This year started with a wave of high profile abuse cases taking over the news. With revelations and exposures like this, and….well, the state of our entire world in general right now, the subject of abuse and power has been in our collective psyche and public conversations. I’m glad that this topic is gaining more traction and being spoken about more openly, but I often find myself frustrated, too: these conversations often lead to splitting the world into good guys and bad guys, and reinforce the idea that human beings fit easily into neat and tidy categories. I think this framing does a disservice to such an important subject, and that it’s helpful to think about the ways we talk about things.

To start, I want to name my position. I’m not writing this as a mental health professional, and this is not a how-to guide for navigating abusive or harmful situations. I’m looking at this as a language educator, and using that lens to explore how the way we discuss things is just as important as the discussion itself. We are connecting more than ever through the language of pop psychology, with clinical terms taking on everyday (and often inaccurate) use. Language is not neutral: it carries emotional and historical baggage, and the way words and framing are used has the power to shape perception, steer cultural conversations, and influence what we see (and what we don’t). Our language around this is increasingly extreme and binary, giving an idealized image of what perfectly healthy connection looks like and painting anything that doesn’t measure up as “toxic” and pathological. Although it might sound counterintuitive, I think this can make us more vulnerable to abusive dynamics, not less.

The way we tend to look at harm or abuse frequently falls into absolutes, staunch moral certainty, and simplified narratives, erasing any uncomfortable ambiguity. The equation is: abuse is caused by an independent bad person who does only bad things, and everyone who’s not overtly and deliberately bad is a good person, disconnected from the abuser’s actions. In this framing, people who confront or refuse to go along with the abuse are seen “rocking the boat”: they’re often accused of being divisive and disruptive, and even when we do celebrate someone taking a stand we’re quick to evaluate the purity of their actions. They have to push back only in ways that we deem acceptable, and they have to live up to a standard of perfect innocence themselves – we’re very insistent on maintaining our strict categories of Good and Bad, and we don’t like anyone spilling out of the lines we’ve drawn. Pop psych content online tends to use this same framing: every other post or think piece out there promises tips and “10 signs” to evaluate how others are broken or bad, with us as the reader somehow always being healthy and “the good one” (psychologist Dena DiNardo describes this beautifully here). In this perspective, everyone is an island unto themselves rather than part of an interconnected whole. Although this can sometimes be useful, I think this way of understanding is individualistic, oversimplified, and also incomplete: it leaves out the way abusive systems actually twist our perception.

I’ve come to view abuse dynamics as a relational web of harm under the spell of a distorted reality. From this viewpoint, all abuse is systemic: the size and nature of the system can vary greatly, from a culture or institution to a workplace or a marriage, but no matter the scenario, there is a both/and to consider: the abusive person is fully responsible for their behaviour and communal participation is what keeps the system fed. When you look at things this way, there really isn’t any such thing as a relationship that’s “just between two people”, either: we’re always in relational webs that span across time and place, and our past experiences are often very alive in the present. Abuse distorts these webs and entangles us in deep confusion, making it very difficult to get free or even to recognize what’s happening in the first place. A really helpful metaphor I’ve found to describe this is from a nearly decade-old Reddit post by someone with the username “breakfastpotato” – I don’t know your real name, BP, but thank you, whoever you are! They were referring to dynamics with in-laws, but I will summarize and expand on it in a wider context – I recommend you read the original post.

The Boat Metaphor
Breakfastpotato describes the web of an abusive dynamic as a system for steadying a boat in danger of flipping over. On this boat, there are Boat Stabilizers and a Boat Rocker. Contrary to popular understanding, the abuser is in fact the Boat Rocker – when they provoke and antagonize, they are crashing into the sides of the boat, constantly destabilizing it. They would tip over quickly if they were in there by themselves, but the Boat Stabilizers keep this from happening. Stabilizers counterbalance the chaos of what the abuser does. When the abuser starts boat-rocking, they soothe, fawn, deny, defuse, pretend, defend, and any number of other behaviours that counteract the force. These steadying behaviours absorb the impact of the abuser’s actions, and together, everyone maintains the illusion that the boat is steady and everything is fine when there is actually constant tension and pressure that would explode if anyone stepped out of line. This is why I like to describe it as a spell: it really is like an illusion has been cast, and people collectively buy into an inverted reality where they pretend that what’s happening is not really happening.

Flipped scripts and Reality Distortion
In this scenario, what we commonly think of as someone “rocking the boat” is actually someone who refuses to act as a stabilizer. Maybe they’re sick of their stabilizing role, maybe they’ve started naming it out loud, or maybe they’re new to the boat and don’t know about the rules. When the abuser runs into them, rather than acting as a shock absorber, the Refuser lets them crash into the side of the boat instead. Everyone feels the impact, and because the boat has appeared steady up until now, on the surface it really does seem like the Refuser is the one causing the disruption. This is the classic “flip the script” moment (otherwise known as DARVO – deny, attack, reverse role of victim/offender) that is a hallmark feature of abusive systems: everything was just fine until you came along and did something different, and now we’re unsteady! You’re the problem! You rocked the boat! Roles are flipped, reality is distorted, and the story is rewritten.

At this point, the Refuser either accepts the reality distortion and gets back in line as a Stabilizer, or they keep refusing or even potentially leave the system, if possible. If they choose the latter, they typically get cast as the scapegoat. Scapegoats are a convenient target for all the fury and frustration of the entire boat: the abuser is enraged at their control being challenged, and the other Stabilizers are also furious and resentful since they now have to work overtime to ensure the boat doesn’t tip over. The Scapegoat becomes a dumping ground for all the unmetabolized, unspoken things in the abusive system, and demonizing and punishing them acts like a cathartic release for everyone in the boat. This ritualistic shame-and-blame game is very effective at keeping the system together: collectively harming someone binds everyone together more deeply in shame and secrecy, and the fate of the scapegoated target is a harsh reminder of what awaits anyone else who decides to step out of line. The illusion spell settles back over the boat, and a rigid story line must be maintained: the boat and the abuser are Good and beyond reproach, and the scapegoat is Bad and the cause of all problems.

Disrupting the Good/Bad Binary
When we view abuse dynamics through the lens of a distorted relational web, it gets trickier to simplify the harm into “good people vs. bad people”. Abusive systems create deliberate confusion, and the lines between cause and effect, reality and illusion, and even victim and victimizer can be blurred in ways that are messy and uncomfortable.

For one, abusers often portray themselves as victims, and tend to accuse actual victims of the very things they’re guilty of doing themselves. This can be cunning and very calculated, especially when there’s a threat of exposure and they’re rushing to control the narrative, but some abusers can truly believe that they are the “real” victims. In a view of reality that’s typically warped by entitlement, they may perceive anything from boundaries to the logical consequences of their actions as mistreatment. And of course, they may also have been genuine victims at some point in their lives as well.

As for Stabilizers, while they’re not the main abusers themselves, they reinforce the abuser’s warped reality, and the grandiosity and entitlement that go with it. They may be on the receiving end of abusive behaviour like gaslighting and coericion, but they also often enact similar behaviours on each other as they compete for the abuser’s favour and try to enforce everybody’s role in steadying the boat. Some Stabilizers may do this unwillingly out of fear, but that’s not the case for everybody. Some Stabilizers have abusive tendencies themselves, and they’re very aware of what they’re doing. They feel emboldened to indulge in cruelty because the abuser’s actions feel like a permission slip, and keeping company with people whose behaviour is worse than their own gives them a chance to minimize the harm they cause. Other Stabilizers may not harm people directly, but they benefit in some way from the abuser. They’re aware of what’s happening, but other people getting harmed is a price they’re willing to pay for those benefits, and as long as they’re not doing anything directly they feel absolved of responsibility. Some people may not realize that they’re Stabilizers at all, and may even feel that they’re helping enact justice when they do things like smear campaigns and punishment because they’re convinced the scapegoat is actually the aggressor.

Most disorienting of all, victims themselves may believe they’re responsible for everything or even that they’re the aggressor. Targets and scapegoats often leave abusive systems broken down and with such distrust in their own perception that they may think they are the cause of the abuser’s behaviour. They may be convinced that nothing would have gone wrong if they hadn’t provoked the abuser or if they’d just tried harder, and they may also believe they deserve the way they were treated.

This is not meant to minimize, equalize all responsibility, or flatten the realities of serious harm. Quite the opposite, actually: binaries are what tend to flatten reality by editing out its complex, messy edges. We think that strict categories and absolutes help keep us safer, but humans don’t fit neatly into categories of good/bad, right/wrong, healthy/toxic, or red flags/green flags. Abusers are great at strategic green flag behaviour. They have a carefully curated image of goodness, and they may be very helpful or generous. They may change people’s lives for the better, donate to great causes, or create beautiful and moving works of art. Many people will only ever see this side of them, and victims will see this persona on and off as part of the intermittent reinforcement of the abuse cycle. They’re not all bad, and they’re not always cruel. You won’t always feel bad with them, either: there will be good times, and even times when you feel chosen and special. You may admire them or even feel grateful for things they’ve done for you. None of this makes them any less abusive, or you any less a victim.

The harm itself is not always easy to identify, either. Abusers are typically very manipulative, and there are often layers to their behaviour that deepen confusion. They may frame control as protection, or unquestioning obedience as loyalty. They’re often good at convincing people to do their bidding, and may get others to do their dirty work like pressuring, provoking, or keeping tabs on a target. This deflects attention away from them and makes it harder to pinpoint exactly where the harm is coming from as they stay at a distance with their hands clean, sometimes even swooping in to play the rescuer in chaos they created themselves. And although most people think of abuse as overtly cruel behaviour, in reality it can be very subtle and easily denied. Abusers often use covert antagonism to provoke in ways that seem innocuous on the surface: using a certain look, or a reference that has hidden meaning only the intended target will understand. These dog whistles may incite a big reaction that makes the target look unstable or even harmful, while the abuser seems calm and collected. Simplistic either/or framing often fails to capture this complexity: “nice” behaviour can be strategic, not sincere. Affection and kindness can be performance, not proof of care. What looks like a casual remark can have sinister undercurrents. What seems like an extreme reaction may be a reasonable response to hidden provocation. Harm can be diffused across the whole web, and the instigator can look like the innocent.

Leaving an abusive web does not make this confusion disappear. In fact, it typically escalates when you break free from the sphere of control. The abusive person may suddenly shift tactics. They may appear vulnerable, hurt, or even apologetic or desperate. They will likely double down on their efforts to uphold their “good person” image, showing their best behaviour to others to make you look mean and unreasonable. Stabilizers will try to rope you back in, framing your role in the system as good and righteous and leaving as proof of your badness.

Rigid certainty does not equal safety
Untangling from a sticky web of confusion like this is a long and difficult process. After being caught in flipped scripts, contradiction, and an upside-down reality, it makes sense that we seek some stable ground and certainty. This is where the categorizing of good/bad people comes in. A framework that gives us tangible signs to look for is valuable: being able to spot patterns and name harm and abuse is a vital step in steadying ourselves, and it gives us a way to make sense of our experience and have clarity after being so destabilized. Therapist Stacey Alvarez calls this framing the abuse lens, and it’s a crucial part of healing to cut through the distortion and see clearly. This is what comes to the forefront in collective conversations around harm and abuse, but it’s also where we tend to stop and let this framing become the filter for all relationships.

I get why it feels intuitive and necessary to do so – if this framing helped keep us safe and steady after serious harm, then adopting it as a whole worldview seems like a way to guarantee safety in every situation. But as Alvarez explains, the true power of the abuse lens lies in its precision and specificity. It’s great when we need to be sharply decisive and cut through confusion, but when we apply it everywhere, it actually becomes its own form of distortion. Relationships, community, and life in general sometimes involve friction, discomfort, misunderstandings, and uncertainty. When we’re inflexible with our expectations around human behaviour, it makes it harder to spot real threat. If we’re too fixated on expecting harm to look a certain way, it’s easy to be blindsided when it doesn’t conform to our expectations – and really, that’s exactly what abusive people tend to do. They’re chameleon-like, and the personas they craft exploit our expectations around goodness and badness. If we’ve experienced an overtly domineering abusive person, the manipulator who presents as shy and insecure might slip by our defenses, or vice versa. If we can’t see beyond strict checklists and categories, we may dismiss the possibility that someone could be harmful if they do things we don’t think a “bad person” would ever do, or insist someone has good intentions because they’ve checked the right boxes of “good person” behavior.

Extremes and rigid framing also makes us limited in what we can see and tolerate in relationships and community in general, and within ourselves, too. This can limit our healing process and our ability to build stability and safety in our lives. If we’ve been victimized, we might spiral into doubt if we don’t measure up to the impossible standards of the perfect victim, or collapse into shame and self-hatred at the ways we may have acted in a Stabilizer role. We might carry a deep sense of being inherently bad after surviving abuse, and find ourselves in a constant quest for something that will redeem us: a program, a protocol, a self-help guru, etc. We can idealize external saviours, and have a tendency to outsource power and authority to them as we try to earn back our goodness. This makes us very vulnerable to people who seek to dominate and control, and it also makes it very hard to see those traits in them.

The opposite can happen, too. As we heal and start to shift away from the belief in our badness, without the capacity to hold gray area or contradiction, we can swing straight into idealizing ourselves instead. Taking on an identity as The Healed One can feel really good, but it can also trap us in upholding an image of perfection and give us a false sense of purity. We may have rigid standards for what being “healed” should look like, and with limited tolerance for imperfect humanness in ourselves or others, we may find ourselves frequently disappointed in others and struggling to form deep connections and community. Seeing ourselves as purely good can also convince us we’re incapable of hurting others because we’ve done so much work to not end up like those who hurt us. In reality, strategies that helped us survive abuse may be hurtful or even destructive in non-abusive relationships, and we may come across as controlling, confusing, or unpredictable even without meaning to. Being a victim who’s done their healing does not make us immune to harming people, and it doesn’t make us inherently “safe”, either: ultimately, safety is something that is co-created in healthy connections, not just a standard for others to pass or fail.

Expanding into our range
It can be hard to expand beyond the sense of certainty that we get from this kind of either/or framing. Cognitive rigidity is a natural response to harm and traumatic events, and when this become our primary lens for life, it feels very much like being safe and in control. Holding ambiguity may feel like being unguarded or even powerless. I’m not suggesting dropping all defenses, tolerating everything and anyone, or getting lost in endless “nuance”, by any means. Binary thinking serves a purpose, and it’s a useful and even life-saving tool in the right context. It’s not something to eliminate. Rather than trying to scrap it altogether, I think it’s helpful to consider developing range: we keep binary thinking for when it’s needed and we expand our options so it’s not the only one. This is a re-orienting of our relationship with our power and self-trust, and it requires perspective that can hold the in-between beyond absolutes.

Part of what makes black and white framing feel powerful is that when we collapse complexity, our choices are limited. “If they do x, it means they’re y, so I should do z” gives a clear directive and leaves no room for doubt or ambiguity. Yes, this can be exactly what we need sometimes, and many things in life don’t have clear-cut answers or an obvious good person/bad person dichotomy, and we’ll need to navigate that through our own will, desires, needs, and discernment. This means using more of our own power and our own voice, and that can be scary and unfamiliar. As much as the pop psych trends like psychoanalyzing every interaction and armchair diagnosing people may seem loudly confident on the surface, I think this can actually reflect a deeper lack of trust in ourselves, our own judgment, and our ability to hold ourselves through our own experience.

Widening our perception and range might not feel possible when we’re used to keeping ourselves contained and urgently resolving uncertainty, but this is what ultimately allows us to develop real self-trust and connections rooted in true safety and mutuality. In terms of avoiding harm, being able to take in the gray area and the bigger web of relationships around us can keep us from rushing to define a situation too quickly, or assuming that surface-level impressions are what they seem. Slowing down like this can help us avoid being pulled into the urgency and intensity that abusive people often manufacture early on, and observe how inconsistencies or patterns of distortion play out over time. It can also allow us to hold the difficult contradictions in someone being both “nice” to us but also abusive, naming harm and acting on the truth without dehumanizing them, and accepting reality even when others don’t.

This opens us up to a much bigger world beyond identifying harm, too. Our cultural conversations often give the impression that once we sort out who’s bad and find our “safe” people, everything will flow smoothly and we’ll feel great from that point on. In reality, difference and healthy conflict are normal things that happen in safe connections, and learning to navigate that is a necessary skill for being in community and building a strong support network. If we can see beyond absolutes of good or bad, we can create space for friction without automatically equating it with harm and danger. We can feel hurt, disappointed, angry, or misunderstood and it doesn’t inherently mean the relationship is unhealthy or that something is wrong. There can also be endings, rejection, incompatibility, misaligned values or even just plain old disliking someone (or them disliking us!) without needing to collapse into a story of the good person vs. the bad person. This skill also allows us to include context and layers in difficult situations: the same behaviour can carry different weight and meaning depending on whether coercion and a power imbalance are present or not, and two situations might require very different responses even if things look similar on the surface.

And of course, when we expand range we can start to hold ourselves in our complex and sometimes contradictory natures, too. There are usually layers to our motivations and behaviours, and some of them may be conflicting or even unconscious. We may be victims and have limited power in certain relational webs, but misuse or even exploit our power in others, especially when that power is on a bigger systemic level and feels less personal. We can disappoint others and fail and it’s not proof of our badness, and we can also get curious about how our ideas of our own goodness can limit us. Some of the traits we believe make us “good” may actually be conditioned stabilizer roles that enable harm, like performing niceness when we really need to take a stand. Some aspects of ourselves that we believe are bad and need to be fixed may seem that way because we’ve only ever seen those traits used abusively. Exiling those parts of ourselves can make us very fixed in our identity, and this can actually make it easier to get pulled into manipulative tactics that use our desire to be seen as a “good person” against us. We’re actually more impervious to these tactics when we’re flexible in our identity, and able to access different parts of ourselves depending on what the circumstances call for. We can give grace and be open and empathetic when appropriate, and we can also be uncompromising or even fierce when it’s warranted without it shaking our sense of self.

My thoughts on this are still evolving, and I invite you to share feedback (and push-back too, if you have it!) There are so many ways that humans do atrocious things to one another, and there’s an awful lot occurring worldwide that can make us feel powerless. Collapsing the complexity of the world can give us a shield against that powerlessness, and that’s understandable. But when our vision for entire cultural conversations and social dynamics takes on a narrow lens, we don’t become safer or more powerful in the long run. Instead, we’re denied our full range of agency and choice, and in doing that we deny ourselves the full range of what’s possible, too.

Many thanks to my dear friend S.D., who read and encouraged the text rants that transformed into this post. Having brilliant friends is a wonderful thing!

References:

Alvarez, Stacey (2026 February 23). How Trauma Shapes an Abuse Lens in Relationships and How to Expand It Safely. https://www.authenticlivingtherapy.co/how-trauma-shapes-an-abuse-lens-in-relationships-and-how-to-expand-it-safely

Brenner, Brad (2026, April). The psychology of black-and-white thinking: why we see the world in extremes. Therapy Group of DC. https://therapygroupdc.com/therapist-dc-blog/black-and-white-thinking-psychology/

Control Alt Delete: Reset from abuse (2025, May 27). The dog whistle you’ve always heard: recognizing covert abuse. https://dvcontrolaltdelete.org/dog-whistle/

Gillette, Hope (2022, July 15). The 4 stages of the abuse cycle: from tension to calm and back. PsychCentral. https://psychcentral.com/health/cycle-of-abuse#reconciliation

Mazzella, Anthony. Anger, aggression, and the abusive personality: a sense of entitlement. https://www.drmazzella.com/anger-aggression-and-the-abusive-personality-a-sense-of-entitlement/

Priebe, Heidi (2025). 5 traits that make people hard to manipulate (and how to cultivate them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrsyeNF6VSo&t=431s

Sable House, Dallas Oregon. In the mind of the abuser. Abby’s House, Center for Equity and Gender Justice (Western Oregon University). https://wou.edu/abbyshouse/files/2015/02/In-the-Mind-of-the-Abuser.pdf

Shashkevich, Alex (2019, Aug 19). The power of language; how words shape people, culture. Standford Report (Standford School of Humanities & Science). https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/08/the-power-of-language-how-words-shape-people-culture

Smith Haghighi, Anna (2025, May 22). What to know about DARVO. Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-is-darvo#darvo-and-mental-health.

The Editors of The Global Council for Behavioral Science (2025, April 21). Language as a lens of reality: how language shapes our thoughts and behaviors . Global Council for Behavioral Science. https://gc-bs.org/p/5-language-lens-reality-c95f/

Username “breakfastpotato”(2018). Don’t rock the boat. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/77w8lf/dont_rock_the_boat/

Yudin, Ana (2026, July 6). Why manipulative people seem so “nice”. Psychology with Dr. Ana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuEhmASbBDg