When a person is inside of a relationship, it’s hard to spot the patterns of abuse. Take any single behavior in an abusive relationship and put it on a desk by itself. Strip away what came before. Strip away what came after. Just let it sit there by itself, with no context. Texting forty-seven times in two days. In and of itself, that can look like love and passion. Maybe the person makes a comment about the way you laugh. On its own, you can take or leave the comment (pro tip: leave it.) Then your person sends flowers after a fight. First thought – they feel bad.
None of those situations seem to be out of the ordinary – until you can start putting the behaviors into a pattern, putting them in context. In and of themselves, they’re innocuous, invisible. Which is why so many women cannot answer the question: why didn’t you see it?
In isolation, none of those look out of the ordinary in everyday life. They didn’t look like the red flags we’re told to “watch out for.” It looks like love. Or a hard day. Or the kind of thing any couple goes through.
So, here’s the thing: The behaviors themselves aren’t the weapon — The sequence is.
A Pattern isn’t a List. It’s a Method.
When we talk about patterns of abuse, it seems like it would be handy to have a checklist to start checking boxes. Sixteen warning signs. Twenty-two red flags. We could scan our relationships against the list and identify which boxes are ticked.
But the list approach in this case has a fatal flaw (besides being unrealistic). Because it treats behaviors as discrete items, each one independent of the others. But abuse doesn’t work that way. We’re finding out that the behaviors are sequenced — and the sequence does the heavy lifting that no individual behavior could ever do on its own.
Don Hennessy, the Irish clinician who has interviewed both perpetrators and their long-term partners, describes what he found inside the minds of the men who do this: a deliberate, repeatable pattern. Not chaos. Not loss of control. A methodology. So, what the abuser is running is closer to a program than a personality.
Methods, by definition, run in order. Each step does its work because of the step that came before. Change the order, change the outcome. Actually, you may not get any outcome at all.
That is why so many of an abuser’s individual moves are so difficult to detect.
The Sequence of Abuse
The sequence of abuse has discernable pattern. In Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control, Don Hennessy notes: “The underlying dynamics appear universal, and are repeated with almost mechanical precision, regardless of the various characteristics of the couple.” And once you have seen it, you can’t un-see it.
The underlying dynamics (of abuse) appear universal, and are repeated with almost mechanical precision, regardless of the various characteristics of the couple.”- Don Hennessy (Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control)
It starts with targeting. Don’s work indicates that an abuser has a specific ‘type’ he’s looking for: kind, loyal, and empathic. Next comes setup and grooming — the love-bombing and concentrated attention that all but guarantee emotional connection. From there, the abuser exploits the victim’s existing insecurities and positions themselves as the antidote: the only one who understands the victim. Then the abuser deepens those inadequacies, training the victim on a rhythm of relief-cruelty-relief — until he is no longer just the source of cruelty but also her relief from it. The room closes slowly, one preference at a time. And by the end, the voice she hears in her own head — the one that monitors her, corrects her, anticipates his judgment before he is even in the room — is no longer entirely hers.
That, in a nutshell, is the sequence — the structure. The behaviors are how it gets built. The sequence is how it works. Which is why it is so maddeningly difficult to recognize.
Why Standard Advice Fails to Recognize Patterns of Abuse
The standard advice about abuse — trust your gut, watch for red flags, leave at the first sign — is terrible advice for people in abusive relationships, not because it’s wrong, but because it assumes that a person can recognize a single behavior as dangerous on its own. The sequence is designed to prevent exactly that recognition.
What can seem obviously dangerous from the outside doesn’t feel dangerous from inside, it feels like her natural generosity extended to the person she loves the most. What feels like manipulation when described on a page doesn’t feel like manipulation when it arrives wrapped in the relief of his return. Each step in the sequence is calibrated against the one that preceded it. And by the time you can see any single behavior clearly, the next step has already changed how you see.
This is why women so often describe the experience of leaving as waking up. Not as catching on or figuring it out. Awakening. Because, by design, what was running on her was operating below the level of awareness.
The Spell Breaks at Recognizing the Sequence
Naming the sequence — out loud, in order, on paper — does what naming a single behavior cannot. It pulls the relationship out of the relationship itself and lays it on the table next to every other relationship that ran the same sequence. And once she can see that hers is not unique: not love, nor the result of her failures, but a pattern that has been run on millions of women before her — something shifts.
The spell, in our experience, does not break at any single behavior. It breaks at awareness of the sequence.
If You are Seeing the Sequence
If you are reading this and you recognize an order to what’s going on — not just a behavior, but a sequence — please know this. What you are seeing is not your failure to read someone correctly. It’s a hallmark to their success at running a method that was more than likely designed, refined, and passed across generations. You didn’t miss it because you were naive. You missed it because the sequence was built to be missed.
So, the first step isn’t leaving – it’s recognizing the pattern. The work of seeing it is the beginning of being free of it. That work is what we’re going to walk through, step by step, in the courses we are building. But this is what I want you to take with you for now: if you’re seeing the sequence, you’re already further along than the design was meant to let you get.
NOTE: Although this article often uses he/him pronouns for the abuser and she/her pronouns for the target/victim, it is imperative to recognize that these abusive dynamics can occur in any type of intimate relationship.