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.
There’s a distinction here between what we may say we expect and what we truly feel we are entitled to. Abused women feel they are entitled to so very little. They settle for crumbs from the banquet of life. Quite possibly because they don’t believe that there is a banquet of life.
An abused woman who is still emotionally enmeshed with her partner will always say that (in between smashing her self-esteem to pieces) he offers her the best thing she has ever had.
The abused mind-set is the state in which your past is always in your future, the state in which you can see no future because all you see is more of that past ahead of you. Or at least, as life starts to move on, in the eye of your mind you constantly see those old scenarios ahead of you. You expect those old scenarios to be revisited on you.
When push comes to shove and you are confronted with the likelihood of your ‘relationship’ finally ending, you start doing some very strange maths. Every kind word or thoughtful gesture is worth, say, 1,000 SUDs (Subjective Units of Distress – an EFT term, but one that fits neatly here). Every cruel word or behaviour is worth, maybe, 1 SUD
Abused women speak constantly of what they are not, not what they are. They speak of their past projected onto the future. They are stuck with a picture of themselves at their lowest possible ebb that they graft onto the unknown future.
The truth about pedestals is, generally, far less glorious than the fantasy. A pedestal is a piece of furniture that is used to display something – or someone – to best advantage. There is, habitually, one pedestal per relationship. An abusive man carts his around with him as a vital part of his seduction kit. That way he’s ready when he meets a woman whom he thinks might be appropriate to park on it for a while.
If he can change now- and change without outside help, why couldn’t he do so before? What’s changed – apart from the fact that you have moved out? Of course he will tell you that he now understands how much he loves and needs you. And where, precisely, does he put the ‘line’ that he now understands that he crossed? What does he feel is acceptable and unacceptable? What will he do if he feels you have done something wrong? Unless he has a very clear and specific game-plan as to how he will manage his reactions to safeguard you – which I doubt – assume he is not capable of delivering.
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.
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