section_path: Psychological research/Abusive power and control
section_name: Abusive power and control
paragraph_text: Abusive power and control
  
  One can regard power as evil or unjust; however, power can also be seen as good and as something inherited or given for exercising humanistic objectives that will help, move, and empower others as well. In general, power derives from the factors of interdependence between two entities and the environment. The use of power need not involve force or the threat of force (coercion). An example of using power without oppression is the concept " soft power " (as compared to hard power). Much of the recent sociological debate about power revolves around the issue of its means to enable – in other words, power as a means to make social actions possible as much as it may constrain or prevent them.
  
  Abusive power and control (or controlling behaviour or coercive control) involve the ways in which abusers gain and maintain power and control over victims for abusive purposes such as psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse. Such abuse can have various causes – such as personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, devaluation, envy or because some abusers enjoy exercising power and control.
  
  Controlling abusers may use multiple tactics to exert power and control over their victims. The tactics themselves are psychologically and sometimes physically abusive. Control may be helped through economic abuse, thus limiting the victim's actions as they may then lack the necessary resources to resist the abuse. Abusers aim to control and intimidate victims or to influence them to feel that they do not have an equal voice in the relationship.
  
  Manipulators and abusers may control their victims with a range of tactics, including:
  
  The vulnerabilities of the victim are exploited, with those who are particularly vulnerable being most often selected as targets. Traumatic bonding can occur between the abuser and victim as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment fosters powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change, as well as a climate of fear. An attempt may be made to normalise, legitimise, rationalise, deny, or minimise the abusive behaviour, or to blame the victim for it.
  
  Isolation, gaslighting, mind games, lying, disinformation, propaganda, destabilisation, brainwashing and divide and rule are other strategies that are often used. The victim may be plied with alcohol or drugs or deprived of sleep to help disorientate them.
  
  Certain personality types feel particularly compelled to control other people.