The Difference between Male and Female Victims of Abuse

 

During a recent radio interview I was asked what I thought what was the difference between male and female victims of narcissistic abuse, or abuse in general.

I answered is that the main difference I have observed is that men and women are two different breeds of cat, in other words men and women process emotional turmoil in different ways.

One of the reasons for this is cultural, and the other is evolutionary.  Not to get all biological, but the brains of men and women are different in the way they process memory and emotion.

“Jennifer Musselman, an executive coach and life therapist with a master’s degree in clinical psychology who was not involved in the study, said this stronger brain connection and higher levels of testosterone suggest men are more likely to have a calm, cool, and collected response to adversity.

New research suggests men are less reactionary to negative emotions because the signals spend more time in the part of the brain associated with reasoning.

Researchers at Institute universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and the University of Montreal studied 46 healthy people by having them view images that could evoke positive, negative, or neutral emotions.

Their brain activity was measured with brain imaging. Blood tests were used to determine changes in hormone levels.

Women were more likely to rate images as negative, but higher testosterone levels — regardless of a person’s sex — were associated with higher sensitivity.

While the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and amygdala were lighting up in both sexes, the connection between these two parts of the brain were stronger in men than in women.”[i]

So while men think more from the rational side of the mind while women think mainly from the emotional side  It’s not to say that one is smarter or lesser than the other, but that we are built differently.

It’s not to say that men are not emotional at all, especially during or after abuse, but we can infer that they are less likely to verbalize it or even report it.

In both cases, men and women try to deal with the abuse and the after effects differently based on these differences. For instance, most of the online Facebook forums for Narcissistic abuse, or any abuse, including infidelity are founded and run by women.  This is not by mistake, but in general, they can be more emotionally wounded by the betrayal that surrounds abuse and infidelity.  Men by nature don’t sit around for a long time discussing with other men the fact that they have been abused.  One reason is because many men were taught machoistic themes such as “grown men don’t’ cry”, or “whine about their problems”. 

Now that thinking is becoming outdated as time goes on, but it still exists within the subconscious of many men.  Because they still feel uncomfortable talking about, much less showing emotion, about their experience as a victim  Which is also why after abuse, men tend to want to move on quicker, even if they are not yet ready to move, on because of that rational mind thinking.

Women have the tendency to “flesh out”, cry out the experience with other women, especially fellow victims, and because they are thinking from the emotional level take longer to heal, which can be both a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether they are ready or not.

A victim of abuse to move forward has to think both ways, both rationally and emotionally.  Rationally to separate the fiction (what I hoped the narcissist to be), from the reality (what they really are), and then emotionally, which is to openly and honestly deal with the feelings of anger, hurt, betrayal, until they are properly placed in context in the heart and mind.   That means that in spite of difference in approach to being a victim, both men and women can learn from each other’s experience.  For men it means learning how to express and deal with their emotions, for women it means learning how to use more of the rational mind so as to not to get stuck primarily at the emotional level.  The most important thing to remember is that every victim of abuse is a victim, it’s not a competition, one better than the other, or one suffers more than the other does.  Suffering during and after abuse is an individual truth and that will always be different for each of us.

Our experience with abuse isn’t the sum total of our lives, it’s a period of our lives.  No matter how long it lasted, it’s not the end of the story and to move on both men and women have to properly heal the wounds so that they don’t constantly re-infect, while minimizing the scars that have occurred. 

 

TPmcatamney