Annie Kaszina a href="http://lifemadesimple.typepad.com/abusednomore/annie-kaszina-answers-you.html">Download annie-kaszina-answers-you.html (11.3K)</a>“Do they do it deliberately?”
A woman wrote to me this week, saying she could not her
abusive ex-partner out of her head. Specifically, she had a couple of questions for me:
“1. Are abusers aware of what they are doing? Is
it a behaviour that will continue
in their next relationship ?
2.
in an […]
This inquiry came from a reader this week. She then wrote: “Bad question. I know, everyone is different.”
She is right, of course. Everyone is different. But abusive relationships are all pretty much the same.
If I had a dollar for every woman who has ever written to
me saying: “I didn’t know you’d been living with my husband/partner”, it would
be a nice little earner – sadly.
This week I was working with a client who knew the answers
to her difficulties as well as I did. At least, she kept agreeing with me and saying that she already knew the
things I was telling her. I had no
doubt that she did. She has been in the
personal development world for some years. But for all that she was desperately
unhappy.
You see, what she knew did not affect what she felt.
Why?
What makes abuse a uniquely awful experience is the feeling of utter isolation. When an abusive partner leaves the sense of isolation, sadly, doesn’t leave with him. So as you start out on your journey it’s easy to feel that you are going fearfully where few women have ventured before. If you knew how the journey might pan out; if you knew, especially, that things would improve, how much easier would that journey become?
So here are some of the most important things I discovered along the way.
"Is it so unrealistic to tell
someone who has been through years of hurt to just ‘move on’ (my
husband’s words)?"
It’s a myth that you need courage before you can make big changes in your life. You don’t need courage at all. You just need to heed that small inner voice and take the small steps that you can, bearing in mind that all roads will lead you somewhere other than where you are stuck right now.
Women who have been through emotional abuse and domestic
violence are, understandably, very tired, very worn emotionally. So it is that they often say things like, “I
want to finish my journey” or, in moments of hope, “I’ve finished my
journey”.
For me, those phrases ring alarm bells. I want to ask:
Let’s face it, we live in a culture that feels
uncomfortable around victims. The
Brits, especially, love an underdog (who, by definition, fights back despite
their weakness). We show compassion
towards the suffering, and persecuted groups. But individual victims make us
feel defensive. Abused women are,
obviously, prime illustrations of this group. It’s easy to blame them for their misfortune.
I remember watching “Sleeping with the enemy” in which
Julia Roberts stars as the battered wife who fakes her own death in order to
escape her gilded hell. And I remember
thinking:
Leaving an abusive man is never easy. Women are most at risk when the relationship breaks down.
It’s easy to see why you could argue that throwing an abusive man the sop of friendship might keep his anger in check. Naturally, he hates being ignored. But it remains the safest course of action.
When you are consumed with hurt and rage hatred may feel like a more constructive outlet than love. The downside is, of course, that you remain just as focused, even fixated, on the person as you were before. So how, you might ask, do you arrive at indifference?
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