Annie Kaszina It struck me recently that when women try to leave an abusive
relationship, they are attempting to move away from something they know
to be toxic. Yet they have little idea
of what they are moving towards. They
see no positive life enhancing vista ahead of them and so the struggle feels
almost superhuman.
If someone had told me that I was on a healing journey I
would have found it immensely helpful. If someone had told me that I could undertake
Paige Parker, of www.DatingWithoutDrama.com, writes “Love is a CHOICE,
Not Always an Emotion." It’s one of those throw away lines that bears
thinking about. If you believe that love is an emotion, then you invest it with all the
beliefs you have about the irresistible power of emotions. If you choose to believe that love is a choice then, obviously, you are
the person making that choice. You make that choice based on your
criteria. And we all know that criteria can change.
Every so often I come across a book that has a profound effect on the way I think. “Not tonight, Mr Right- why good men come to girls who wait” (by Kate Taylor) is the most recent one. The slightly flippant title, although self-explanatory, does not do the book justice.
Ok, so the title is not too charitable. But I’d be the first to admit that I became
a fool over a man. I spent nearly two decades as a
fool. By this I mean a woman who sticks
around too long in a relationship that is deteriorating progressively, a
relationship which becomes increasingly unhappy most of the time.
We become fixated on our partner’s potential – and of
course he has potential, whatever we mean by that word. If he hadn’t had potential why on
earth would we have bothered in the first place. Few of us have a robust enough sense of self, or are that crazy
that we choose to have a relationship with someone we feel has less to
recommend him than the average cockroach.
Because abuse is a syndrome and not as most abused women
start by believing a ‘one off’, there are certain, more or less standard
queries that I receive. Let it be said,
first off, that this does not these queries make any less important or moving.
This week I received one such; it said, approximately: “my
husband has been emotionally abusive, but we love each other. Can we make this relationship work?”
The past few weeks have been the soggiest of my adult
life. As I clear the marital home where
I’ve lived for decades with a view to my imminent move, (April 5th)
I have cried as I never cried for the end of my marriage. (Do I wonder??!)
Years and years ago I watched “Stepford Wives” (the
original version) while I was studying Fascism for my doctorate. The line from the film that has stayed with
me down the years is; “Because we can.” This is what the men of Stepford say to Joanne, the lead character when
she asks why they are destroying their womenfolk.
Back then, the answer struck me as both simple and
profound. It still does. It held true as true for acts of collective
violence as it did for individual acts of violence. Perpetrators did it because they could.
A couple of weeks ago I was working with a young woman who
had just had laser surgery on her face.
Neglected by her mother and father, she had been sexually abused by an
uncle. For want of a better way of
dealing with the experience at her tender age, she had taught herself to laugh
about it and told herself that it wasn’t that important in the great scheme of
things.
She had laser surgery on her face to remove the scars from
the years when she had dug her nails into the skin over and over again.
One of the (many) joys of ending a long, miserable
marriage is that it leaves me free to pursue my own personal development, or
spiritual journey. Possibly I left my marriage at a time when personal
development courses had become main stream enough to be readily available. Certainly I am constantly grateful for all
the resources readily available out there.
Maybe you don’t have an Inner Sh**bag. Maybe you’re too nice, too gentle, too
forgiving. Part of me wishes that I
could say as much. And part of me
doesn’t.
I learned Inner Sh**bag behaviours during the course of my
marriage. Sometimes the best way to
deal with my abusive husband was to fight back using his own verbal tools
rather better than he could. Sometimes
I would use my natural flair for language to silence and humiliate him.
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