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.
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.
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?
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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