Hi Michelle - another good topic.

My whole life I've been conscious of interacting with people in one of three ways:
1) Like I interacted with my paternal grandmother (and grandfather when he was alive) - with love and trust and open affection. I had these type of relationships very rarely, and almost always with boyfriends. I felt happy and open and OK with who I was - I felt like a good person.
2) like the way I interacted with my mother - locked in a cycle of abuse and resistance/despair. This was most often with authority figures who I felt were inflexibly dictatorial/authoritarian. I would become a rebel - the very bad child, a monster.
3) like the way everyone else seemed to interact with me when I was young (including my father), perfectly capable of exchanging polite pleasantries, but at arm's length, not really getting involved, no commitment (and certainly no protection). In these relationships I feel invisible behind my mask, that no-one wants to see anything but the mask. I also feel most in danger here, because I don't know how many of those people are potentially dangerous, hiding behind their own masks.

I used to wonder if I was drawn to abusive people (it's one of the 'stats' I used to hear about abuse survivors, kind of implying masochism). But after years of observing, I've realized that the number of bad people I come across probably isn't any larger or smaller than the population at large, and it's not that I want to be there - I don't. It's just that I don't know how to disengage with them - so I get locked in the 'dance' when most healthy people would have just stepped aside long ago. My radar is very finely tuned to potential abusers. Sometimes I think I unintentionally aggravate a situation just to bring them out of the closet. I think it's an understandable reaction - it only makes sense if you know that, say, a dangerous animal is close by, you'd keep your eyes on it, rather than on other things. So abusive people, although no greater in number than in the lives of healthy people, tend to take up more of my life space and attention because I don't know how to live my life in their general vicinity and still feel safe.
The secondary impact is I've spent so much of my life scanning for danger that I don't know how to recognize most of the good, decent people, and have no idea how to form a true relationship with them. I always feel on the outside there.

Another thought just came to me, don't know why I hadn't considered it before. I don't generally consider people with anger, etc... issues to be abusive - I just see them as people in pain who need to learn to direct their emotions in a healthy way; I may need to duck once in a while when they're having problems, or give them some space, but I never need to worry that they would intentionally hurt me. The people I consider abusive are those people who let their reactions hurt others, but either do it intentionally, or have no remorse about it.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has learned to deal with abusive people in any way other than running/hiding, or fighting back with everything they've got. I'm reminded of a self-defense course I once took. The instructor demonstrated that, if someone is throwing something at your head, you don't have to spend huge amounts of energy diving across the room, you just have to tilt your head enough for the object to miss you. Wish I knew how to do that in my real life...
Regards,
J.