The Body Knows When Democracy Is in an Abusive Relationship

By Dr. Evalie Horner

Sitting across from a client whose partner swung between adoration and cruelty, I watched her body tell the story before her words did. Her shoulders curled when she talked about his rage. Her breath softened when she remembered the early days, when he seemed to see her in a way no one ever had.

Later, scrolling the news, I felt the same tightening in my own chest as I watched a crowd laugh while a leader flirted with violence. My body was reacting to something it recognized. The dynamics of intimate abuse were playing out on a national stage.

Propaganda isn’t mainly about controlling facts; it’s about controlling feeling. It slips past thought and goes straight for the nervous system, the same system that flinches at a raised voice or softens when it feels safe. The body remembers what the conscious mind tries to forget. When propaganda is effective, it doesn’t argue. It conditions. It teaches us how to feel before we have time to think.

I’m a psychotherapist and a survivor of emotional abuse. In my clinical work with survivors, I’ve come to understand propaganda not only as a political tool but as a psychological choreography. The same tactics that mark abusive relationships, love-bombing, gaslighting, scapegoating, emotional flooding, also structure authoritarian power. Both bypass real dialogue. Both weaponize our deepest needs, safety, love, belonging, meaning, and turn them against us.

In abusive relationships, love becomes the weapon. A partner idealizes you, mirrors your values, promises belonging, then then slowly replaces empathy with control. Psychologists sometimes distinguish between cognitive empathy (the ability to read what someone feels) and affective empathy (the willingness to feel with them). Abusers often have the first and lack the second. They know exactly which emotional buttons to push. They just don’t stop when you hurt.

Our bodies register that absence long before our minds catch up. The nervous system swings between hyperarousal (fight or flight) and collapse (freeze or fawn). The body becomes starved for co-regulation, the experience of being seen and soothed by another human being. The abuser’s intermittent warmth then lands like a drug, deepening dependence even as harm escalates.

Authoritarian politics follow a similar rhythm, scaled up to a nation. A leader flatters pain, offers scapegoats, promises safety through obedience. There is outrage one day, reassurance the next, until exhaustion replaces discernment. In the Trump era, this choreography has been hard to miss. The volatility mimics that of an abuser: grandiosity one moment, grievance the next. Millions refresh their feeds like anxious lovers, scanning for reassurance or attack. Bodies brace for the next blow.

A lot of people throw the word “narcissist” around too casually lately, but clinically, narcissism is not just vanity. It is grandiosity, entitlement, hypersensitivity to criticism and a chronic absence of true empathy. At its most extreme, it mutates into what psychoanalysts call malignant narcissism: charisma fused with cruelty, charm braided with domination. These people don’t merely crave admiration; they feed on submission.

In relationships, this becomes intermittent reinforcement: cruelty punctuated by tenderness, punishment followed by “I can’t live without you.” That unpredictability creates a nervous-system addiction to hope. The victim clings to the good moments, desperate to believe that love will return if they can just behave correctly, or shrink smaller, or forgive one more time. Hope becomes the leash.

Authoritarian leaders use the same blueprint. They love-bomb the public with promises of unity and greatness, then punish dissent. They label criticism as betrayal and teach entire nations to regulate their nervous systems around the leader’s moods. Each new scandal or threat becomes another hit of adrenaline to a country already locked into fear. Citizens internalize the volatility like traumatized partners tracking the emotional weather of an abuser.

When the brain’s fear center senses danger, it seizes control from the regions that help us reason and reflect. In that moment, the body isn’t searching for truth; it’s begging for safety. Belonging becomes oxygen, craved more urgently than clarity. Propaganda exploits that circuitry. It doesn’t reason with the mind; it plays the body like an instrument, using repetition, outrage and scapegoating until fear becomes ambient, an atmosphere rather than an event. In that haze, certainty feels like relief. One villain, one savior, one simple story about who is to blame — adrenaline becomes a substitute for belonging.

This is why, despite my political horror, I feel deep empathy for many Trump supporters. That may sound strange, but it’s not naïveté. It’s recognition. I know what it feels like to be spellbound, to mistake intensity for intimacy and charisma for care. I know how the body can override its own unease to preserve the story it wants to believe. Devotion can outlive trust. Shame can bind more tightly than love.

When I look at people who remain loyal to a leader who harms them, I don’t see stupidity; I see the body’s logic of survival. They’re caught in the same trance that keeps many survivors bound to an abuser: the hope that if they can just endure a little longer, the tenderness will return.

In the therapy room, I’ve watched the moment when that spell begins to break. The client isn’t persuaded by a clever argument. She is moved by a new experience of safety. Someone believes her. Someone doesn’t punish her for seeing what she sees. Only then can she begin to face the shattering truth: that what felt like love was control, that the story she built her identity around was a mirage. That kind of reckoning requires immense courage — and refuge. People don’t change because they’re shamed. They change when they feel safe enough to admit how deeply they were fooled.

The same is true for a country caught in the emotional orbit of an authoritarian personality. Awakening from that spell won’t come from more ridicule or clever fact-checks alone. It will require spaces — in families, communities, congregations, even online — where it is possible to say, “I was wrong,” and not be destroyed for it. Empathy doesn’t excuse harm, but it does create the conditions for recovery.

Our bodies can help. We see it in the subtle tightening in the chest when deception hovers near, and in the deep exhale when something genuine enters the room. Our bodies are tuning forks for truth; they resonate before our minds can rationalize. Freedom is not just a set of laws or institutions; it is also a nervous-system state. You know you’re free, I often tell my clients, when your body no longer braces for the next blow.

The work ahead is both political and embodied: to rebuild institutions that protect pluralism and accountability, and to reclaim the inner democracy of breath, heartbeat and intuition. That begins in small, radical practices: pausing before reacting, noticing what your body does when you hear a leader speak, seeking conversations and communities that leave you calmer, not more charged.

Authoritarianism, like malignant narcissism, depends on disconnection — from ourselves and from one another. What it fears most is not rebellion, but our capacity to love and perceive without needing permission. False love flatters. Real love frees. When our bodies remember the difference, we withdraw our consent from every architecture of control.