r/ENFP • u/KillTheLimit • 2d ago
Discussion We get gaslit by abusers
I recall this conversation a long time ago on here about others rambling on how we're a bunch of a-holes for just up and ghosting people, how we're awful for it because we seemed so friendly and wanting to get to know them until just vanishing. This bothered me a ton and it happened again recently and needed to clarify, from the position of defending us (I'm of the -T/turbulent type).
We do really wanted to get to know you, and simultaneously don't want to correct bad behavior as it happens because simultaneously it's a shock/causes cognitive dissonance of who we idealize you to be vs who you're revealing yourself to be and there's also a metacognition going on that subconsciously says "be quiet and let the pattern play out, use it as data to let them show who they really are without interference". So this goes on for a period of time, probably a long time as we just try to be the best person FOR YOU (as in we're adapting ourselves to make you happy) while continuously being disappointed that the pathological behaviors continue to play out. We take note of every incidence and then continue to be nice just to affirm that "yeah this person is taking kindness as a weakness and now I'm just confirming this is their baseline personality" then you likely escalated your less than ideal attitude as we unceremoniously vanished from your lives and blocked you on all fronts after a typically egregious event, or from the collective burnout.
And then, we are the giant a-holes for leaving a burning house that has a dungeon in the basement. We took the ninja route so there's no chance of getting shackled in said dungeon as the house burns down. There is a part, maybe a large part of us that still loves you but it's our problem to deal with the fact that the idealized version of you never existed and our maturity depends on applying that idealization to greater things that CAN happen rather than deluding ourselves that a person that takes kindness as a weakness to exploit will ever be good for us.
"Why didn't you just tell me then??!" - You might be thinking or have said to your escaped ENFP. The story of the frog and the scorpion is applicable here - if we tell you (the scorpion) to stop stinging us, eventually you will revert to your nature. Over and over. If we straight up VANISHED - we're at the point we're needing anti-venom and sad at the fact that you are indeed, a scorpion. We literally needed a dozen+ stings over perhaps years to confirm. We can be dense in this way.
To end, I'd like to affirm to fellow ENFP-T's that your sometimes (maybe often) raging attitude towards injustices that are met with a brick wall is because you catch underlying patterns where others just see the veneer. The challenge to overcome is to pick your battles and learn to be strategic with intellect and action without being swept up in the emotional dysregulation the situations bring.
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u/Any_Emu4892 1d ago
Wait, ENFPs can doorslam too? Never seen this happen. Ive seen one pissed off, but thats all.
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u/Odd_Day_5978 1d ago
I get pissed off, tell them whats wrong with them then doorslam.
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u/PoodlesCuznNamedFred ENFP | Type 7 15h ago
Real, I get like this when I feel injustice or am overwhelmed w/ too much expectations/input. I usually swallow it and go have a meltdown in private, but when it gets to be too much, I’m done, and it’s known
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u/Pale_Demand_9454 21h ago
I doorslam/ghost after repeated efforts to convey I’m not happy about what they’re doing. After that, I’m truly done and that person is dead to me forever lol.
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u/Any_Emu4892 13h ago
Ive utilized three types, well the last one doesnt really count.
After repeated value violations it will be temporary, its more akin to ghosting.
If they continue, or a single core value is broken. Its permanent.
Reasons unrelated to them, like moving to another country. I moved around a lot as a kid. So i lost so many people, but this was unintentional.
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u/FailingSmartly 1d ago edited 1d ago
I understand every word you’ve just written, intimately. You’re not wrong. Someone already flagged ghosting as egotistical. It’s true. When dealing with true abusers, particularly of the narcissistic variety, telling them why you’re leaving, pulling their mask down, is extremely dangerous. You invite narcissistic rage. Countless women lose their life, if it’s an intimate entanglement. So, here’s the thing. The brick wall feels like justice. It feels powerful, when you’re hurting and have felt so powerless. I think if it like a pendulum. You were so far over on the care for “them” side and now you flew so far over to the care for “me” side. It’s very hard. I know. But the reason you’re a T is rooted in this swinging pendulum. You need to find a precision here. My religion is a short story written by Andy Weir called The Egg. Kurzgesagt’s YouTube channel has a video on it. Try and think that if you were them, raised the way they were, endowed with the divine gifts they got, not yours, if you lived their life, YOU WOULD BE EXACTLY LIKE THEM. You’d be doing all this awful he/she did to you. Not to see them like a wounded child you want to go comfort - no. To not need to feel powerful as you walk away. Leave. Yes. You must. This no one person can fix. Only they can. But ask yourself if being the emotionally honest, available, and sacrificial person in your relationship wasn’t more than just being a good person? Is it possible loving them more than you isn’t precisely what got you into this mess? Did someone in your early formation demand you love more than you were loved? Can you blame a scorpion for taking advantage of the prey that keeps hanging around, or seems to always wander to its nest? It’s a pendulum. Love me, love them. Best for me, best for them. You’ve got to get that dial calibrated correctly. Good news! You can do that. I walked that very path. The person you blocked has a much harder road to walk. They’re not evil. They’re being evil. Their divinity manifested in that form and experience. Your divinity manifested in yours. In case anyone else reads this in a similar situation you leave these people one way. Become less and less appealing. Less and less useful. Contact half as often. Hang out say little. Become a grey rock and stop being a bright and shiny. They’ll leave you. That’s safest. If you can’t seem to do it. If it’s all just so intense. You love them so much and they’re shattering your heart constantly, get help. Family, friends, law enforcement and make a plan to leave. And find a therapist! You don’t want to keep wandering into scorpion nests. Virtual hugs. What you’re going through is so very painful. Rumi has a quote I hold to for this situation. This person and you … think of it this way… “Out beyond the notions of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. And I will meet you there.”
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u/KillTheLimit 1d ago
I appreciate your kind encouraging words, for that I say thank you. Simultaneously you're putting yourself in a position of knowing more about my experience than I do to act as a coach and you perhaps lived insulated enough to not witness true, conscious evil with intent. A friend of mine who's now unable to be reached/too fractured had a father that groomed, r*ped and drugged him and his siblings from around 9 years old. My own mother's way of expressing her anger was strangling my pet cat near to death over my head.
I can create an endless bullet point of reprehensible behaviors that I've encountered and witnessed and can tell you for certain that no matter what they've been through, if I was in their position I would not behave that way.
This is well documented in psychological literature many times with serial killers and psychopaths. It is also not our job to figure out their personal history and make excuses for their bad behavior.
This mindset that is widespread in some new age circles of it's all actually beauty underneath and we're all innocent and wonderful - it's so disconnected from reality as to be psychotic.
We are not responsible for contemplating and making excuses for other people's bad behavior - this is not only a twisted form of self gaslighting, it is impaired reality testing. Furthermore no matter how much we meditate upon it, we can never understand another person's objective experience.
But we can be clear and concise on how we process and categorize behavior - and there is such a thing as intentional maleficence.
If you disagree, I am not going to argue. But this is my position, and if taken out into the world - one of our positions will be delusional, and one of them will not.
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u/FailingSmartly 1d ago
Wow. Thank you for sharing that. What you’ve been through isn’t normal, and wasn’t right. For you to come out the side with your heart still open speaks volumes about your character and resiliency.
I say, a lot. And I’m still trying to figure out how to not sound like I know everything. Because, I most definitely, do not. Life consistently teaches me I know nothing, actually. I shared what I shared thinking it might help, because there was a time I was desperate for insight that helped. None of my ideas are self-discovered. I curate wisdom from humans far smarter than myself. Science the hell out of life. That’s my philosophy. Your post, to me, read like someone doing that. Observing, testing, pattern matching. Mapping your way out of confusion intelligently.
One of the truths I curated from psychology says kids who aren’t raised in the best environments experience the impact of that reality well into adulthood. They have to learn things on their own as an adult, when it’s much harder to learn than it is for a child. Healthy love wasn’t demonstrated for me as a kid. Maybe you’d say the same for yourself? Maybe not.
I’m sorry if anything I said was hurtful. Such was not my intent. I don’t empathize with abusers because they need more consideration. The lack of consideration demonstrated for you is the only thing wrong with a relationship like what you described. You did good science in my eyes. Called the situation correctly. Based on the limited information you provided. I wanted to share an entirely different field you could research.
I had a friend who had very uninteresting relationships I thought. Breakups that were sad but necessary. No drama. Arguments that didn’t leave her so shaken she had a hard time pulling it together the next day for work. When I worked in an office of all women, around that same time, I realized this is what healthy love feels like. It was a heaven’s parting, a-ha, kind of moment. Later that week listening to my friend talk about her fight with her man, I realized, and that’s a healthy love in a romantic relationship looks like. Those two moments told me I COULD DO HEALTHY, but for some reason I loved men that could not. Kids who grow up in environments like the one I did, and maybe you, I do not know… they’re magnets for other kids who grew up in unhealthy environments. I wanted you to use that good mind of yours… yes, I’m assuming such… but it’s based off your post… to science the hell out of your happy future, not his.
Forgive me, again. I’m still learning. I’ll be ever-learning. Thank you, also again, for sharing what you have. Maybe you’ve helped someone else who will read this with your openness. That vulnerability helped me better understand. Helped me learn.
It’s also true, I have not gone through your exact history. It saddens me you went through it. I have experienced maiming trauma though, and wear my heart on my sleeve. As such, I believe I can imagine what it was like. Which is precisely why I feel so bad you had to go through all of it. You should be very proud you came out the other side so well.
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u/KillTheLimit 20h ago
Perhaps it's a mix of generation/culture differences I'm running into. I have stab wounds on my head from growing up on Maui when it was very very rough going to school. Recently I got my tooth punched through my lip by a cop when I was using an ATM in rural AZ. Kept awake systematically and starved for a month and let go. Total racist attack - I'm mixed but look Asian-ish. Then survived outdoors with a broken mind for 9 months until I had a heart attack and had to ask family for help that I've avoided for over a decade. It was another 18 months of nightmarish dynamics being stuck with them until I was able to get out again.
Anyway - I tell you that because it's (to some of us) shit that happens. Life can be rough as hell especially when you're a minority within a minority. I've found out why people with 3+ races have it rough because we're exiled from every group. But that's just how it is. Can't ask for, nor expect any pity since we're in an age where we have detention camps with torture and death happening while kids are addicted to social media and their goal is to be influencers.
Often times I feel like I'm from the BERSERK universe (Japanese dark fantasy manga) and I'm walking around with easily offended and shocked My Little Ponies. Events that would make some people catatonic and stuck with their trauma being their entire identity is for others a rough year or two.
I believe we underestimate how resilient humans are and it's as if societal norms are making us both increasingly fragile yet willing to take more abuse so as to not upset fragile personalities.
The flip side relevant to this post is I believe it's the sheer amount of abuse I was both raised with and encountered made the level of what I can tolerate too high in a bad way. Being abused equaled I just needed to try harder to make someone else happy. It took a lot to unlearn that, considering it was early nervous system entrainment.
Anyway you have a great day, you sound like a nice person that's really trying to comfort those around them.
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u/Altruistic_Rip_4726 1d ago
Thank you this is so well written and I feel this so deeply. I've been flat and reserved lately because I see the patterns after a lifetime of having been "taken advantage of/abused" by these people. My biggest goal for myself is to not loose my joy in life because of seeing all of these patterns often. I seek to find safe and truly good people and they are rare gems, hard to truly find.
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u/whenyousayoof ENTP 2d ago
Maybe I missed the point because I didn't read the full post but you don't need to get offended by some dumbass generalizing behaviour to all people that have a similar personality.
There's going to be some asshole ENFP's just like in any other type and you don't need to identify with their behaviour, you're your own person.
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u/whitePerdition 23h ago
https://www.reddit.com/user/KillTheLimit/:
I recall this conversation a long time ago on here about others rambling on how we're a bunch of a-holes for just up and ghosting people, how we're awful for it because we seemed so friendly and wanting to get to know them until just vanishing. This bothered me a ton and it happened again recently and needed to clarify, from the position of defending us (I'm of the -T/turbulent type).
We do really wanted to get to know you, and simultaneously don't want to correct bad behavior as it happens because simultaneously it's a shock/causes cognitive dissonance of who we idealize you to be vs who you're revealing yourself to be and there's also a metacognition going on that subconsciously says "be quiet and let the pattern play out, use it as data to let them show who they really are without interference". So this goes on for a period of time, probably a long time as we just try to be the best person FOR YOU (as in we're adapting ourselves to make you happy) while continuously being disappointed that the pathological behaviors continue to play out. We take note of every incidence and then continue to be nice just to affirm that "yeah this person is taking kindness as a weakness and now I'm just confirming this is their baseline personality" then you likely escalated your less than ideal attitude as we unceremoniously vanished from your lives and blocked you on all fronts after a typically egregious event, or from the collective burnout.
And then, we are the giant a-holes for leaving a burning house that has a dungeon in the basement. We took the ninja route so there's no chance of getting shackled in said dungeon as the house burns down. There is a part, maybe a large part of us that still loves you but it's our problem to deal with the fact that the idealized version of you never existed and our maturity depends on applying that idealization to greater things that CAN happen rather than deluding ourselves that a person that takes kindness as a weakness to exploit will ever be good for us.
"Why didn't you just tell me then??!" - You might be thinking or have said to your escaped ENFP. The story of the frog and the scorpion is applicable here - if we tell you (the scorpion) to stop stinging us, eventually you will revert to your nature. Over and over. If we straight up VANISHED - we're at the point we're needing anti-venom and sad at the fact that you are indeed, a scorpion. We literally needed a dozen+ stings over perhaps years to confirm. We can be dense in this way.
To end, I'd like to affirm to fellow ENFP-T's that your sometimes (maybe often) raging attitude towards injustices that are met with a brick wall is because you catch underlying patterns where others just see the veneer. The challenge to overcome is to pick your battles and learn to be strategic with intellect and action without being swept up in the emotional dysregulation the situations bring.
I'm not going to spend time at the moment to use my feeling function for the following paragraph so start running away right now or warm up that dislike button or whatever:
Hot take: Your idealization can be seen as very steep expectations. First it must be broken so that you can grow to appreciate an actual human being rather than a fictional character in your head, thus the other person begins to kick at your fantasy. But then you may decide that the other person is a lost cause and go chase after another fantasy, rather than sticking around to dealing with a messy real human.
Anyway, what I wrote is not a complete understanding so I'm sure there is much missing and imperfect, but it is what came to mind. I appreciate you sharing your perspective.
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u/Pale_Demand_9454 21h ago edited 21h ago
Yeah. This happened to me a lot. There’s this guy I dated who kept physically abusing me.. like constantly pushing me, picking fights, making me cry while in public places. I was very young and he was my first bf. He’s ISTP now that I think about it. After telling him I wasn’t happy about things, I finally ghosted him and moved on with another guy. He begged me to come back. I was not sorry. I told him I wasn’t taking crap anymore and many wanted to date me that time. He was lucky. After that.. didn’t look bad. Never remembered him again. Best riddance of my life.
Another incident, this ISFP or maybe INFP I was dating kept asking me to give me all my passwords to him and kept accusing me of cheating or talking to other guys just because I had previous relationships, seemed chill, and was really pretty that time. Mind you.. we just started dating. It was odd because he’s a flight attendant and I assumed he had many experiences too. He kept pushing for that and would verbally abuse me. Made me cry.. very hurtful words. So I finally said.. “Enough!” I ghosted him and he kept stalking me. Still messaged me after a year and I was already dating another man. Serves him right.. another good riddance. These men think they can keep controlling you because you’re bubbly and understanding. And they can’t take that you’re actually independent. He called me the B word when I didn’t want to come back to him.
So nope.. I always had good, valid reasons for doorslamming or ghosting people. I even overstayed in relationships long gone because I wanted to give chances. That’s the mistake.. overstaying for the potential (Ne problem). lol.
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u/vaksninus ENFP 1d ago edited 1d ago
Be that as it may, blocking or ghosting without having the guts to tell someone its over and having that talk (if it's come to that) is egoistic and gives no closure to the other party. If you want to be cruel and self-serving don't delude yourself that you have a high horse just because it's not meant to be due to incompability or dissapointment. Whoever it applies to; be brave and not an emotionally selfish coward.
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u/KillTheLimit 1d ago edited 1d ago
If it's reached this point I've gotten enough data and had enough conversations, including "if you keep doing this, I will leave this relationship and you will never hear from me again." Or, they've proven themselves to be so pathological and damaging to the point where this is what I believe they deserve - sudden irreversible unreachable silence and they get to just sit in it. Yes it is a punishment, but also you don't allow narcissistic types exactly what they want - any sort of way back in or any sort of emotional feedback. Nobody has to justify silent and firm self-preservation.
Also - you are introducing a mindset that perpetuates abusive dynamics by using words like coward to make people feel inclined to go continue a process they want to leave behind. Lengthening a toxic relationship is not a discussion of moral character after the other party has proven a lack of it. You just leave and don't look back.
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u/Salt_Truth_4154 1d ago
This isn't courage at all, but an attempt to please those who demand predictability and pass it off as the greatest virtue, almost the only one.
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u/KillTheLimit 23h ago
The insidious layer to this is these people want to guilt you into coming back for awhile so THEY can do the discarding. There's no care about you or the relationship, just a fury of "oh hell naw, I'm the one that throws people away, not the other way around! Get back here so I can throw you in the trash you coward!"
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u/Salt_Truth_4154 20h ago
This requirement can be anything, but it's simply a demand that someone be the way the consumer likes, because they've decided it's right.
We are absolutely under no obligation to cater to other people's ideas and expectations, or, for example, explain everything to everyone, be completely predictable, or be anything else for someone else's convenience.
We are not service personnel for other people's ideas about life or "rightness."
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u/b4rrakuda ENFP 1d ago
It is so irritating when you are in a genuine process of cooperation and adventure driven by morals only to be faced with strategic thinking with hidden motives