Recover From Emotional Abuse>Emotional Abuse

In my experience, abused women carry many old, limiting beliefs about relationships.  Most commonly, they are simply not aware of them.  They can long for the best in their life, but the beliefs that have been programmed into them lead them to expect… if not the worst, then something second, or third, rate. Curiously enough, love does not appear to fly out of the window when we are maltreated.  Abused women have, if anything, a pathological attachment to their abusive partner.  In reality, that has far more to do with fixation than love. 

The abusive contract that I, and every other woman there had signed up for, albeit unawares, was this: “I will tolerate whatever you dish out.” I say that because we always gave in, always ultimately went back to our abusive partner, and excused, overlooked, denied, or minimized the unacceptability of their words and deeds. Whatever we said along the way, the ultimate message our abuser received and registered was this: “This too I will accept. I may not like it, but I am still here.”

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.

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.