You MUST Recover From Emotional Abuse – Here’s Why

05 Feb 0201

Do you ever think about the reasons why you matter?

In this article we need to do something that you probably don’t do nearly enough – and that is, look at the reasons why you matter.  You don’t have to be with a Narcissist or emotional abuser long to start to feel that you really don’t matter.

How easy is it to give up on yourself when you don’t feel that you matter?

That is why making you feel utterly insignificant is such a part of the agenda of the Narcissist and abuser.  The abuser’s words and deeds  are carefully crafted to create in you a profound belief in your unimportance and worthlessness.  It would be impossible to overstate the enormity of the damage that that belief inflicts on your inner world.

Don’t let an abuser convince you that you’re crazy

At the heart of that damage lies an assumption about normality that needs to be overturned.  An abuser tells you that you are CRAZY – off the charts, crazy.  He also tells you that he is normal.

In fact, an abuser is totally wrong on both counts.  You are normal in as much as you,

  • Trust the person you are attempting to share your life with
  • Believe the best of him
  • Struggle to understand why someone would deliberately hurt, humiliate, reject and destroy someone they professed to love enough to share a life – or at least living space – with.

He, on the other hand, is another story.  If you were as awful as he says you are, he should have done the only sane thing and left.  Instead, he sticks around because he gets his pay-offs from putting you down and control you.  That is not normal.  It may or may not be clinically crazy.  However, it is certainly sick and toxic.

By the time you decide you have to walk away, most probably that toxic vision of who you are has spread its roots into every area of your life. That doesn’t make weeding it out impossible.  It simply means you have to be thorough.

You can change the way you see yourself

The good news is that there is a MASSIVE pay-off for weeding out the toxic self-image foisted onto you by your Mr Nasty. It does not have to be a lifetime’s work.  Nor is that work doomed to end in failure.

Your life, once you have ejected the emotional abuse from it, can be filled with love, connection and self-worth.

The key challenge that you will have to face is keeping yourself on track. You’ve been trained to be easily discouraged.  Let’s face the facts – your emotionally abusive partner is no slouch when it comes to negative brain-training.

So, for the next few minutes, I want you to turn down the volume of your abuser’s criticism – and your self-criticism – so you can take on board the reasons why you HAVE to make a full recovery from emotional abuse. All 10 of them.

#1 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse -The Groundhog day Issue.

You’re doomed to keep repeating the lessons that you don’t fully learn. That’s why so many women replace one emotionally abusive partner with another – albeit a superficially different one. How scary is that?

#2 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – Happiness

You can never feel happy while you are still living in the emotional hell your partner created for you. Remember, that hell doesn’t just fade away because you are no longer “in a relationship”.

#3 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse Safety

You will never feel safe for as long as you live – whether physically or “just” emotionally – in Abuse World. If you feel constantly frightened – whether about being judged, attacked, or ill-treated, or about your alleged inability to build a life for yourself, you need to take that as a sign.  That is telling you that most of your time and energies are spent on trying to make yourself feel safe in an unsafe world. It’s not working, but it’s depriving you of the precious energy you need to move forward.

Healing occurs when you can create the safety you need within yourself.  Living with a sense of safety is normal for most people.  It can become normal for you, too.

#4 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – Freedom

Abuse World made you feel totally unfree. How can you ever be free to create your life for as long as you tell yourself what you cannot do, who you cannot be, and what you cannot have?

#5 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – Your children

Your children are not stupid. If you tell them one thing but live another way, they will pick up on the message of your actions. Which means that you will end up teaching them how to live the emotionally abused lifestyle. You don’t want that for them.

#6 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – YOU

Yes, really.  YOU!

You owe it to yourself. You’ve had a bum rap from You-know-who for long enough for it to feel like your normal. It’s not normal, it’s not right, and it’s not doing you any good, at all. The time has come to send a message – to yourself – that you are worth so much more than that.

#7 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – The price is too high

The emotional and financial costs of emotional abuse are HUGE. If you feel downcast, depressed, disempowered, self-doubting and demotivated, that’s the emotional cost of emotional abuse. It’s not who you are. It’s just how emotional abuse leaves you feeling.

If you’re struggling financially – or you worry you’ll always struggle financially – that’s just another key cost of emotional abuse.  The more you heal, the more you come to believe in yourself  The more you believe in yourself, the more talents and abilities you come to own that you can monetize.  When you struggle emotionally, you are more likely to struggle financially.  That’s just the way it works.

#8 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – You want to have a loving relationship.

Who could possibly blame you for wanting to enjoy a happy, cherishing, mutually loving relationship in the foreseeable future?

However, before you can have that loving relationship you have to leave Mr Nasty behind.  That means putting behind you all the learned toxic relationship baggage, anxieties, and expectations. You cannot create a good relationship while you’re still stuck in the bad relationship headspace.

#9 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – It’s your life

You only have one life. An emotionally abusive relationship demands that you give up on your own life.

Many victims of an abuser or Narcissist are ready to give up on their lives 30, 40 or even 50 years before they actually die. How sad is that?   Others, like Sabrina S. leave it tragically late to reclaim their life.  Don’t let that happen to you.

Give up on your toxic relationship, sure enough, but NEVER, EVER give up on your happiness, on the good things that lie ahead for you.  It’s your time to step up to the plate and own them.

#10 Reason Why You Must Recover From Emotional Abuse – You have the power

If I, the original unset jello managed to recover from emotional abuse, you surely can, too. You have the power.  You “just” don’t happen to believe that yet.

You may be telling yourself a story about everything that you cannot be.  However, having worked with so many clients who have overcome toxic relationships, I absolutely KNOW that you can go on to amaze and enchant yourself – and other people.  Over and over again.

Besides, you’re a role model. You do not know who you can inspire by your story of overcoming the awful things you’ve been through.

Every story that I tell of a woman who’s found the courage to  survive an emotionally abusive relationship and reclaim her life, inspires other women all over the world – women she’ll never even meet. She becomes an example who will inspire other women to walk away from the misery they didn’t believe they could leave behind them.   You can, too.

Wherever you are in your life, you have so much to give, to share and to enjoy.

Your emotionally abusive partner did everything he could to pull you down into his black hole. The mangy, miserable monster wanted to deny you your chance to live your best life.

So someone has to tell you – and I’m delighted for it to be me – your abuser was a nasty mental and emotional infection. Fortunately, your immune system is more than strong enough to beat it.  You will need to focus on yourself, rather than him.  But, when you stop to think about it, that makes sense.

 

 

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Annie Kaszina, international Emotional Abuse Recovery specialist and award-winning author of 3 books designed to help women recognise and heal from toxic relationships so that they can build healthy, lasting relationships with the perfect partner for them, blogs about all aspects of abuse, understanding Narcissists and how to avoid them and building strong self-worth. To receive Annie’s blog direct to your Inbox just leave your details here.

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