When someone looks down on another person because of their gender, race, or any other characteristic that makes them different, what’s really happening beneath the surface?
The answer reveals something uncomfortable about power, insecurity, and the patterns that keep abusive dynamics alive.
Misogyny exists as a real and pervasive problem. Most women deal with it at least once in their lives, and many deal with it repeatedly. But when you strip away the specific labels and look at the underlying mechanics, you find something familiar. You find the same power-over model that shows up in every abusive relationship, regardless of who’s involved.
The abusive person sees certain people as inferior. Not as smart. Not as strong. Not as capable. And on top of that perception, they carry a superiority complex that convinces them they have the right to exert power and control. This can happen through overt aggression or through more passive methods like manipulation and covert behaviors.
What makes this particularly insidious is how the abuser justifies their actions. They don’t see themselves as insecure or weak. They see themselves as maintaining proper order, keeping people in line, or simply getting what they deserve. But underneath that facade of superiority lies profound insecurity.
The Insecurity Behind the Mask
Think about how a bully operates. They don’t pick on someone they think might beat them up. They target someone they perceive as weaker, smaller, or less capable of fighting back. If the bully discovered their target had exceptional fighting skills, they’d move on to someone else. This isn’t about strength. It’s about maintaining an illusion of power.
The same dynamic plays out in abusive relationships. Someone who feels deeply insecure finds ways to control people they believe won’t defeat them. By dominating someone they perceive as weaker, they temporarily feel strong. Their insecurity shines through every controlling behavior, every put-down, every attempt to change or diminish another person.
This is why misogynistic behavior and abusive behavior share the same root. Both stem from someone who needs to maintain control to feel secure inside themselves. Both involve targeting people the abuser believes they can dominate. Both require keeping someone else small so the abuser can feel big.
The superiority complex isn’t evidence of actual superiority. It’s evidence of deep-seated fear:
Fear of being exposed as inadequate.
Fear of losing control.
Fear of being seen as the insecure person they actually are.
When you understand this, you start to see abusive behavior differently. It’s not about the victim’s worth or capabilities. It’s about the abuser’s desperate need to feel powerful because they feel so powerless inside.
How Abuse Creates Its Victims
One of the most damaging myths about abusive relationships is that people with low self-esteem are the ones who get into them and stay in them. This gets the timeline backward. In most cases, people enter these relationships feeling perfectly fine about themselves. They have a healthy amount of self-esteem and self-worth. They feel good about who they are.
Then they meet someone who, slowly, over time, disintegrates that self-esteem.
The abusive person constantly puts them down, makes them feel worthless, reminds them how inadequate they are, and treats them as if they have no value.
When someone treats you as worthless long enough, you start to feel worthless.
That’s a natural response to constant emotional pummeling. And this is how abusers create their victims. They push someone’s esteem so far down that the person eventually develops low self-worth. But that’s the result of the abuse, not the cause of it.
Healthy people get into abusive relationships all the time. Then they become mentally unwell because of what they endure. When they finally get out, they have to rebuild everything. Their esteem. Their worth. The truth that they are lovable and important. The understanding that they are not what that person made them believe they were.
The healing process requires rebuilding from the ground up. And contrary to popular belief, people who come out of abusive relationships with low self-esteem don’t typically jump right into another abusive relationship because of that low self-esteem. Most take time to heal. Most recognize the patterns. Most work to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Low self-esteem develops when you’re taught as a child that you aren’t worthy or lovable. That can make you vulnerable to certain dynamics. But it’s not the primary driver of why healthy adults end up in abusive situations.
More often, it’s about meeting someone who seems wonderful at first, someone who fills your cup until it overflows, making them appear like the most amazing person in the world.
That initial love-bombing phase can actually increase your self-esteem temporarily. The abuser makes you feel incredible about yourself for weeks or months. That’s what makes them so attractive. That’s what creates the bond. And that’s what makes it so devastating when the mask comes off, and the abuse begins.
The Masculine and Feminine Energy Dynamic
Understanding abusive dynamics requires looking beyond gender labels at the energetic aspects people carry. Everyone has both masculine and feminine energy inside them, regardless of their gender identity. These aren’t about men versus women. They’re about different approaches to life and relationships.
Feminine energy tends to be more emotionally connected, nurturing, compassionate, and empathetic. Masculine energy tends to be more about taking charge, leadership, and outward action. Neither is better than the other. Both are necessary. Both exist in everyone to varying degrees.
Problems arise when someone takes one of these energetic roles to an extreme and makes it toxic. When someone amplifies the masculine role and uses it to dominate rather than lead, abuse becomes possible. When the ego gets involved, and someone becomes selfish, that’s when the leadership aspect turns into control and intimidation.
This can happen regardless of gender. Women can take on an overly dominant masculine role and become abusive. Non-binary people can do the same. Anyone can amplify one aspect of their personality to the point where it becomes harmful to others.
What typically happens in abusive relationships is that someone takes the masculine energy, the take-charge aspect, and stretches it to an extreme. They become narcissistic, selfish, and convinced of their own superiority. They use that energy to get what they want because deep down, they feel inferior and insecure.
The toxic version of masculine energy shows up as bullying, controlling, and intimidating behavior. It’s outward-focused aggression designed to keep others in line. And while feminine energy can also become toxic, the typical abusive patterns follow the masculine model because of its outward, dominating nature.
This framework helps explain why abusive qualities can show up in anyone. It’s not about assigning toxic behavior exclusively to men, even though misogyny is specifically about men feeling superior to women. It’s about recognizing that these controlling, dominating behaviors stem from taking one energetic role too far and making it aggressive and selfish.
When Religion and Culture Enable Abuse
Some people use religious texts or cultural traditions to justify their abusive behavior. They find passages that seem to support male dominance or female submission. They twist words to create loopholes that give them permission to control, hurt, or diminish their partner.
This is religious abuse. It happens when someone exploits belief systems to maintain power over another person. Conservative views about male-female relationships can become weapons in the hands of someone determined to dominate. Patriarchal structures that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years can get used to justify treating women as inferior.
The pattern shows up clearly in how some people interpret religious teachings. Instead of focusing on love, compassion, and mutual respect, they cherry-pick the parts that support their need for control. They use God or tradition as an excuse for behavior that harms others.
Throughout history, men have not treated women equally. This has been passed down generation after generation. You can see it in families, in politics, in every level of authority. It’s systemic misogyny that has contributed directly to abusive behaviors for centuries.
There’s a reason that 85 to 90 percent of people who join programs to stop emotionally abusive behavior are men. The patterns get passed down. Sons watch their fathers. They absorb the message that men should be in charge and women should submit. They learn that control equals strength and that showing dominance proves masculinity.
This doesn’t excuse the behavior. Understanding where it comes from doesn’t make it acceptable. But it does help explain why these patterns persist and why breaking them requires conscious effort and real transformation.
The Question That Reveals Everything
When someone can’t treat their partner with respect, kindness, compassion, sympathy, and empathy, one question cuts through all the excuses. Why do they, the abuser, stay in the relationship?
Think about it: If you can’t treat someone well, that suggests you don’t actually like them and you don’t want to be with them. Yet abusive people claim to love the people they can’t even respect! They say they care about people they constantly hurt and push away.
This contradiction reveals the truth: They’re not staying because of love. They’re staying because of what they get from maintaining control. The relationship serves their needs, even if it destroys the other person.
People who can’t show basic kindness to their partner are making both people miserable. They’re creating a situation where no one wins. And yet they refuse to leave. They refuse to change. They insist on staying in a dynamic that brings unhappiness to everyone involved.
This is the living paradox of abusive relationships. The abuser is never satisfied with their partner, yet they won’t let them go. They constantly try to control and change someone, yet they’re never happy with the results. They make themselves miserable by staying with someone they can’t appreciate or respect.
When someone refuses to treat you well, they’re showing you who they are. When they can’t find reasons to be generous with their heart, when they can’t support you or show you kindness, they’re demonstrating that they don’t value you. And by staying anyway, they’re making a choice to keep both of you trapped in misery.
The responsibility for change often falls on the person being hurt. If the abusive person refuses to change, if they don’t believe they’re the problem, then the other person has to make the change. That means taking steps you might not want to take. It means having hard conversations.
And sometimes it means accepting that if they won’t change and stop hurting you, you might have to change your situation.
With people like this, you should absolutely try to communicate your needs and boundaries. But in the end, if they refuse to change and don’t believe they’re a problem, you can’t wait forever for them to have an epiphany. Sometimes you have to make the change they won’t make.
The superiority complex that drives misogyny and abuse isn’t really about superiority at all. It’s about insecurity desperately trying to look like strength. It’s about fear masquerading as power. And it’s about someone so uncomfortable with their own inadequacy that they need to make others feel small just to feel normal-sized themselves.
You deserve respect, kindness, and love. You deserve to be accepted exactly as you are. And when someone can’t offer you those basic things, you have every right to question why they’re in your life at all.
 | Paul Colaianni Paul Colaianni is an Emotional Abuse Expert and Behavior and Relationship Specialist who has been analyzing complex relationship dynamics since 2010. As the creator of the Healed Being program and host of the top-rated Love and Abuse and The Overwhelmed Brain podcasts, with over 21 million downloads worldwide, he specializes in helping people recognize hidden manipulation, navigate emotionally abusive relationships, and empower themselves to make informed decisions. |
