwide transmission of this dyad.

We are in great distress, primarily at present over the violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. This conflict evokes the abuser-victim dyad for observers worldwide, and interrogates our humanity itself. Each side has accused the other of being an abuser and perpetrator. Each side has accused the other of injustice and attempted annihilation. Each side has supplied historical evidence to back their claim. At least some parts of each side depend on the other side’s total loss, and each side knows and fears this.

The worst outcome of the abuser-victim dyad is violence. Worse still is ideologically sanctioned violence, in which a demographic group takes a grandiose, self-serving, and hostile stance toward another and legitimizes killing the other group in the name of preserving their own safety and narrative identity. In the case of the current conflict, each side has provoked the other and has made a show of power through violence. As a result, violence is fortified as a legitimate if not dominant pathway of dealing with abuser-victim dyads. This creates intense intrapsychic pressure for individuals, and great interpersonal and cultural pressures on institutions and society.

We are pressured to take sides and self-righteous stances. At the extreme, some might be seen as amplifying conflict, by supplying weapons and legitimizing one-sided narratives that exclude the other side.

It is much harder to create a transitional space for de-escalation and resolution of the conflict, because this requires sitting with ambiguity and uncertainty outside the zero-sum, win-lose binary algorithm of abuser-victim dyads. Indeed, institutional momentum has been marshaled against the cease-fire that 68% of Americans support, and against voices and narratives that challenge Israel’s current military and cultural strategies. Challenging Israel’s strategies and narrative is seen as threatening Israel’s existence. Whether this is paranoia or legitimate fear is a matter of great and unresolved uncertainty. But the attempts to resolve uncertainty in the direction of paranoid and fearful containment perpetuates the abuser-victim dyad, as well as the underlying suffering of Palestinians.

Individuals, institutions, and cultures rely on containment of internal hostilities. However, containment cannot come through aggression or by making some individuals and demographic groups devalued "others.” Aggression—physical, psychological, and cultural—will only fortify and aggravate oppositional narratives and distress. Containment must come through validation and understanding of the underlying suffering of all parties. We must understand that the abuser-victim dyad is a nidus of injustice and suffering, and we must resolve not to perpetuate that dyad. We must amplify and expand compassion, empathy, relatedness, and communication across our diversity.

Our humanity is too precious to lose to antagonism. There’s so much more possible for us in the cultivation of peace.

We must hold out hope that we can use this collective trauma to deepen into greater belonging, care, safety, and survival. In the end, it’s not individuals or demographic groups that threaten us, but the qualities of hatred and selfishness. And those qualities are workable. They are amenable to positive influence and nurturance. But their transformation relies on concrete and visible examples and experiences of the success of our better angels.

It falls to us, as individuals, institutions, and a society, to cultivate those better angels, those quiet voices that are drowned out by the din of guns, bombs, and narratives of abusive power.

(c) 2023 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.