Continue to offer her your sister love, support and hold the belief for her that she will recover and build a happy life for yourself, until such time as she can do it for herself. If she has been so bruised and battered in her abusive relationship that she cannot hold on to the belief that she can ever be whole and happy and healthy again, she needs you to do it for her, until she can.
Abused women try desperately, excessively, hard to be lovable. We will let down boundaries, tolerate bad behaviours, ignore the writing on the wall, silence our intuition… You name it, we have all done it. And it doesn’t work. It may be less trouble in the short run, but it definitely compounds our misery in the longer term. It prolongs the relationship, and it certainly ensures that the relationship is based on conditions that are increasingly unfavourable to us.
Abused women tend to fight to keep the seeds of hope and a better future alive. Yet, left to themselves, they most commonly fail to remove the inner cynic. So they struggle to keep the tender seedling alive in a toxic environment. This makes for an unduly difficult, thankless struggle.
Perhaps you are struggling to exorcise the memory of an abusive partner, or two.Perhaps you don’t even want to think about entertaining another man in your life at this point in time. Still it is worth knowing that somewhere, out there, something much, much better is available to you and, when you are sufficiently far advanced on your healing journey, it will be within your reach.
Abused women wait to be invited to the banquet of life and that invitation may never come. Certainly, it will never come soon enough. Then it struck me. Abused women wait to be invited when, in reality, it isn’t that kind of banquet. What it actually is, is a self-service banquet. Anybody and everybody has an equal right to pitch up and serve themselves.
There’s a distinction here between what we may say we expect and what we truly feel we are entitled to. Abused women feel they are entitled to so very little. They settle for crumbs from the banquet of life. Quite possibly because they don’t believe that there is a banquet of life.
An abused woman who is still emotionally enmeshed with her partner will always say that (in between smashing her self-esteem to pieces) he offers her the best thing she has ever had.
The abused mind-set is the state in which your past is always in your future, the state in which you can see no future because all you see is more of that past ahead of you. Or at least, as life starts to move on, in the eye of your mind you constantly see those old scenarios ahead of you. You expect those old scenarios to be revisited on you.
When push comes to shove and you are confronted with the likelihood of your ‘relationship’ finally ending, you start doing some very strange maths. Every kind word or thoughtful gesture is worth, say, 1,000 SUDs (Subjective Units of Distress – an EFT term, but one that fits neatly here). Every cruel word or behaviour is worth, maybe, 1 SUD
Abused women speak constantly of what they are not, not what they are. They speak of their past projected onto the future. They are stuck with a picture of themselves at their lowest possible ebb that they graft onto the unknown future.
The truth about pedestals is, generally, far less glorious than the fantasy. A pedestal is a piece of furniture that is used to display something – or someone – to best advantage. There is, habitually, one pedestal per relationship. An abusive man carts his around with him as a vital part of his seduction kit. That way he’s ready when he meets a woman whom he thinks might be appropriate to park on it for a while.
Over the next 5 days, I'll send you some lessons and tips that I've found have really helped women to heal from narcissistic abuse. Starting with the basics.
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