Annie Kaszina

Abused women tend to be more or less incapable of ‘taking the intentional decision to survive’. Especially if, by survival, you understand ‘create a life worth celebrating’, rather than ‘drag yourself along the shoreline, more dead than alive’. Abused women have no sustaining vision of their future life. As a general principle, they see the future as a wasteland.

‘Clean pain’, is the pain of an actual event, and ‘dirty pain’, is the suffering we generate for ourselves inside our own mind. When you are at rock bottom, it is easy to transition from ‘clean’ pain to ‘dirty’ pain. ‘Dirty’ pain occurs when we start spinning a ‘story’ for ourselves around events. ‘Dirty’ pain is generally harder than ‘clean’ pain to deal with.

By entering into an abusive relationship you signed a contract to believe all the bad things that your partner says about you. Sure, you signed that contract unwittingly. But still, by virtue of staying in the relationship you have honoured it. And I don’t have to tell you that there are absolutely no limits to the negative things that an abusive partner will say about and to you.

Happily, that has changed for her and for you. The fact that you are reading this now shows that you now think carefully about the nature of abusive relationships and have access to the information that you need to recognise and avoid them

As all abused women are well advised to learn, feeling hopeless and worthless leaves you very vulnerable to more abuse.

Inevitable harm happened to you in the past because you couldn’t know that it would, inevitably. It was never your fault, it was simply inevitable. There’s no point in blaming yourself for what you could not have prevented. There is every point in ensuring that you never risk finding yourself in that position again.

The first major glitch occurred a few months into our relationship. Before then he had put me on a pedestal, (although he was less charitable about other people). Then one day, out of a clear blue sky, he became very angry and accusatory.

An abusive relationship leaves you feeling utterly powerless. (It’s funny, isn’t it how an abusive partner does his level best to exclude all laughter from your life?) The tools for starting to reclaim your power are so small, so seemingly insignificant that you may have overlooked them for years. But they still work.