Annie Kaszina “I am lucky in that I have never experienced physical abuse, but I
have experienced verbal and emotional abuse, and strangely enough, I
have recently realised that some of the worst of it has been from
myself! How many times in the past have I verbally beaten myself up for
making mistakes or doing/not doing something I should/shouldn’t have
done?" So wrote one reader recently.
How many times have we all done that? And how often do we continue to do that? I know I have.
‘They’ never told you, because they didn’t know. It is the degree of widespread ignorance in our society about mental abuse that allows it to go on happening. Not only do they not know, but they don’t have an inkling that they don’t know.
Have you ever listened to a question about your values, or
a question like: “What’s most important to you in a relationship?” and thought:
“That’s so obvious that I don’t even have to think about it”? I know I have.
I first encountered Clarissa Dickson-Wright, one of the
legendary Two Fat Ladies, many years ago at the fabled bookshop Books for Cooks. I remember her; I don’t flatter myself that she would ever remember me.
She was just starting to work there. I went there every few months to
buy piles of cookbooks about everything from Entertaining to Indonesian
cooking.
“Victims blame, victors learn” is a quotation from
the truly inspirational “One Minute Millionaire” by Mark Victor Hansen and
Robert G. Allen. This extraordinary book has a self-help text on the left hand
pages and a highly readable story, or parable, on the right. I started reading the story side shortly
after S. came to stay and those words jumped out at me.
A couple of weeks ago I invited a
dear friend to stay for the weekend. S. is someone I met some 5 years ago. We
were both leaving toxic relationships and we met the first time we both attended
the same domestic violence support group.
S. is probably the most talented
woman I have ever met. Still, 5 years later, while things have changed
for her also, she has barely moved forward.
Emotional abuse doesn’t stop the day you walk away from an
emotionally abusive partner. Unfortunately, it will probably continue to affect you long after your
abusive partner has become history, unless you discover what emotional abuse
really is and how best to overcome it.
Last week my ex-husband emerged, like the Loch Ness
Monster, from the murky depths he calls home, to bring a little horror and
revulsion into our lives. Not for him the thought of thinking fondly of his daughter at Easter – or indeed at any other time of year. But then, I guess nobody ever suggested that the Loch Ness monster was all heart…
So the Sentencing Guidelines Committee (SGC) has given a
new advice to judges that ‘remorseful domestic violence’ could get a community
order or suspended sentence. It
sounds as though the SGC has been listening to a garbled account of
“Supernanny”, rather than considering the realities of domestic violence.
Harriet*’s face had been etched into a mask of anxiety and
pain by the years spent putting herself last while she tried to make bad
relationships work. She came up to me
on the last day of the course I’d been running on Domestic Violence Recovery to
tell me how far she had come along her journey.
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