#|| your active participation in their little scene. and they'll go at you for dissociating.

[revvnant]

insomnia is just wrecking my shit but i can must will think about michael's little cycles as a late teenager. specifically like. the ups and downs of dealing with abuse. i feel like a lot of resources focus on the abuser's cycle - honeymoon, tension, incident, reconciliation - but not very much on the victim's. in my experience, if it goes on long enough, there does come a point where you disconnect from that flow. especially if you're in the stage between realising the abuse is happening and getting out. the helplessness and frustration of being unable to leave once you know you're being mistreated creates its own cycle. knowing what's happening, you may try to use logic to start to control the situation, but because the abuse tends to be nonsensical, no amount of pointing out the behaviour or arguing your case or even highlighting that it's irrational is going to make it stop. eventually you exhaust yourself and enter phase two, playing dead. since it's so out of your control, you decide to just stop caring and let it happen. they're still doing the exact same song and dance and you are being dragged along for the ride. it doesn't matter if you argue, because it's going to keep happening, so why waste your time and energy that could be put towards recovering from each incident? but then they keep happening, and your energy comes back, and it turns into frustration again. because you don't deserve to be treated this way. sometimes this leads to a fourth phase, where the frustration triggers a blowup, and then guilt and self-blame over the ensuing issues; lots of 'maybe it was my fault because i let it slide for too long and got angry', 'oh am i just as bad as them', etc. this leads back into the attempted rationality phase, trying to 'fix it'.

so there are fluctuations in michael's behaviour. sometimes he's a doormat. sometimes he fights back. and it's tied to the way he constantly has to manage his own energy/resources, while throwing himself against the brick wall that is william's treatment of him. and some of those bricks are made up of the honeymoon phase! but when you're far enough along that you've caught on to the game, those moments can start to sour, too, because they never last. sadly from an outside perspective this does make mike look unstable which just adds to the problem. such is the hammer they're beating him with.