Month: April 2010

One belief that you might like to change right now is about your faults, failings, shortcomings, design flaws – or whatever else you, or your abusive partner, care to call them. In fact, you, my friend, are a woman of enormously overdone strengths. The full list would be too long to detail, but let me point you in the direction of a few of yours.
You have, doubtless, heard the old expression ‘generous to a fault’. Generosity to a fault is only one of your overdone strengths. You have overdone every one of your many strengths to a fault – the fault of letting your abusive partner completely off the hook.

 
Having worked with many, many women
who have been trapped in an abusive relationship, one thing is very clear: they
don’t realize that the relationship is abusive.
 
That is a key reason why they stay.
 
They stay because they lack the
ability to take a good, hard look at their abusive partner’s behaviour and say: “No,
this is not acceptable.”
 
Now, you […]

There are many reasons why women stay in an abusive relationship. Mostly, they stay as long as they do because they aren’t even aware that what they are experiencing is domestic violence. They tell themselves it isn’t domestic violence because of any, or all, of the following: