How do you recover from emotional abuse when you feel broken?

“This is my last effort to reach out to someone for help. My love, whom I thought was my love, started out to be a prince. He made me feel like a princess. I loved the way he made me feel………………in the beginning.   I am in a fog world. Trying to figure out what the hell happened?   I am broken. I am scared. One day, I pray, I will be able to fly again.”

For anyone who has ever been in an emotionally abusive relationship everything that A. writes will sound painfully familiar.  How can you NOT identify with her pain, her despair – and her story? 

How often do I hear the Prince story from emotionally abused women? Every day that has an ‘a’ in it. 

What’s it about? Finding someone that makes you feel good – temporarily.

In fact, A. admits that she desperately wanted to feel loved.

Mr Prince was an emotional market trader.  Just like all emotionally abusive men are emotional market traders. They trade in love, and they have a great pitch:

“Get your love here.  Beautiful lasting love, available now! Top quality. You’ll NEVER find another offer like this. Will last a lifetime. Grab it now, because it’s the last one, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.” 

Mr Prince is mirroring exactly the kind of dialogue that is going on in your head.

That’s what makes him so good.

Silver-tongued creep!! 

So, how do you get over him?

The short answer is this:  you start LISTENING to yourself. A. says she’s in a ‘fog world’. In reality, she knows what happened: she fell for a great pitch. But when she got her purchase home she found it wasn’t fit for purpose.

The trouble with buying from market traders is that you don’t have a lot of redress. The same goes for emotional market traders.

You can go to them for redress but market traders are brilliant at dealing with hecklers – and that’s what you’ve become: a heckler, just someone who is badmouthing their merchandise.

You might as well give up on the idea of getting satisfaction from them.  It isn’t going to happen. There’ll always be another sucker to pitch to.

That leaves you with … you.

For the sake of argument, let’s take a closer look at A.’s words. After all, she could be any woman who wants to recover from emotional abuse. She starts: “This is my last effort to reach out to someone for help.”

A. is doing two things here: she is putting the onus for her recovery on emotional abuse on me, her reader  – when I’ve never even spoken to her; and she is making a prediction for her entire future. There will be no further attempts, ever, if this one fails.  This, despite wanting to ‘fly’ i.e. have a good life someday.

A. ‘loved the way he made her feel’.  In the short term, Mr Prince provided her with a ‘legal high’. That’s quite different from loving the man that he is.

‘Coming down’ and going ‘cold turkey’ are really hard.

Hence she’s ‘broken’.

Being ‘broken’ is both tragic, and final.  Especially in a society like ours where things are not repaired but replaced. If you’re ‘broken’, you’re on the scrap-heap.  While the consumer can always find a replacement.

If you’re angry by now, you should be.

Human beings are not things. We’re not consumer non-durables. We never wanted to be duped by emotional market traders.

But here’s the point: you – and I – have been grossly emotionally abused by… language. 

Mr Nasty aka Mr Emotional Market Trader has abused you every which way through a conscious, deliberate, and highly skilled use of language. You continue abusing yourself through your unconscious use of language.  Just like A. does.

A. is not broken: she’s profoundly unhappy.  Nor is she truly in a fog. She has the answers: they just don’t fit with the narrative she tells herself. She’s mystified because that narrative isn’t the truth – when she SO wants it to be.

In fact, everything A. says to herself only serves to makes her feel worse.

That’s very common.  I hear exactly that from all of the emotionally abused women I work with.  Which means that they desperately need to change the language and the story they are telling themselves.

It’s that Einstein thing about not being able to solve a problem at the level at which it was created.  You’re unlikely to be able to solve your emotional problem for as long as you continue using the language with which it was created.

Doing that for yourself can be challenging – you already know that. Skilled, dedicated help will enable you to change that language, so you stop feeling like A..

When you stop feeling like A., you start feeling like the person you truly are – or can be. It’s that simple.

If you want to discover how you can make that shift in the shortest possible time, then this is what you need to check out.