The stages of healing from an abusive relationship follow no particular time scale and some of them may well overlap. Expect to regress from time to time at each step along the way. That is normal, even predictable. It is also unimportant as regards the final outcome. Each stage will take you further on your journey back to health and wholeness.
An abused woman will always tell you how hopeless and helpless and meaningless she is without her partner. She will tell you that she is nothing. In fact, she will be so convinced that she is a complete zero that she won’t even see and hear the reality.
Blame is a great way that abusive men avoid dialogue. They avoid it because they could lose. They won’t tell you about their innermost feelings, only the hurt that you’ve caused and the faults you’ve committed. Normally when an adult woman talks about being silly, whether or not she knows it, she is using that playground language to minimize her profound feelings of distress. The kind of silliness that abused women reproach themselves for is about ‘messing up’ and feeling needy and stupid and pathetic. That kind of silliness reduces you to a powerless child trying desperately to curry favour with a cross, punitive adult.
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