Mental Abuse Recovery

I can’t believe something like this could happen to me. I thought I was so strong. I still feel myself daily questioning whether I deserved it or not. I feel like maybe I was wrong all along… that I did deserve this… otherwise how could he be so happy now without me in his life? Isn’t the abusive one the one who is tormented afterward because his object of control is gone? Maybe I was the one who was abusive? Maybe all of the horrible things he said about me are true.

My husband has been verbally abusive since we got married 10 years ago. His abuse is getting harder to bear and I am beginning to hate him for the abuse. What should I do?

I had become aware that the fear and shame that grew out of my abusive relationship were still ‘drivers’ in my life. And I wanted to clear them.

The stages of healing from an abusive relationship follow no particular time scale and some of them may well overlap. Expect to regress from time to time at each step along the way. That is normal, even predictable. It is also unimportant as regards the final outcome. Each stage will take you further on your journey back to health and wholeness.

An abused woman will always tell you how hopeless and helpless and meaningless she is without her partner. She will tell you that she is nothing. In fact, she will be so convinced that she is a complete zero that she won’t even see and hear the reality.

Blame is a great way that abusive men avoid dialogue. They avoid it because they could lose. They won’t tell you about their innermost feelings, only the hurt that you’ve caused and the faults you’ve committed. Normally when an adult woman talks about being silly, whether or not she knows it, she is using that playground language to minimize her profound feelings of distress. The kind of silliness that abused women reproach themselves for is about ‘messing up’ and feeling needy and stupid and pathetic. That kind of silliness reduces you to a powerless child trying desperately to curry favour with a cross, punitive adult.

Let us not forget that Sheryl Gascoigne was a battered wife. This recent news suggests that she is still exhibiting the characteristics of a battered wife: the self-sacrificing love, the willingness to keep working at a relationship, the belief against all odds that there still can be a happy ending…

Abused women are more blinkered, when it comes to their strengths, qualities and resources, than any racehorse will ever be. All they ever have in their line of vision is their abusive partner pointing the finger of blame at them. Which is why we tend to gallop wearily onwards in an attempt to catch up with the abusive partner so that he will pat them and offer the odd sugar cube or carrot.
That is what you have to do for as long as you believe that it is all you can hope for.
Finally, there is a way to change that.