Have you ever looked at someone else who doesn’t appear to have the
problems you have and thought: “It’s alright for you”? I’ll admit I
have.
In fact, back in the bad old days of living with a Crazy-Maker, that thought crossed my mind all too frequently.
Well-meaning
people would frequently tell me how to look at the world and manage my
life and my relationship. Sometimes they were wrong. Not uncommonly
they were right; although I rarely felt like thanking them for their
opinion.
It’s often said that the
lessons we need to learn keep coming up again and again until we finally ‘get’
them, grasp the nettle, bite the bullet; whatever you care to call it. And maybe what we call it is actually quite
important. ‘Getting’ or understanding
doesn’t’ sound too bad, grasping the nettle or biting the bullet sounds
decidedly more unpleasant.
Of course, that has to
do with our beliefs and expectation about how painful it will be to stay with
the emotional lesson we have to learn.
This week I came across The 13 Characteristics of Adult
Children of Alcoholics. It makes
interesting reading even if you are not the child of an alcoholic.
As the author, Dr Janet G. Woititz, observes: “If you did
not grow up with alcoholism but lived… with another potentially dysfunctional
system, you may find that you identify with the characteristics described
here.”
It inspired me to rewrite it specifically for abused
women. The point of doing so is this:
to share the realization that the damage caused by a dysfunctional relationship
results in characteristics that are common to an entire category – in this case
abused women.
However characteristics are not the same as character or
nature.
The proverbial can of worms – otherwise known as the hideous residue
of our ghastly experiences – is, according to one definition, a ‘source
of unforeseen and troublesome complexity’.
It’s something we all
expect to have. Standard issue for all human beings are a birthright
and a can of worms. The birthright we sometimes have to fight for; the
can of worms we’d rather not look at. After all, unless you enjoy
fishing, it’s not a very attractive image.
As far as I can see, fairy tales –
or at least the way they are habitually interpreted – have a lot to answer
for. Take the old notion of having to
kiss a lot of frogs before you find the one that metamorphoses into your
prince. It’s a great story, but in
terms of the likelihood of it happening, it’s probably up there with pigs
flying.
Verbal abuse, as I constantly remind the women I work with, says far
more about the abuser than it ever says about you. That’s because
although verbal abuse is always levelled at you, it is never actually
about you. What it is about is the abuser’s need to shake off his
feelings of inadequacy, for a while at least.
The trouble is even
when you know this with your head, it is hard to feel it in your heart,
hard not to be swayed by the power of these negative feelings.
It
seems to be because feelings are invisible and intangible that they
have so much power over us. We cannot defend ourselves physically from
them, and so their destructive charge gets in under our radar.
This morning I received an email that I could have written
myself, 6 or 7 years ago. It came from
a woman I’ve never met, who lives a few thousand miles away on another
continent. She writes: “I
feel like I’m completely broken to pieces.”
She’s a woman at rock bottom. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do,
how or if she can possibly go on. All
that she does know is that she ‘wants out now’. She wants to live.
That is the start of recovery
Isn’t it interesting how, when you have an abusive
partner, your world shrinks to your partner’s view of it?
Maybe that sounds cryptic. Here’s how it works. An
abusive partner is forever telling you what you do wrong (from his view of the
world), what is wrong with the world (from his view of the world), what
‘people’ think of you (from his view of the world) etc.
“I am lucky in that I have never experienced physical abuse, but I
have experienced verbal and emotional abuse, and strangely enough, I
have recently realised that some of the worst of it has been from
myself! How many times in the past have I verbally beaten myself up for
making mistakes or doing/not doing something I should/shouldn’t have
done?" So wrote one reader recently.
How many times have we all done that? And how often do we continue to do that? I know I have.
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