“But I love him.”
“I can’t leave her. It would destroy her.”
“I probably deserved it.”
“I’m the only one who really understands him.”
And the ever popular…
“I made a commitment and I’m going to stick to my commitment no matter what.”
If you’ve ever tried to talk to a friend about leaving their abuser, you’ve probably heard some of the above statements as your friend tries to justify why they are staying. They are not just blithe statements, either. They believe absolutely in the reality of what they are saying, and they will have carefully thought out reasons why staying is their best or only option.
The victim’s belief that “this must be” is harder to break than the cycle of abuse itself.
It isn’t always that they are denial about the abuse. They understand their partner is mistreating them on some level. Still, they have built a core belief about their relationship or their allotted role in their relationship and breaking that belief is extremely difficult. At least from the outside. The real change has to occur within the person — they have to free themselves from their belief and shift to a fact-centered view of their relationship. And that takes time.
It’s something you learn quickly as a therapist when a couple comes to you asking for help with their relationship and you discover that the real problem is that one of them is almost the entirety of the problem. Or at least is the origin of the problem. More often than not, the victim is as eager as the abuser to reject that idea. They fight the truth of their situation because it conflicts with their core belief — and that core belief is all that is holding them together. The victim’s belief that “this must be” is harder to break than the cycle of abuse itself.
Over time, people who stay with abusers invariably become different people. They become sensitive to their abuser’s triggers and walk on tip-toes to avoid saying or doing things they fear will offend them. They lose their own sense of identity and begin to see themselves the way their abusers see them. God forbid they are too thin, too fat, or don’t have idealized sex organs — their partner has likely targeted their weight or blamed them for not having the kind of equipment that can provide enough pleasure. Shaming becomes their daily norm, and if it isn’t about their body shape and size, the targets may be their cleaning or grooming habits, their earning ability or child-rearing skills, their porn consumption or masturbatory habits.
Victims learn, one insult at a time, to accept the narrative the abuser feeds them: they aren’t good enough, they aren’t smart enough, they aren’t sexy enough. By the time a friend or therapist is allowed in, the victim is already a changed person with a new core belief about their situation. They are damaged, maybe even broken, from their daily struggles. And sometimes the only way they can hang on to their own self-esteem is by resigning themselves to the belief that they are trapped, and have no choice but to accept the relationship they have. After all, when someone has convinced you that you are unworthy, it’s hard to believe that anyone else would want you. It’s the ultimate indignity an abuser inflicts: they ruin you for other people. They make you feel fundamentally unlovable. They shame and blame you and gaslight you into accepting responsibility for all the problems in the relationship.
And it is that psychological wear-and-tear on victims that genuinely alters their views of themselves and their entitlements in life.
LOUISA’S STORY
On the surface, Louisa had a perfect life: married 20 years to a professional guy, two grown children, nice home, nice neighborhood, and enough money for some extras. Perfect, right? Yet somehow Louisa wasn’t satisfied. She didn’t know why because her husband seemed like all other husbands on her street and was a respected member of the community because of his high-profile job. The problem was her, she figured. She was the one who was restless. She was so restless that she had secretly taken a lover. The guilt got to her, though, and she ended that relationship, even though it had been amazing. Once it was over, she confessed to her husband, and after weeks of fights, he finally said he forgave her. But two years later, they were in my office because, in fact, he had never forgiven her. He threw it up in her face as often as he could, using it as an excuse to avoid sex with her and to constantly question her on the details of the relationship. He even went behind her back and told their children that their mother had cheated, something that hurt her deeply. She was afraid it would change how the kids saw her and feared they would pull away from her. And that still wasn’t enough for him. Now he checked her cellphone and spied on her, even threatening to find the other man and punch him in the face.
She made an appointment with me because she didn’t want to give him the kind of details he asked for, which included everything from the size of her lover’s penis to how many orgasms she had had with him and the acts they did together. At first, she had given him details out of guilt but that only seemed to inflame his jealousy and rage. Now it was a rare day when he didn’t want to fight the same fight with her. She wanted a therapist’s opinion on how much detail a husband is entitled to know after you have an affair and how to get her marriage back on a better track.
Louisa accepted all the blame. It was all her fault, she should never have done it, and for the first year or two, she accepted all of her husband’s punishments as her penitence. She deserved it, she said. She violated her wedding vows. She just wanted to end the anger now. She wanted to build from what she learned and try to have the same joyful sex life with her husband that she’d had with her lover. But that wasn’t happening. Their marriage was going downhill.
It took some time, but eventually, I was able to tweeze out the bigger story of what drew her to her lover in the first place. She said it started as a friendship and then there was a spark. Against her better judgment, she accepted his invitation to a hotel room. Despite her anxiety, he immediately put her at ease. He was passionate, he genuinely appreciated her, he thought she was beautiful and sexy, he loved talking to her and he loved hearing what she had to say about literally everything. She had never met a man who seemed so sincerely interested in how she felt and so invested in making her feel good, in and out of bed. She couldn’t say a bad thing about her lover.
So…given that her lover, as she put it, was everything her husband was not, it was time to explore what her husband had actually been like with her before she had that affair.
For one, her husband never seemed to find her very sexy. From the beginning of their relationship, he was critical of her breast size, even offering to buy her implants. When she turned him down, he made her feel like she was a bitch who wouldn’t give him what he needed. She tried harder to please him and changed the way she dressed in hopes that would satisfy him. It did not. He said she looked slutty in sexy clothes so she returned to her plain outfits and passive attitude in bed. He was suspicious of her desire to be more sexually experimental: clearly, it was something she learned from her lover, he said.
Outside the bedroom, things were no better. Her husband often brought work home and lived more or less like Louisa’s third child, free of household chores and meal responsibilities. She laid out his work clothes for him every morning and ran all the household errands too. He, in turn, criticized all her choices, from the meals she cooked to the money she spent. She had begun working part-time, but her husband considered her job meaningless and had mixed feelings about her not being available whenever he wanted her to be there. On the one or two occasions when she had to go out in the evening with co-workers, he called her constantly, reminding her of her curfew, asking for details on who was there. He disapproved of her having relationships outside the home. He questioned her loyalty if she was having conversations with strangers when he wasn’t there to hear everything that was being said. He was the same way even when they were with her large extended family. If she spent too much time in another room, he would find her and muscle his way into whatever conversation she was having.
What had hurt her most, though, was when she was admitted to the hospital for emergency appendicitis. When one of his relatives died, she stopped her life for a couple of weeks to comfort him. But when she fell ill and almost died, her husband didn’t visit. He hated hospitals, he said. He knew she’d be okay. Her mother and sisters were visiting her. He didn’t need to sit in the room with them. Wasn’t he there on time to pick her up when it was time for her to go home, he said? What more did she want? He was there when it mattered, he said.
Little by little, the picture Louisa created of their real lives together, long before she ever cheated on him, was one of a grim and passionless relationship with a man who thought of her more as a possession than a wife to whom he owed certain obligations, including the obligation to be supportive, compassionate and loving. When it came to sex, it was even sadder. After 20 years, he still did not know how to give her an orgasm. He said the problem was her: her clit was hidden “in there.” His idea of foreplay was to grab her by the breasts and says “let’s do it.” He never noticed if she was in a good mood or a bad one. He felt that the moment he touched her boobs, she should be ready to have sex. He told her that’s what a loving wife would do. Instead, every time he touched her boobs now, she tensed up and felt like he was molesting her. Worse, when she wasn’t responsive, he got angry with her and more than a few times, walked out of the bedroom to sleep on the couch.
So now the truth emerged. There was a long pattern of abuse in her marriage. She had never felt whole with him. “I’m helping you be a better person,” he would say when she tried to deflect his negativity.
Her lover was like oxygen to a dying plant. She’d never had good foreplay before. She had orgasm after orgasm with him. It was a revelation. He thought her tight small-breasted body was perfect and told her he couldn’t get enough of her. And although her lover was a very prominent man, much more accomplished than her husband, he treated her as an equal, as someone he respected and admired. All the things that Louisa had always felt she should have with her husband were things her lover gave to her.
She downplayed its meaning. She told herself it was only because it was an affair. Nobody who lived with her would treat her that well. It was probably all her fantasy, she said. She wasn’t all that and she knew it. If her lover knew her as well as her husband, he’d probably see her the same way too. The reality was that she had to make her marriage work because … (see excuses at the top).
Louisa’s image of herself was twisted and warped by her husband’s narrative. She had been trained into believing that she was the problem. She didn’t realize that the affair was related to the dysfunction in her marriage. She thought it meant she was flawed. She was disloyal. It shook her when I asked why she felt like she had to be loyal to someone who treated her so poorly. She knew he was treating her poorly — she did, deep down. But she couldn’t leave him because … (see excuses at the top).
WHEN ABUSE VICTIMS WEAR BLINDERS
Most of us wear blinders when we’re in love. We may defend our partners when they do crappy things. They may say cruel things when they’re pissed off. It’s unpleasant but it’s normal and people usually get themselves back on track by reaching resolutions they can both live with. Victims though cross a certain line by keeping their blinders on when it escalates to chronic abuse. They never get back on track because there is no track. Their whole lives are devoted to avoiding conflicts and absorbing blows. So there is a big broad line between a dysfunctional relationship with people who fight a lot but basically love each other deeply and also have wonderful times together; and a relationship where one person is crushing the life out of another, whether through obvious means (like physical aggression) or subtle and insidious methods, like constant criticism, verbal abuse, and instilling fears of inadequacy in their partner. That latter form of abuse, the kind Louisa lived through, is the hardest one because it is a long, slow series of tiny little insults which, over time, make the victim as emotionally unstable as their abuser.
Here are three things I’ve learned about working with abuse victims.
THREE TIPS TO HELP SOMEONE WHO IS LOVE-BLIND
1 PLANT POSITIVE, TRUTHFUL IDEAS
You will never succeed if you try to get a victim to see your point of view. They may be too damaged to process it. If you hammer on them, they likely will become more entrenched in their core belief that their abuser is a necessary evil in their lives.
Instead, try planting some seeds of ideas to help them come to their own truths.
I usually ask two key questions.
The first question is “Why does your partner’s happiness matter more to you than your own happiness?”
This helps a person reframe a relationship and ask themselves “is it true I don’t adequately value my own needs?” or “how come my partner is more important to me than my own life?” It helps them wake up to the importance of their own personal happiness It restores their sense of self by making them put themselves into the equation as an equal entity. The question can get inside their heads and eat away at the negative load. I have had a number of clients achieve breakthroughs after thinking carefully about that question.
The second question is, “Is your partner living up to the promises s/he made to you? If not, then why are you keeping yours?”
This idea is really powerful in BDSM power relationships where I have witnessed way too many submissives solemnly vow they had to keep their part of the contract or agreement even when the dominant failed to maintain their commitments. A contract is an agreement between both sides: if one person fails to meet their commitments, that contract is broken, period. Either you have to renegotiate and get to a better, fairer place, or you need to end a relationship with someone who doesn’t honor commitments the way you do. Otherwise, you’re just beating a dead horse. The contract/marriage/deal is done when your partner treats it as a license to abuse you.
A dominant male client Carl, had a different tangle when he married a woman he thought would be the perfect slave for life. That was the talk she talked too, for the first year or two. Then, suddenly, she changed her mind, started criticizing him for his BDSM needs, decided religion was the answer to her problems and pulled away sexually and emotionally because her church disapproved of non-traditional sex. She made him throw away all their toys and treated him coldly, blaming him for forcing her into BDSM even though she’d been a very willing participant at one time. Ten years later he was in a sexless vanilla marriage he never wanted and would never have agreed to. Even more depressing, she used every opportunity to cast blame on him, as if he had forced her into BDSM.
So this second question gave him food for thought. She had fully consented to the master/slave relationship when they married, claiming it turned her on. She was no longer the woman he married. She was aloof and judgmental now, picking on him constantly, making his time at home almost unbearable. He felt bound by the vows he’d made to her, even though her vows all turned out to be empty. She had severed the marital contract with her own choices. He was stubbornly clinging to the empty shell of a marriage, partly out of pride, partly out of an earnest commitment to his original promises. The situation was stressing him out and breaking his self-esteem in terrible ways.
BE PATIENT ABOVE ALL
2 Just because someone isn’t ready to make a change this week or this month, or even this year, it doesn’t mean they will never do so. Never give up hope because I’ve seen it time and again in my practice that people walk out the door saying they will never leave someone only to call me a year or two later and say they finally left the person because the questions I put in their head kept working on them and making them feel more entitled to happiness.
Carl was a prime example. It took him a while to work through the choices he made and to forgive himself and grant himself some mercy. Though it seemed at first like he was rejecting some of my advice, over time, the advice started to make sense to him. After his wife pulled another dirty trick on him, it all became clear. Finally, they got a divorce, Happily, he quickly found his dream relationship with an intelligent and emotionally stable submissive woman who has done worlds of good for him, healing his heart with love.
Louisa too left her husband about a year after our therapy together. It took that much time for her to re-examine her options and to absorb the positive re-enforcements her lover and I had both given her about her own strength and intelligence. After the divorce, she built a new life with a great new job, new friends, and a new-found sense of possibilities for joy. Contrary to her fears, her children stood firmly by her side through all of it. In retrospect, free of her blinders, and was so very happy she got away.
In therapy, it’s happened at least a dozen times that victims have seemed to give up hope of leaving only to call or write months or years later that they had left and were living much happier, emotionally healthier lives without their abuser.
It’s a therapy fact that there is a cumulative effect when you make people question things they never questioned, and remind them that they are worthwhile human beings who deserve to be treated with love and compassion. But how long it takes for the cumulative effect to push them into making significant changes is completely individual. Very very few people can do it overnight — and then, usually only after a partner has done something exceptionally malicious. For most victims, it’s a process and sometimes an achingly slow one, especially to an outside observer.
If you want to help someone leave, learn to be patient. Don’t expect them to take your brilliant advice and implement it, especially not right away. Show them something they never get at home: loving, compassionate kindness, respect for their point of view, and extreme patience. Let them know that they deserve the treatment you’re giving them.
It isn’t a sprint to the end. More like “slow and steady wins the race.” For some people, it takes just as long to get out of a bad relationship as it took for the relationship to decline into abuse. If the victim is someone you genuinely love, expect it to be a long process. Don’t judge them for not moving at an ideal pace. Just be there for them, listen to them, and let them know you will help if they choose to leave. Knowing they can count on your support will build their courage and self-esteem.
ACCEPT THAT PEOPLE MAKE BAD CHOICES AND MAKE A GOOD CHOICE FOR YOURSELF
3 As much as we want to help other people get their lives together and escape bad situations, there is very little you can do when someone is committed to going down with the ship. Some people are. Mel was a guy who fell in with a woman who presented as a calm, wise, intelligent and powerful woman. She did not openly identify as a dominatrix but she was hanging out on a BDSM personals site, so he assumed she just didn’t want to be labeled. He fell head over heels for her. He was a lonely widow and she was the first attractive woman since his wife died who had captured his interest. So he gave it his all. Little did he know, at first, that his all would include more money than he really had to spend, more time than his career allowed, and more attention than he gave his kids and others in his life.
I tried everything I could think of to help him see that he was hurtling towards disaster, insolvency, and worse. After one conversation with the woman, it was obvious to me that she was a raging sociopath. As far as she was concerned, any man who didn’t want her was a cheap, mean bastard who deserved all the vengeance she could dish out. Mel told me that she had already destroyed the life of her last boyfriend by publicly shaming him, destroying his career, and almost succeeding in stealing the man’s home by getting him to sign documents she later altered.
And Mel wouldn’t give her up. See all excuses at the top plus the outright fear that if he ended the relationship he would be in the same shape as her ex. Mel fully understood how awful the woman was. On some level, though, it turned him on. In his mind, already damaged by her abuses, this was what a dominatrix was like, i.e., ruthless, cruel and uncaring. It hurt me that I couldn’t help him but the reality was that he wanted different results but didn’t want to change. And that, of course, is impossible. Until one or both partners change, a relationship cannot change.
If you have been trying desperately to get someone to leave a relationship and, despite all the logic you’ve been throwing at them, they remain passive, it’s now up to you to take a deep breath and back away. You can’t fix people who don’t want to be fixed. You can’t show them the light when they want to keep their blinders on. You can’t talk people out of being in love either.
Adults fuck up. Adults make bad choices. You can either accept it and stick by them with patience, or you can walk away and focus on the things you can control, like your own happiness. But if you want to be their support, you have to accept their limits and wait until that day when they really are ready to make changes. That moment is when you can shine by doing concrete things for them, like helping them find a new place, introducing them to good people, and being there when they need a shoulder to lean on.
Louisa and Carl and many others who summoned the courage to leave were ready for change when they reached out to me. I’m still in touch with most of them, and they have all moved on to far happier lives. In fact, ask any one of them today, and they’d say the person they are with now is the opposite of the person they fled. Getting them there wasn’t easy but they were prepared to fight for their happiness.
I don’t know what happened to Mel. I think about him often and can only hope that those seeds I planted did eventually grow and that he somehow found the courage to cut it off with his sociopathic friend.
