Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Abusive relationships
Why is it so hard to walk away from a relationship, especially an abusive one. Is the abused more to be blamed than the abuser? Is the victim of an abusive relationship emotionally vulnerable?What makes a person tolerate abuse? Does the victim suffer from self-esteem deficit? Why is leaving more difficult than staying? Why is the familiar torture preferred to the unknown future? Why is any company better than no company? Is sympathy for the abuser a wrong emotion? Is there no exit?
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Is the abused more to be blamed than the abuser?
ReplyDeleteA simple "no" should suffiece to that question. Yet, those who find themselves in abusive relationships have been somehow "primed" and readied to accept those relationships.
In most cases, the abused is taught at a very young age to accept the fact that there being, their thoughts, their lives have no "special" or intrinsic meaning in the broad scope of society. This is true whether the abused is male or female.
Sometimes, this lack of self-esteem is reinforced by the religious teachings prevalent in the home. A friend of mine just now escaping 11 years of vicious abuse where her life was endangered repeatedly believed in the black and white notion of her religious upbringing that you "marry for better or worse" and in the fiction that "love cures all".
Like many abuse victims, she created a twisted definition of "love" based on her interpersonal relationship with her parents. Her father was persona non grata, except to critize her and make her feel stupid or bad about herself. Yet, he was never there to inspire, encourage, or support those good decisions the child made. I'm sure he did not intend to "set her up" for abusive relationships; but, he was part of the training that made her believe she didn't "deserve" respect. So, at a very early age [5-7], she started settling for any attention she was "blessed" with from her father.
Her mother was not much better. She never made any effort to counteract the effects of the father by telling the child that she was a good child, an important human being, or even that she was "pretty".
Add to that, her 4 sisters left her out of most of their activities and she became an invisible being in her own childhood home.
The combination of these two elements convinced her, in her own mind, that she should be "grateful" for any type of attention she got from a man and if she ever got married she would be "lucky".
This thought pattern led to the concept that she had little or no choice in "who" she married and she jumped into two relationships [both abusive] and stayed until she was almost dead [in this second one].
Somewhere between leaving her parents home and marrying her first abuser, she created a definition of love and marriage that was neither healthy nor realistic. [By the way, she still does not describe her first marriage as "abusive". Yet, all the behaviors of her first husband that she relates are classically abusive. He just had not gotten physical.]