If you focus on our capacity for unhappiness and pain, then that is what you will experience most in your life. If you focus on your strength, your courage, your capacity for love, your humanity and your potential, then that is what you will register. These things may be driven underground in an abusive relationship, but they are never lost. They remain as seeds beneath the snow.
One reader describes this syndrome more tellingly than I could. Like many of us, after an abusive childhood she fell into other abusive relationships. She writes:
“I’ve had so much anger bottled up in me, and recently it was me who lashed out in anger at someone else .. mostly because he wasn’t being honest with me .. but even so, I don’t want to end up being an ‘abuser’ !”
Sometimes that fear of the pain worsening keeps women in a hopelessly damaging relationship, because of an old –profoundly questionable – belief that even a bad partner is better than no partner. (It’s a kind of reworking of that dubious old cliche: ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’. How does that one work? How can you possibly know that the person/future you don’t know will be worse?)
Because you acknowledge your can of worms, it doesn’t mean you have to own it. Or even if you have owned it for a while, that doesn’t mean you have to stick with it for all your natural life. After all, you’ve owned cars and all sorts of possessions, until the day you parted company.
Inasmuch as it’s your can of worms, it’s yours to do with what you will. You own it. It doesn’t own you.
None of us can be good at everything. Women who find themselves in abusive relationships are, in all probability, not good at men and all the stuff around falling in love.
When it results in an abusive relationship it is, obviously, very damaging. But it tends to happen when we haven’t yet recognised, or owned, our limitations around choosing men.
Once we do, we have the power to rectify the problem.
The problem of domestic violence in the UK is huge and the long term cost to society is, probably, incalculable. It is easy to see how, from every point of view “sorry seems to be the cheapest word”.
is often a scowl at home” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
It’s often said that when Life, or The Universe, has
something to teach you, it keeps putting that lesson in front of you until you
finally get it.
(Equally, you could argue that sometimes you miss
something the first zillion times, because you’re not programmed to notice
it. So you keep […]
On a personal note, 2005 is ending with one of those unwanted gifts that may have to grow on you.
I recently spent time in a specific environment that I had chosen, in preference to various others, in the hope that it would be safe and nurturing.
As luck would have it, it […]
In the last couple of weeks a with
another nice man has set me thinking. This man is a high-flying executive who teaches negotiation in the UK
and abroad. For some reason I told him
how I successfully negotiated a problem I was faced with while staying in Rome
recently.
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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