His frantic late-night work proves your claim.

His depression at losing everything proves your claim.

The more you hurt him, the more unstable he appears, and the more unstable he appears, the more justified your hurting him looks.

It is a trap that tightens every time the victim struggles, because the struggle itself is entered into evidence against him.

And the cruelest part is that it works on the victim’s own mind, too — because a man watching himself fall apart, told daily by everyone around him that he is falling apart because he is broken rather than because he is being broken, will eventually begin to wonder whether they are right.

That is how they nearly finished my son.