Abused No More

Why Christmas Is The Toughest Time For Abused Women

Christmas is, allegedly, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.  But is it for you? 

If you are struggling in an abusive relationship, or if you are processing the breakup from an abusive partner, Christmas can feel like the loneliest, saddest time of the year. 

Why? 

Because society and the media propagate a myth of how things are meant to be at Christmas, and your life doesn’t look like that.  Nobody is meant to have emotional wounds or scars at Christmas.  We are all meant to conform to the fairy tale.  

It’s a time to spend money we may not have for presents our loved ones almost surely don’t need, and probably don’t even want.  

The pay-off for doing that is the wonderful smiles of gratitude they will give you – the same smiles of gratitude that your loved ones, and especially your loving partner, will lavish on you for the enormous effort you have selflessly expended to create the perfect holiday.  

Yeah, right! 

Let’s have a reality check here.  Being free of your abusive relationship over the Holiday Season can feel lonely.  However, it is a lot less awful than enduring the Most Wonderful Time of the Year with an abusive partner.  

Why? 

Do I even need to tell you?  

The holiday season is like a searchlight that highlights on all the cracks and faults in your relationship.  You spend the time desperately searching for any shred of proof that the relationship is – or could be - better than you know it to be; while your partner is enraged, beyond all measure, by the seasonal expectation to play Mr Nice Guy.  

Combine that with seasonally enforced ‘closeness’, alcohol, and the stress of the holiday season, and you have a time bomb; a time bomb that you simply cannot defuse. 

Denial alone will not be enough to save you from the inevitable explosion. 

Of course, if you’ve been out of the relationship a little while, this is the time of year when you could start to remember ‘The Good Times’. 

If you find yourself doing that, please, please, take a moment to stop and think: 

• Which good times?
• How long ago did they happen?
• How often did they occur?
• How did they end?
• Who got the blame for ‘spoiling’ them?
• What did your abusive partner do to make you feel good over the holidays?
• What price did you end up paying for ‘the good times’? 

An abusive ex-partner may use the Holiday Season for leverage.  Given that he is very good at exploiting your vulnerability, he may use the Holiday Season as a time to get back together with you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if he suddenly reappeared, tail between legs, to tell you he has finally ‘got it’, finally understood what a treasure you are and, from now on, he will be a reformed character, aka The Man of Your Dreams? 

Wouldn’t that be the best Christmas present?  Ever? 

Actually, it wouldn’t.  I’ve no wish to rain on your parade, but this is the time of year to exercise extreme caution.  The bottom line is this: 

Abusive men do not change their spots.  

They may need you.  They once really liked something about you – something they could feed off.  You were really useful to them in lots of ways – maybe you still are.  They get their feelings of power and control from putting you down.  They may even have their occasional tender moments – they have needs, too, after all.  

But your wellbeing is never anywhere near the top of their agenda.  

The truth is that it is not on their agenda, at all. 

If they don’t care about your distress – and they don’t – then your wellbeing does not even figure on their agenda.  

How would you know that your wellbeing really did figure on their agenda? 

The short answer is probably this: they would be willing to offer you their consistent, generous help and support so that you could achieve what you really want to achieve, in your own way. 

Oh, and they would behaving in a loving manner also.  Consistently. 

That would be the ultimate giveaway! 

But that is not going to happen, is it?  Either during the Holiday Season, or at any other time of year.

The worst of it is that he taught you even to stop expecting to be treated in a loving manner.  

This Holiday Season there may be many things which you would like, and cannot have.  On the other hand, this is the perfect time to start treating yourself in a loving manner.  

Not sure how?  Find just two things that make you feel good, things that are cheap and cheerful, like a hot bath, filled to the brim with bubbles, or dancing in your bedroom to your favourite music, and make sure that you commit the time to doing them every day over the holiday season.  

It doesn’t take much to make you start to feel better. 

Try it!  You’ll soon see that it works.  

7 Critical Mistakes That All Emotionally Abused Women Make

Why do women stay in an abusive relationship?  

It does not happen because they are stupid or weak-willed.  Abused women stay in bad relationships simply because nobody taught them how to recognize an abusive relationship when they fell into one.  Two things leave women vulnerable to abusers; lack of information and lack of self-worth.  Nobody would willingly put themselves through that misery.  What follows are 7 critical mistakes that all women unknowingly make that put them at risk - that you doubtless made also.

1.  You bring a lot of unresolved negative programming to your relationship. 

You may say that you were riding high before you met your abusive partner.  (Abused women frequently tell me that they were doing well before they met their emotionally abusive partner.)  That may well be true.  But here is the other side of the coin: you felt bad about yourself; you had low self-esteem.  You didn’t really believe you deserved the best.  In fact, you didn’t believe you deserved very much at all.  That is why you settled for a partner who you actively disliked at first glance.  Chances are your parent(s) trained you to expect to be treated as inferior.

2.  You don’t have clearly stated needs, wants and expectations at the start of a relationship. 

Well, you wouldn’t, would you?  You were trained to be less worthy (than pretty well everyone).  So how could you possibly imagine that your needs, wants and expectations would be important to anyone – even you.  Maybe you thought that if you could just get your partner to love you, then he would want to focus on your needs, wants and expectations.  It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t work, because it is like trying to rewrite a contract, after it has been duly signed and witnessed.  The contract you actually signed up to stated that both of you would focus your energy on meeting his needs, wants and expectations.  Why would he want to change a state of affairs that suits him perfectly. 

3.  You are brilliant at putting yourself last.  

It’s probably in the context of your relationship with your abusive partner (and offspring) that the word ‘martyr’  comes up most frequently.  But you are an Olympic medallist at people-pleasing.  Your unvoiced hope is that, one day, if you do enough for other people, they will finally reciprocate.   How long have you got?  If it hasn’t happened yet, the overwhelming likelihood is that it never will.  A wise person once said: “Today is practice for tomorrow.”  What you are actually practising is throwing good love after bad; while your partner is practising bleeding you dry.  If today is practice for tomorrow, what do you think tomorrow might look like?

4.  You are quick to believe the best about everyone - except yourself. 

You’ve grown up in the fantasy kingdom of The Pedestal.  The most precious thing in this kingdom is the pedestal on which one lucky person gets to stand, because of their outstanding personal merit.  Maybe, at the start of the relationship, your abusive partner allowed you to stand momentarily on his pedestal.  But an abusive man soon reclaims it – by right, of course.  Standing on the pedestal means that he is The Best – and you are a sorry excuse for a woman, a partner and a human being.  Because he says so, you believe it; and because you stand so far below him, you find it easy to believe that you stand far below everyone else also.  Believing is seeing, is it not? 

5.  You fail to learn from experience. 

An abusive relationship represents the – insane – triumph of hope over experience.  Every time you tell yourself that it won’t happen again, that it will get better, that you can believe his apologies (if he still bothers to say he is sorry); and every time it does happen again.  The only difference is that it gets a little worse.  And you hang on in the relationship, by tooth and nail, in the vain hope that it will get better.  You hang on while the months turn into years, maybe even into decades… but it never does get any better.

6.  You don’t hold your abusive partner accountable. 

Perhaps you tell him that you don’t like his behaviour.  You may even have left him, on occasion, for a while.  But, sooner or later, you ‘forgive him’.  You take him back, and the abuse starts all over again.  Why?  Because he knows that although you might make the ‘right noises’, there are no real deterrents to his behaviour.  He knows that, whatever you say, when push comes to shove (as it often does) you will put up with whatever he dishes out.  In an abusive relationship, you get the behaviour that you are prepared to tolerate.  How do I define the term ‘tolerate’?  What you do not draw a line in the sand under, in reality, you tolerate?  Under which of his behaviours have you actually drawn a line in the sand?

 7.  You become a denial superstar.  

Distorting the true importance of what happens is a lot easier than changing his attitudes and behaviours.  So, you tell yourself, and the world, a story that is less unpalatable than the reality.  ‘He can’t help it’, ‘he doesn’t mean it’, ‘he loves me, really’, ‘he’s had a difficult childhood’, ‘it’s just the alcohol’, ‘he’s going through a really hard time’, are some of the stories you tell yourself to explain his treatment of you.  The next stage is: “I don’t blame him for feeling like that’, ‘it’s my fault, because I…’, ‘if I hadn’t done X, he wouldn’t have…’.  And then there is: ‘he’s no worse than a lot of men’.  Your justifications sanction his bad behaviour.  By refusing to admit what is really happening in your relationship, you collude with him to allow the abuse to continue.