How can you know if you’re in an Emotionally Abusive Relationship?

Just because there’s no physical violence, does that mean a relationship isn’t abusive?

No.

The adage, “can’t see the forest for the trees” is particularly true in emotionally abusive relationships, and it’s not uncommon for men and women in them to be unable to identify the relationship as being abusive.

Why is that?

It goes back to 1973 and an unsuccessful bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in which two perpetrators – both repeat offender prisoners – took four hostages, three women and one man. Over the six days they were held, the hostages began to identify and sympathize with their captors.

Hostages in the Norrmalmstorg Kreditbanken bank vault, Stockholm, Sweden. The 1973 robbery gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome” which characterized a scenario in which captives sympathized with their captors.

As the standoff was ending, police called for the hostages to come out first, but the four captives – who protected their abductors to the very end – refused. One female hostage, 23-year old Kristin Enmark, called out, “No, Jan and Clark go first—you’ll gun them down if we do! We want to leave with the robber!”

When police seized the gunmen, two female hostages cried sympathetically, “Don’t hurt them – they didn’t harm us!”

When interviewed by investigators and others following the crisis’ conclusion, the hostages reported fearing Law Enforcement Officers’ rescue effort attempts, and felt their captors were protecting them from harm. The bonds formed during that stand-off had become so strong that there were reports of one female hostage who had been engaged to be married to one of the kidnappers – which was later discovered to be false, though it is true that one hostage developed a Legal Defense Fund to help pay the perpetrators’ criminal defense costs.

Researcher Ian K.Mackenzie wrote
in “Journal For Police Crisis Negotiations”
that Stockholm Syndrome consisted of:
“strong emotional ties that develop between two persons
where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.”

Psychological researchers utilizing the FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System (HOBAS) – the only entity that compiles national statistics on crisis incidents (hostage, barricade, and/or suicide) which are used in research and decision making – found that

China hacks Army’s Redstone Arsenal computers in Huntsville, Alabama, steals military secrets

Among defense contractors, QinetiQ North America (QQ/) is known for spy-world connections and an eye- popping product line. Its contributions to national security include secret satellites, drones, and software used by U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Former CIA Director George Tenet was a director of the company from 2006 to 2008 and former Pentagon spy chief Stephen Cambone headed a major division. Its U.K. parent was created as a spinoff of a government weapons laboratory that inspired Q’s lab in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers, a connection QinetiQ (pronounced kin-EH-tic) still touts.

QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed.

“We found traces of the intruders in