Recovery

Abusive men are brilliant at activating the anxious, disempowered child within you. They do this to disorient and disempower the competent adult that you have become. In time, with enough input from an abusive man, it’s easy to forget that you are a competent adult. It’s easy to believe that you are the pitiful creature an abusive partner says you are; precisely because his words confirm the child’s tendency to feel hopeless and helpless.

Many women want to be free of an abusive partner, or ex-partner, and yet can’t quite let go. From a logical standpoint it makes no sense at all. But why should it? One woman’s words sum up the problem perfectly: “What is that part of me that endlessly holds out the hope that he has grown and won’t be a jerk?”

Nobody ever deserves to get hooked into an abusive relationship, but that is exactly what does happen to a lot of us. In fact, the statistics suggest that 1 in 4 women will undergo domestic violence – and that probably doesn’t include those of us who “only” suffer mental and emotional abuse.

We try so hard to accommodate to our abusive partner’s whims, wishes, and demands that we completely lose sight of ourselves. Still, somewhere in that tiny space, our self-respect remains. And the day comes when something finally triggers it. When that happens we respond from an entirely different place, from a strength and a clarity we didn’t even know we had.

Perhaps the environment you grew up in was emotionally abusive; you may have been emotionally neglected – and otherwise ill treated. Or you may just have been programmed to be a total people-pleaser. Either way, you were trained to be exceptionally receptive to an abusive partner. So you, like me, were much more inclined than another woman might be to put in those 10,000 hours (and possibly many further thousands as well).

You see, we grow up, but our fears and anxieties do not – until we do something about them. “Mini-Me” did her absolute best for you when you were younger and she was the only one who could run the show. She’s still doing her best. Without realizing it, you’ve been delegating to her, for all these years.

One belief that you might like to change right now is about your faults, failings, shortcomings, design flaws – or whatever else you, or your abusive partner, care to call them. In fact, you, my friend, are a woman of enormously overdone strengths. The full list would be too long to detail, but let me point you in the direction of a few of yours.
You have, doubtless, heard the old expression ‘generous to a fault’. Generosity to a fault is only one of your overdone strengths. You have overdone every one of your many strengths to a fault – the fault of letting your abusive partner completely off the hook.

 
Having worked with many, many women
who have been trapped in an abusive relationship, one thing is very clear: they
don’t realize that the relationship is abusive.
 
That is a key reason why they stay.
 
They stay because they lack the
ability to take a good, hard look at their abusive partner’s behaviour and say: “No,
this is not acceptable.”
 
Now, you […]