Abused No More

How do you want to be loved?

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: 

• 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!”
• Accepting, and overlooking distasteful and/or troubling behaviours – including leering at other women, emotional bullying, threats, addictions, etc.
• Settling for less. 

Now the notion of settling for less needs some expansion.  There is a notion around that, especially if you have reached 30, or so, your ‘biological clock is ticking’ and you should be prepared to settle for Mr Good Enough. 

I don’t buy that one, at all.  As you know to your cost, it is a dangerous notion, indeed.  Abused women are pitifully bad at identifying Mr Good Enough, or even Mr Half-way Good, correctly.  

Too many women end up in abusive relationships because their internal dialogue goes something like this: 

“Well, you might as well face it, you’re not so hot.  You can’t expect anyone really fabulous to come along, so you might as well make do with this guy.  He’s the best you can hope for.  Especially as being with him gives you an opportunity to stand in his shadow and hide your inadequacies behind him.”    

The bottom line for women who end up in an abusive relationship is that they don’t know how they want to be loved. 

They don’t know how they want to be loved, because they had no experience in their formative years of being truly loved, and accepted unconditionally.  

They had no experience of being good enough, just as they were, just because… 

You would be more inclined to put up with an abusive, critical partner, would you not, if experience had taught you that you never had been and never were going to be good enough? 

Part of the healing process for abused women is learning to love themselves. 

When you think about it – which you probably don’t very much – loving yourself costs nothing, and harms nobody.  

When you are constantly striving to give love without receiving love, you are running on empty; and that, inevitably, harms you.  When you can love yourself, giving and receiving love become much, much easier, because your love tank is always being replenished.  

Still, making the shift, from the self-loathing that has been programmed into you by an abusive partner, to self-love, is not easy.  This is why it is so important for abused women to start to focus on the good feelings they get from other people, rather than on the bad feelings an abusive man foists on them. 

Some women who leave an abusive relationship are in a rush to dive into the next relationship.  Others don’t even want to contemplate another relationship ever again.  

I’ve no doubt that taking the time to be relationship-free long enough to heal and learn to truly love themselves is the best thing that abused women can possibly do. 

But still, it is really useful to ask yourself: “How do I want to be loved?” 

Especially if you don’t have any clear answer.  

Because, envisioning how you want to be loved, will help you to discover what is valuable and lovable about you.  In order to have a vision of how you want to be loved, you have to enter into a more loving dialogue with yourself.  You have to move from the self-loathing dialogue to a more constructive way of relating to yourself. 

So here’s a clue: how you want to be loved is actually the way that you want to be treated.  It’s something you need to be very, very specific about.  Settling for less is extremely dangerous; you’ve already tried it, you know how much it has cost you.   

The way you want to be treated is not about your financial circumstances; it’s not about being showered with expensive gifts, or any of the public trappings of a relationship.  What it is about is the dynamics of your relationship. 

If you want to feel loved, what specific behaviours will show you that you are loved? 

If you want to feel respected, how will your partner’s behaviour towards you show you that you are respected?

If you want to feel valued, what will your partner have to say, and do, to show you that you are valued? 

If you want to feel treated as an equal, how will you know that he treats you as an equal? 

If you want to feel cherished, how will your partner’s behaviour show you that you are cherished? 

How good will it feel to have someone in your life who really, really cares about your feelings? 

Good, huh? 

So now for the killer question: 

Why would you imagine that anybody else is going to do for you what you are not prepared to do for yourself? 

Every small step you take towards loving yourself brings that feeling of being loved and lovable that much closer. 

Neither you, nor I, can know if, or when you will have another partner in your life.  Right now, it doesn’t even matter.

But you can start feeling loved and lovable right now; plenty of people in your life will be willing to reflect that message back to you, just as soon as you start to feel it for yourself. 

Even if you can only feel it for yourself for 30 seconds at a time, that is a useful start.  

Try it, and you will see.

 

 

 

 

 

A Half-shot Latte

Can your abusive (ex-)partner do a Jekyll and Hyde routine?  

Can he sometimes switch from Mr Nasty to Mr Nice Guy? 

And does Mr Nice Guy appear when has got the message that he really has gone too far this time?  

Not because he feels genuine remorse – much as you might like to think he does – but because he knows that he needs to do something to reel you back in.  Because, if he doesn’t reel you back in, and you go off and finally end the relationship, it is bound to cause him some inconvenience, at some level. 

The bottom line is that he will lose someone he uses, in various ways, to make himself feel good.  And it will cost him more time and trouble to mold a new partner than it does to play his games with you. 

From your point of view, of course, it looks very different.  When you have invested - a lot - in an abusive husband or partner, you want to believe there is a tipping point; you hang on hoping that, with enough input and education from you, Mr Nice Guy will become the fixture.  In your fantasy, your abusive partner will understand how much he has hurt you, and how much you love him, and need him to change, and… 

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.  

This week, I’ve been working with an abused woman whose sometime partner is Mr Nasty having a Mr Nice Guy moment.  But that’s not what she sees.  She sees that he is being ‘really loving and caring’.  Her fantasy is that, finally, the tipping point has been reached.  

I doubt this somehow.  I’ve no doubt he is saying at least some of the right things, and doing enough of the right things for her hungry heart to swallow his bait unquestioningly.  Even though she has enough experience to know exactly how it will end; in another abusive explosion.

Contrast that scenario with a story I heard in the same week from another woman who, after many years with an abusive partner, now has a truly loving partner.  This woman, Dee, could not help but share the story of a half-shot latte. 

Briefly, what happened was this: Dee’s partner lives in another town, but spends as much time with her as he can.  One Monday morning, he went to the bank in her town, before returning to his home.  He invited her to go with him and have a latte – Dee just loves a half-shot latte.  She had to refuse because of an early appointment.  The partner did his business, and went 10 minutes out of his way to drop off a half-shot latte (and sugar sachets) to her, before driving home. 

Is one half-shot latte a big deal? 

Yes, it is, in reality.  For a number of reasons, including: 

• He went out of his way to make a small, loving, unnecessary gesture.  He wasn’t trying to buy, impress or manipulate her with a $2 latte.
• He expected no thanks; he knew she was busy and couldn’t spend any time with him, but he did know she wanted that latte.
• He was focusing on what she wanted, and what he could give her; not what he wanted from her.
• A person who is consistently loving in small ways is much more likely to truly invest in the relationship, than someone who thinks they are ‘above’ such details. 

If you think about your abusive relationship, you probably hear the word ‘love’ bandied about a lot – quite often to tell you where you are going wrong, by not behaving lovingly enough.  Abused women often speak about their abusive partner's mythical loving interludes - these are, actually, the interludes when he is behaving less badly than usual.  Period.

Your abusive partner has very clear ideas about everything that you should be doing for him.  How much time does he spend thinking about what he could do to brighten your day? 

Did that question raise a wry smile, I wonder? 

Once, after he had been particularly vile, my then husband felt he had to make a big gesture to reel me back in.  As I have a long-term love affair with Italy, and we live in the UK, he decided he would take me to Italy for a weekend.  He informed me that my favourite city is Milan.  Now, I’m passionate about Venice, Rome, Florence, and a few other cities also, but Milan, which I’d recently visited with him, is my least favourite Italian city.  

It wasn’t important enough for him to even register that. 

How much of what is important to you does even a long-term abusive partner bother to discover?  

Does he know your favourite book, film, colour, music, restaurant, café, city or beach?    

More to the point, does he care? 

If not, why not? 

And, if he doesn’t, can you see how you have educated him to believe that what matters to you is not that important? 

Maybe he doesn’t have to care about the things that you care about.  But if he is not prepared to respect what you care about, simply because you care about it, it is a clear sign that he doesn’t care about – and respect - you.   

That’s what made that latte so precious to Dee.  A $2 latte showed her that her partner was prepared to care about her in a way that mattered to her.  

You don’t see an abusive man doing that.