Recover From Emotional Abuse>Emotional Abuse

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.

An abusive partner rapidly becomes the most influential person in his partner’s life. He has the power to take an abused woman to dizzy heights of happiness (although the statistical odds of this happening decrease markedly the longer the relationship limps on). He has the power to plunge her into the depths of despair, and usually does. When he does, his partner needs to explain what has happened to herself. The problems in the relationship cannot really be his. That being the case, they must be hers, mustn’t they?

Abused women tend to be more or less incapable of ‘taking the intentional decision to survive’. Especially if, by survival, you understand ‘create a life worth celebrating’, rather than ‘drag yourself along the shoreline, more dead than alive’. Abused women have no sustaining vision of their future life. As a general principle, they see the future as a wasteland.

‘Clean pain’, is the pain of an actual event, and ‘dirty pain’, is the suffering we generate for ourselves inside our own mind. When you are at rock bottom, it is easy to transition from ‘clean’ pain to ‘dirty’ pain. ‘Dirty’ pain occurs when we start spinning a ‘story’ for ourselves around events. ‘Dirty’ pain is generally harder than ‘clean’ pain to deal with.

By entering into an abusive relationship you signed a contract to believe all the bad things that your partner says about you. Sure, you signed that contract unwittingly. But still, by virtue of staying in the relationship you have honoured it. And I don’t have to tell you that there are absolutely no limits to the negative things that an abusive partner will say about and to you.