Glad you like the blog! It’s astonishing what excuses abusers can come up with. That blogger writes a lot about consent issues and “it’s not ‘legitimate’ rape, so why do I still feel ooky?” questions, so there have been some… extraordinary… examples of where human behavior can go.
I’ll echo that, but I do have to wonder how much of it is a conditioned response? I had a female friend who in hindsight was nearly as bad a narcissist as my mother, but I was so used to being put down by my mother that I didn’t realise how bad she was until I moved house and was separated from her.
She’s not the only narcissist friend I’ve had, I seem to attract them for some reason.
Also, from what I’ve read online, it can be nigh on impossible to get away from a narcissist.
This is not really a new question. People have been asking this for decades. (Centuries? Millenia?)
The blog that Cinnamon Imp posted lists a lot of the reasons. I think that some others are: There’s nowhere else for me to go, He/she will find me and make things worse, He/she will change if I act better, etc.
As for the first one, I don’t know what I’d do if I suddenly had to leave home with nothing but the clothes on my back. I have friends in the area, but I don’t really know if I could stay with any of them. And I might be a little too proud to ask. Even if my home situation were intolerable (it’s very much not), there’s a certain security in knowing where I’m going to sleep. Add to that the fear that if I ran away, someone would hunt me down and kill me, well, that’s not a great incentive.
These situations are never as simple as we’d like to think.
I’m going to tell you what a priest told me years ago, and which helped me move out of my mother’s house shortly after my father’s death (I’d moved back him to help care for him and rapidly become the homemaker and everybody-caretaker of my childhood again): “You’ve spent your whole life taking care of her, but she squeezes you so hard you can’t breathe. You can’t take care of her or of anybody else if you’re dead.”
The whole speech was longer, but seriously: get out. The best thing about owning my own house is that if I am with my mother and she oversteps the boundaries I’ve set, I can just up and leave.
And maybe the victim really has started to believe all the horrible things being said about them? That I can understand. I know better. I’m just feeling sorry for myself lately.
Absolutely.
I know what that’s like. PM me if you need some ears.
Because the relationship isn’t always abusive. It starts out pretty normally, and while signs of abuse might be there, they’re hard to spot if you don’t know what to look for.
So two years into a somewhat happy relationship, your girlfriend (lets say it’s a girl because of the OP) decides she doesn’t like what you said and slaps you. What do you do? Do you give up a relationship that you’ve built for two years, or do you try and change the person? Most people will try and save the relationship.
Then what they get into is something called a cycle of violence. After the abuser hurts the victim, she starts to apologize for her behavior and promises to never do it again. The victim believes her apologies and and the couple reconciles. Then the cycle starts all over again. As things progress, the happy times in the relationship decrease, and the abusive times increase.
From outside the relationship this all looks insane. But if you look at what the victim is doing from his point of view, it makes more sense. He is trying to save a relationship that was doing fine for two years. Maybe if this person knew about the cycle of violence and how abuse escalates in a relationship, he would make a different choice. But not many people are taught this before they start dating.
This doesn’t even include the people who are financially dependent on their abusers or who are afraid of the consequences of leaving. If you’re a house wife with three children, there is a very real chance that you might lose custody of the children. Or worse, you are given custody and the abuser runs away and stops paying any support.
Finally, most assaults and homicides in domestic violence situations occur after the victim decides to leave. Any victim leaving someone who is physically abusive has to be prepared for things becoming much worse before they become better.
Just to be clear, I was referring to emotional abuse, not domestic violence. I don’t, for a second, believe that one causes less emotional damage than the other, but I do think the situations are different in key ways. The emotionally abused person, for example, is most likely not in danger of physical bodily injury if they attempt to leave. (And I am aware the two often occur together.)
Sorry, I am kind of emotionally bleeding all over the place right now. My mother was egregiously emotionally abusive. I can’t describe to you the helplessness. I lived with it for years and I dreamed of running away but could never get up the courage to do it. Twelve years ago almost to this day, when I was 17 years old, I finally just snapped and decided I wasn’t going to deal with it anymore. I walked out of the house, right in the middle of an argument, with no money, no vehicle and no particular place to go, and I would have slept under a bridge if that’s what it took to get the hell out of that situation. The threat of retaliatory violence was in fact very real, because Mom had a tendency to completely lose her shit. At that point not even the fear of her wrath would have sent me crawling back. Fortunately for me I had caring relatives and did end up with a place to stay, but my point is just about anything looked better than being abused.
At a certain point, the anger at being mistreated outweighs the guilt of leaving someone you love and the inconvenience of starting a new life and the fear of retaliation. The OP knows he is being abused. When he finally does get out of it, he’ll look back on it and kick himself for not getting out sooner. If I had left sooner, I wouldn’t be having a freaking nervous breakdown right now just because it’s October. Just thinking about who I might have been in the absence of fear and self-loathing… it’s a tragedy. I just don’t want others to be hurt.
Olives, you got angry enough to leave. My own way out of a case of “the blues” caused by someone else fucking up with me usually ends when I get mad - on occasion I’ve just left, other times I’ve not so much gotten even as gotten them turned into mincemeat (not literally). But for some people the anger never arrives… once you get over this slump, be happy you have that anger, because when it’s controlled by the person who has it (rather than controlling the person), it’s an extremely powerful source of energy.
I’d send you the biggest bag of hugs ever but I seem to have left the bags at home… {}^∞
In my situation, it was a combination of things. First, I grew up in an emotionally abusive home, which it was never pointed out to me that that was abuse. Second, the abuse in my marriage started gradually. I think a lot of it had to do with his spiral downward into mental illness. Short explanation: I thought I could save him from himself (as an aside, I am codependent - that plays a major role into how I handled it).
Also, the majority of my “friends” often witnessed his behavior over the years. Some thought it was funny, others tried to ignore it to not get involved. No one really pointed it out to me and I was so caught up in excusing his behavior “because he couldn’t help it” or “he’s sick”. It took someone who had experience in helping people escape abusive relationships to finally help me understand.
I had to do so much soul-searching and therapy to come to grips with what I had been living with. I had to be honest with myself, which I had not been for so long. So yeah, I blame myself in a lot of ways. I wanted a relationship that wasn’t there, and I convinced myself it was okay.
Another thing I had discovered in my journey is that emotional/psychological abuse is not something that is talked about. Yes, we all hear about the dangers of physical abuse, but there is a huge lack of information about emotional abuse. I would imagine there are many people out there living in this and have no clue. Plus, emotional abusers are extremely adept at manipulation, some of the most grounded and intelligent people you know can easily become victims.
I always told myself as a young girl that I would never put up with abuse; I wanted to be a strong, independent woman, “I” would never be one of “those” weak men/women who would subject themselves to that. I could never understand why, not until I found myself deep in the cycle did I finally build compassion for these men and women. It’s really difficult to face up to what is going on, not to mention the logistics of escaping and keeping yourself safe during that time. It’s overwhelming.
If anyone is curious about emotional abuse, here is a link to the common behaviors of the abuser.
Rumata, you out there?