Continue to offer her your sister love, support and hold the belief for her that she will recover and build a happy life for yourself, until such time as she can do it for herself. If she has been so bruised and battered in her abusive relationship that she cannot hold on to the belief that she can ever be whole and happy and healthy again, she needs you to do it for her, until she can.
Abused women try desperately, excessively, hard to be lovable. We will let down boundaries, tolerate bad behaviours, ignore the writing on the wall, silence our intuition… You name it, we have all done it. And it doesn’t work. It may be less trouble in the short run, but it definitely compounds our misery in the longer term. It prolongs the relationship, and it certainly ensures that the relationship is based on conditions that are increasingly unfavourable to us.
Abused women tend to fight to keep the seeds of hope and a better future alive. Yet, left to themselves, they most commonly fail to remove the inner cynic. So they struggle to keep the tender seedling alive in a toxic environment. This makes for an unduly difficult, thankless struggle.
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