The word “grooming” pops up a lot these days, especially when politicians talk about their opponents. In that context, the word is usually associated with pedophiles, and it has almost become synonymous with sexual abuse of children (see our post for July 21, 2023). As we noted in our last week’s post, however, grooming can take place in a variety of contexts, such as romance, finance, education, terrorism, and criminal enterprises. No matter what the context, though, and whether the target is a child or an adult, common to all grooming actions is a perpetrator who lies continuously to manipulate a victim by building trust, and steadily bring the victim under control. The essence of grooming is when the victim becomes willingly submissive to the power of the perpetrator.
In this post, we want to take a more detailed look at the grooming process, and place it in the context of emotions. A groomer not only instills extremist, narrow-minded attitudes and actions in their victim, but also extremist emotions, and that aspect of grooming is what we want to discuss here. The shrewd, devious, and surreptitious ploys used by groomers result in gaining control of victims by convincing them that the groomer is right and everyone else is wrong; that only the books, movies, magazines, and TV shows acceptable to the groomer are legitimate – all else is fake. The groomer creates a world that is simple, black/white, either/or, right/wrong, with no in-between. The victim’s emotional world is groomed to fit only one model – the groomer’s; all others are invalid. The victim becomes an emotional extremist, a casualty of rigid indoctrination.
To illustrate what we mean by grooming emotional extremism, let’s analyze grooming in the context of gender roles. The emotionally-groomed girl is taught to believe that to maintain her femininity she must be subservient, emotional, quiet, and proper; the emotionally-groomed boy is taught to believe that to maintain his masculinity he must be dominant, aggressive, loud, profane, and unemotional (except to the groomer, of course). The problem here is that this narrow grooming robs victims of a trait that is important in the coping process: Flexibility. What is the groomed woman to do if she finds herself in a situation that requires her to be assertive, strong, and forceful? What is the groomed man to do if he finds himself in a situation that requires him to be tender, caring, and sympathetic? Each will be lost and uncertain because they have been groomed to express a limited, inflexible range of emotions. That uncertainty will result in frustration, self-anger, socially-inappropriate behavior, lowered self-esteem, and, most tragically, increased dependency on the groomer.
Trevor lives with his girlfriend and they have an infant daughter. One day, alone with his daughter, the baby was crying incessantly, and everything Trevor tried to quiet her failed. “Finally,” he said, “I lost it and smacked it on the head. I guess it was too hard because she went unconscious. I panicked, I called 911. They came and took her to the hospital. The police also came and arrested me for hitting her.” The daughter recovered, but Trevor was indicted for child abuse. During the trial his wife began divorce proceedings. Trevor was found guilty and sentenced to jail time. After serving his time, he was paroled, ordered to live in a half-way house, attend regular counseling sessions, and forbidden to have any contact with his ex-wife or daughter.
In counseling Trevor achieved some insights into his behavior. He says, “Social signals like smiles and crying from other people have always been hard for me. My dad always said that trying to feel how someone else was feeling was a sign of weakness in a man. My dad was a drunk and hit me a lot. No matter what I did, he might hit me. I remember as a kid wondering what do I have to do to get some support and affection from this guy? Mom tried to show me she cared, but if she hugged me dad would explode, yelling at her for making me a sissy, and then clobbering me to show me how to be a man. My childhood was really confusing.”
Trevor’s childhood experiences deprived him of emotional flexibility, and made it difficult for him to learn how to give and receive love. As he grew older, whenever someone reached out to him, he didn’t know how to react. Expressions of love and caring from others became aversive for Trevor, threats that reminded him of his childhood inadequacies. Note Trevor’s comment earlier, referring to his daughter: “I lost it and smacked it on the head.” For a moment, the daughter was an “it,” not someone Trevor could relate to positively with love and affection. “No wonder I never really got close to a girl for too long in high school,” Trevor said. “Commitment was a scary thing for me. I took a chance when Sally asked me to move in with her. I figured, what the hell. If things got out of hand I could always just walk. Then she got pregnant.” Trevor’s interactions with his infant daughter awakened many of his childhood issues. “She would smile at me and I got scared – What do I do? What does she want? When she cried, I thought she was mad at me because I was a lousy father. My dad was right; I was worthless. I wasn’t a man. That really got to me.”
Trevor’s early abusive environment and grooming encouraged him to distrust the world and be insecure in social situations. He had a hard time learning how to interpret social signals, and he was confused about how to give and receive love. Frustrated and angry, Trevor lashed out at the source of his confusion, just as his own dad had done. Dad was the only male adult in Trevor’s early life, and he emotionally groomed Trevor to avoid situations that required him to make flexible emotional choices, like ones involving commitment and affection. The only thing that mattered was to be a man.
Sally and the daughter moved to another state, and Trevor – in spite of some insights in counseling – never fully resolved his issues. He stayed in counseling but the sessions slowly became centered on managing his anger. His interactions with women were mostly brief and limited to the bar scene; he remained unable to commit himself to a long-term romantic relationship.
Psychology and Stress 