It’s not about you, in the sense that it is not about continuing to focus on the sadness of what you have been through, and lost. It’s not about the fear and the pain you have experienced. You have a mission. When you are a victim of abuse, you are just thinking about you. You are the only person that can live your mission, and if you don’t do your mission, it won’t get done.
The message your abusive partner gives you loud and clear is that it’s all about you and what you do wrong. Everything bad that happens in his life is somehow because of what you do wrong. It’s not surprising abused women think that ‘it’ is all about them. They hear it often enough.
But here’s the curious thing; abusive men all say much the same thing, the world over. Abusive men are still playing out the small child’s view of the world, in which they are the center of everything. If a situation pans out differently, they will throw a temper tantrum to re-establish their desired status quo.
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.”
You have been trained into believing that anything that goes wrong in your abusive relationship is solely your fault. And you have been trained out of feeling joy.It is terribly hard to let go of something in which you have invested so much for so long. Because you think that your investment and your life have been wasted. Not so!
A lot of abused women live in a hostile world, in which bad things happen, almost exclusively. There are no angels. Or more correctly, there are no angels watching over abused women. Although they can see that things seemed to go rather better for other people.
Working with clients this week, I was reminded of those thoughts. My clients were with women who had resigned themselves to the abusive compromise. They were prepared to make a trade-off with their abusive partner. Abused women will accept a lot of bad behaviours they find hurtful and damaging, in order to get a scrap of the love and affection they desire.
In just one short verse McBride encapsulates the life of every abused woman and the behaviour of every abusive man. First, you have to understand that the treatment you have received has been deliberate. It really was designed to ‘break your spirit down’, break your wings, and make you emotionally dependent on your captor. Abused women learn that men are dangerous, that intimacy is destructive. They still have a ‘map of the world’ in which all relationships are bound to be the same as an abusive relationship. Some women shy away from relationships, others rush into physical intimacy. Both tendencies are attempts to avoid the risk of exposing their spirit to the vulnerability of intimacy.
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.
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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