I want to address the timing of my post. My daughter has not stopped having nightmares about a few situations that occurred in her previous gym since we left 3 years ago. There have been times when they lessened, and times when they were worse. Recently, the nightmares became frequent again. I did not realize it at the time, but her solution to this was to drink monster and coffee all day so she would not sleep. It took about a week before that caught up to her and something terrible happened. To protect my daughter’s privacy, I won’t go into that, but I will say that she is currently hospitalized and will be for a long time. The fact that this occurred around the same time as the news about Jerry Harris is purely coincidental. However, I have spoken with the mother of Jerry’s victims and she does not have an issue with my opinions or postings. She agreed with me that abuse is abuse- no matter the vehicle for the trauma to occur, the result is the same. I do not post to compete with, or take away from, anyone’s hurtful situations. In fact, I wish to add to that discussion in order to educate people in a way that I wish I had been before my daughter was harmed.
Here is a list of characteristics of a toxic relationship that I pulled from the internet:
Domination: attempting to control another’s actions and always have their own way. The abuser may use threats and/or manipulation to get their way.
Verbal Assaults: Berating, belittling, criticizing, humiliating, name-calling, screaming, threatening, excessive blaming, shaming, using sarcasm in a cutting way, verbal abuse disguised as jokes. The abuser may then belittle you for being hurt by their words and taking it so seriously.
Constant Criticism/Continual Blaming: This can be difficult to identify. The person might put you down under the guise of humor, similar to verbal assaults, or claiming they are just trying to help you to be better. Engle describes this dynamic’s effects, saying “When someone is unrelentingly critical of you, always finds fault, can never be pleased, and blames you for everything that goes wrong, it is the insidious nature and cumulative effects of the abuse that do the damage.”
Abusive Expectations: When someone places unreasonable demands on you. Usually they react strongly when you do not meet these expectations.
Emotional Blackmail: Coercing another to do what you want by playing into their fear, guilt or compassion (ie: one partner threatening to end the relationship if they don’t get what they want, silent treatment, guilt trips, making you feel selfish when you do something they don’t want you to do, asking you to give something up as a way of proving your love/friendship/loyalty to him/her). Again, this blackmail may be subtle or overt.
Unpredictable Responses: This is characterized by drastic mood swings, sudden emotional outbursts for no apparent reason and inconsistent responses. They may react to a situation fine one day and then explode at the same situation the next day. This causes others to feel constantly on edge-waiting for the other shoe to drop. This behavior is common with alcohol and drug abusers/addicts or those with various forms of mental illness. This form of emotional abuse keeps you in a hypervigilant state, needing to be ready to respond to the other’s explosions or mood swings.
Constant Chaos/Creating Crisis: This is characterized by continual upheavals and discord. The abuser may deliberately start arguments with you or others or seem to be in constant conflict with others. The phrase “addicted to drama” fits here. This behavior may serve to distract from their own problems, feelings of emptiness or feel more comfortable for those who were raised in chaotic environments.
Character Assasination: Constantly blowing someone’s mistakes out of proportion, humiliating, criticizing, making fun of someone in front of others, or discounting another’s achievements. This can also involve lying about someone to negatively influence others’ opinions of them and gossiping about their mistakes and failures.
Gaslighting: This term comes from the classic movie Gaslight in which a husband uses a variety of insidious techniques to make his wife doubt her perceptions, memory and sanity. The abuser may continually deny that certain events occurred or that he or she said something you both know was said or he or she my insinuate that you are exaggerating or lying. The abusive person may be trying to gain control over you or avoid taking responsibility for his or her actions. This often results in the abused doubting themselves and less likely to speak up when future abuse happens.
The same descriptors can be used to describe a toxic gym environment. If you can understand why people have difficulty leaving a toxic relationship, then perhaps you can also understand why they may also have trouble leaving a toxic gym environment. When you look around and and the behavior appears acceptable to a group of people, you wonder if you are crazy because you have an issue with it. When the person doing the abusive behavior is celebrated and practically worshipped, you tend to wonder if you are the one with the problem because you don’t feel that way too. When the person doing the abusive behavior sprinkles in sporadic doses of seemingly authentic love and attention, you do start to wonder if you are crazy to think that someone is capable of being so loving and so awful at the same time. Well, they are. When the person doing the abusive behavior also affords you the opportunity to experience a “dream come true” situation along with all the accolades included, it is hard to reconcile the bad with the good. Some terms to google: gaslighting, crazymaking. The concept of people staying in harmful relationships is nothing new and by now the information is readily available enough that we should all have a degree of knowledge about how that works. I can understand how these concepts are completely foreign and unbelievable to someone who has never been in such a situation. The fact that one cannot comprehend does not lessen the experience of the one who endured the abuse. I’m beyond happy for those of you out there that are unable to relate. But that doesn’t make the ordeal that mine and many others went through any less real or traumatic.
I will also say that every person who appears happy in a situation may not be. Sometimes, the good is weighed against the bad and a person decides one is worth more than the other. That doesn’t mean that later on there won’t be resulting consequences. Some people simply don’t understand that they aren’t being treated right, and an even larger group of people don’t have the strength to stand up to it or walk away. I’m sure it’s even more difficult to find the courage to leave when you see vocal people like myself dragged to hell and back for talking. That’s the very nature of the toxic relationship, isn’t it? If they were easy to leave, nobody would be in one. The same goes for the gym environment. Education and support will go a long way to change that. Thank you to those who have supported me. This has not been an easy road in so many ways. I don’t want anyone else to go through this.
