Relationships

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 […]

There are many reasons why women stay in an abusive relationship. Mostly, they stay as long as they do because they aren’t even aware that what they are experiencing is domestic violence. They tell themselves it isn’t domestic violence because of any, or all, of the following:

All abusive relationships start with compromise. My experience of listening to the story of hundreds and hundreds of abused women suggests three levels of compromise: 1) Dislike at first sight. I’ve yet to come across one abused woman whose initial reaction to her future partner was not a resounding: “Yuck!” 2) Accepting, and overlooking distasteful and/or troubling behaviours – including leering at other women, emotional bullying, threats, addictions, etc. 3) Settling for less.

There is a fundamental flaw in every abused woman’s thinking here, and it lies in the gulf between the way she thinks she has been educating her partner, and the message that he receives. She thinks that he hears her statement – that he must not treat her that way, because it is painful to her. What he actually hears is that she is asking him, from a place of powerlessness, whether he would, please, be kind enough to change. And he wouldn’t. He will play act, to the best of his ability, for as long as he needs to. But he will do no more than that.