The Straight Dope on Why Women return to abusive relationships?

Great Debates
21

Oh, I agree with that very much indeed. They don’t usually decide they are going to be abusive, indeed, many don’t even recognize it as abuse. “A little slap to larn 'em better, that ain’t abuse.” Or “it’s not abuse if there’s no physical violence”. It works into a particular personality type called “The Right Man”. Or “The Right Woman”, for that matter. “Look, I’m right, s/he’s wrong, and Just Doesn’t Get It. I have to do this for his/her own good!” May not even come out until the first time the SO actually wants something for him/herself that does not fit exactly into the abuser’s vision of Life As It Shall Be.

I think that choosing a victim is often not a conscious process. It would be a matter of presentation, and work over time. I mean that the victim usually presents, on one level or another, his or her vulnerability. The abuser can pick up on that - and reads it as “this person is compatible with me”. Then, during the beginning phase of the relationship, gullibility tests are done to determine how much of a sucker is on the line. Again, such tests may not be conscious, but along the lines of “If you loved me, you would/would not …” and observing the responses. If the responses are flattering, then the behaviour escalates.

On preview, Pandora illustrated it beautifully. If she had not responded as compliantly, he may not have escalated as far as he did - NOT THAT IT WAS HER FAULT, but it may have contributed. And I betcha part of his initial attraction was the fact that she worshipped him - that gullibility thing. And it sounds like he was a classic Right Man. In fact, it’s so classic I think it oughtta be a case study.

As for the psychopathy involved…I’d say it’s not a one-to-one correspondence in that all abusers are psychopaths, but a goodly number of psychopaths are abusers (reference: “Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us” by Dr. Robert Hare, and the already cited “Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence”).

Of course, I could be relying on heavily biased information, seeing as how my actual interest is in psychopathology/serial killers. :slight_smile:

Sorry. Off-topic. We’re talking about the victims of domestic violence.

What you all said about co-dependence, and drama queens. I think that all plays a part. That’s why these relationships are so nasty to deal with on all sides - it’s rarely only one of these issues, it’s a big ugly ball of all of them. Apparently one call all law officers dread is “domestic dispute”. Never know what you’ll find, never know if one or both will turn on you, and a cow to prosecute.

[sub]And it’s allude. Really, I’m not trying to escape anything…or your spellchecker betrayed you.[/sub]
Hey, I wonder…if any insights into violent psychopathology and the care and treatment thereof can be gleaned from the study of reformed abusers… They might not be psychopaths, but some of the behaviours are very similar, if not identical.

22

My mom gave me that speech too, superstar - my father is very emotionally abusive and so is my mother. We weren’t hit often, but it did happen. Mom was more emotionally manipulative. A large portion of my childhood as spent being convinced that I would come home to find she had killed herself. It helped maintain her control.

And I was so very very careful in relationships - little tests and checks that if the guy didn’t measure up, he was out. And now I’ve been married to a wonderful guy for over 9 years, and I trust him. But some part of me keeps watching. I tell him if he ever hits me I’m gone, and he doesn’t understand. I’m not accusing him of anything - he has never raised a hand to me, and I can’t see it ever happening. But I keep watching.

23

My friend said she thought it was better to have a crappy man than no man at all. I tried to tell her that I certainly didn’t feel that way and in fact thought it was better to have no man than a crappy one, but she cannot be shaken from her belief. It seems to built into her very being.

She has three children and no real marketable skills. The deal she made with her husband said that he would go to school first and when he got a better job, then she would go. Of course, now that it is her turn, something always comes up. She said she feels trapped and just wants to make the best of the situation.

24

My experience with women in abusive relationships was via my best friend and her defacto partner (and father of two of her children). So my perception of the problem is not from the inside, so to speak, but as an observer of the phenomenon. He’d beat her up, she’d come to me or her other friends for refuge and support, and then days or even hours later she would be back with him.

Looking back on it now, I think I understand what was going on…at least for this couple anyway. Jenny thrived on the attention. Jenny would get a LOT of sympathy and comforting after a beating as all of her friends would rally to her aid. We would listen to her litany of complaints against Ian, and try to help and motivate her to take legal action…but all to no avail. She’d go back every time.

I believe it was a sort of Munchausen’s syndrome with Jenny. When all of her friends and I ran out of sympathy (after 3 years of at least weekly bashings) she told us that she believed that Ian was sexually molesting their baby daughter. This of course reinvigorated our efforts to help her, and gave her the attention she so desperately craved. But she still didn’t leave.

And of course, the molestation allegations turned out to have been completely fabricated. And I found out some years later that 99% of the ‘bashings’ were bullshit as well…the other 1% came about when Jenny thumped Ian first and he would try to defend himself from her violence. She needed some bruises to show her friends, and went about getting them the only way she knew how. He had been protesting this all along, but nobody believed him because you are ALWAYS meant to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. I still feel somewhat guilty about my involvement in the whole thing.

Eventually the ‘authorities’ stepped in to figure out what the hell was going on, forcing this couple to part company. Ian now has full custody of the kids and their lives are going well from what I hear.

25

Women return to abusive relationships because they are ignorant and weak. Plain and simple.

                                   Thanks.
26

I have a feeling that it might be just a bit more complex than you suggest vengence.

I also have a feeling that such misogynistic attitudes might not go down all that well on this board.

But, hey, I’m a woman, so what would I know? :rolleyes:

27

I’ll mention it now. When my son saw his mother’s face crushed (I don’t mean crushed in that I was upset, I mean crushed as in broken cheekbones, broken jaws, black eyes, and a split lip), he, at the tender age of two, fell apart. No wonder, seeing as how it was his father that did it to me. And yet, I hadn’t had enough. I ended up with a boyfriend that pretty much repeated that pattern. It was when he broke my nose in front of my son when the restraining orders, the police protection, the evictions, the “MISSY IS TAKING HER LIFE BACK” began. I’ve spent years helping him to heal, as well as myself. He’s healed thanks to the help I got him. I didn’t have any. Help, that is. It took this wonderful child of mine, who is now doing just fine, is an honors student, who loves his new stepfather, and who trusts, knows what is right and wrong, and who knows what is and isn’t acceptable as far as treating people is concerned, to make me see the light. I loved someone other than my ex-assholes (as I know refer to them) MORE than anyone else - and it was my SON. HE gave me the gift I now have. I had to give something better to my child, and in the process, gained a bonus for me.

Do I “love” myself? Nope.

Do I still feel unworthy of love? Yep.

Do I still feel unattractive? Yep.

Do I still think I’m the stupidist idiot on this planet? Yep.

Do I still have issues? Yep.

Do I still have night terrors? Yep.

Do I have PTSD? Yep.

Is my current marriage going to work out? Don’t know. I brought a lot of baggage into it. Isn’t husband’s fault, I can only ask him to deal with so much. But it’s hitting the skids right now. We’ll see.

Will I ever be “whole”? Nope. Never.

But I can hope and do my best to make sure my child has the best life he can. And frankly, anymore, that’s all I care about.

By the way, the poster, now known as vengence will be mine…maybe can rest assured that it will be mine. Take your opinion, Billy, and shove it up your uneducated ass.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

28

This is an official warning-you are not to post in this manner outside of the BBQ Pit again.

                                    Thanks.
29
      • I will continue to maintain that women who repeatedly engage in such relationships do it because (for some reason) they like it, or they like some aspect of the relationship, and feel that putting up with the physical abuse is worth it. In the US at least, it is very common to hear of women who repeatedly find men who will treat them in physially abusive ways. You can always find stories of “women who escaped”, but from what I have seen and heard first-hand, there are still many more women who have little interest in escaping. When the situation with one guy ends, they go out and find another who is very similar to the one before, even in terms of the physical abuse he commits. In these cases there’s no “blame” to place on anyone, there is no one to “save”. Different people like different things, and some like things rough.
        ~
30

Czarcasm, I would just like to thank you and if I’m ever lucky enough to meet you, I’ll buy you a beer, buy you a car, buy you a house…) :).
When people post stuff like that in a thread like this, it’s reliving some of the pain. Really. It’s the same put downs, it’s the same disregard, it’s the same disallowance of being a human being. It’s the same “YOU DON’T MATTER. YOU ARE UGLY. YOU DON’T MEAN ANYTHING. YOU ARE STUPID. YOU ARE WORTHLESS.” And I’ve heard it for years. And no, I don’t know if disallowance is a word, but when I read what that idiot wrote, it hurt. A whole bunch. Thank you for telling him to stop it. I’ll go on off to bed now, and deal with my demons, and hopefully the fool that wrote that won’t ever have to deal with the demons I DO deal with. I may hate what he wrote, but I can’t hate anyone enough, even the men who abused me, to wish that kind of lifelong emotional fallout on them. Call me kind. Or call me stupid. Your choice.

And although I wanted to say, “One can only hope”, I won’t. Because I wouldn’t want ANYONE, even the the poster who made those comments, to go through the pain I go through daily.

Phlosphr, if you would be interested in talking about this further, please email me. Thanks to comments by people like DougC (now that I see it on preview), I don’t think it’s something I want to talk about on the boards anymore; obviously. Yes, it’s a weird email addy, I know, but I got it from Coldfire thanks to an off the wall thead years ago. Don’t ask. :slight_smile:

DougC, I don’t have the words to tell you what contempt I have for your comments. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you really stating that I enjoyed having my life threatened while the emergency room -personnel was treating me for a busted face yet ignored him telling me he’d kill me if I said anything? I enjoyed my son’s FATHER TRYING TO KILL ME? AND THREATENING BOTH OF US? He held a GUN TO MY HEAD! I ENJOYED THIS? You ass.

FUCK THIS. Doug, you want to talk to me and I’ll tell you about a few things that you obviously haven’t experienced - emotional blackmail, emotional torture, physical abuse to the point where I was on life support. Yeah, kiddo, I wholeheartedly support the notion that we ASK FOR IT. Emotional abuse to the point that makes Apocolypse Now look like Doctor Fucking Spock. My CHILD seeing his mother almost DEAD. Talk to me, DougC, let me tell you how things REALLY WORK. You self righteous son of a bitch. LIVE MY LIFE. Until you do, Shut Your Fucking Yap.

You know what, you aren’t even worth pitting. See y’all. I am going to dump my guts about the abuse I’ve been through and read this crap to try and help someone understand something and then get the crap I’m getting from people like the troll and Doug? Gone.

C’Ya.

31

I have been in a relationship where my skills at dealing with a woman were tested, I believe women enter into relationships with men, where they test the skills of their men and their men come up shorthanded. It is a skill to deal with a woman, when they test you. Some men do not have what it takes, and the result is violence.

32

bojon, may i be the first to say… HUH?

what the hell kind of horsecrap are you smoking?

33

With all due respect Phlosphr you seem to be taken with the general notion that the usual dynamic in these situation(s) is that a rampaging, abusive male bully is running around smacking the hell out of his weak and cringing female SO just for laughs, and/or a feeling or power. While this dynamic may indeed exist in certain situations, it is a far, far more common real world dynamic for disagreements (initiated by the woman as often as the man) to escalate to verbal abuse, that then leads to one partner striking the other (initiated by the woman often as the man). It is the third and most dangerous leg of these dramas in which a physical scrum ensues, where the physical damage is usually done, and this is generally dominated by the man simply because they are usually (but not always) larger and stronger.

Studies have shown that women initiate nearly half or better of the first violent physical contact in many of these escalating conflicts in the form of a slap, a push, a shove or a kick because they were angry with their SO, these are returned and it’s off to the races we go. Oddly, if you ask many of these women if they were violent they will swear they were not, because socially, interpersonally, and operationally female physical violence is often not seen as “real” violence, even by women themselves, unless it’s extreme, and in a many cases a man in reasonable shape can take quite a pounding from a woman before he suffers any real physical harm.

The problem in these scenarios is that if they go at it long enough, there is often a point in these dramas where he does get hurt or massively irritated, and that is usually the flashpoint where the really potent violence ensues and the damage is done.

People who physically damage other people should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but you need to understand that the real world dynamic in domestic violence situations is a lot different than passive women being persecuted by sadistic men. It’s often a dysfunctional dance and women lead as often as they follow in initiating and perpetuating the conflicts that cause these situations. The notion that the person who gets hurt the most in the end is the sole victim in these scenarios is a handy “feel good”, but it’s a long way from an accurate real world snapshot of the social and interpersonal dynamic that led them to that point. Stopping violence has to happen on both sides of the gender equation in order to be effective, and to some extent women have to start taking responsibility for curbing their own initiating violence in order to reduce the overall incidence of domestic violence.

34

I think that this conversation is important enough to move to Great Debates.

35

It’s this attitude that is quite likely to be the death of a friend of mine.

He’s involved in an abusive relationship. He shows up with bruises. He gets hit, kicked, punched, pushed, and has things thrown at him. He’s been cracked in the head with a sauce pan. He doesn’t eat because his girlfriend, who he believes loves him, told him that he’s too fat. He spends hours wondering why he’s not good enough for her and how it is he makes her cheat on him.

And he won’t leave because he believes that men can’t be abused.

36

Women not only return to abusive SOs, they keep picking them. Several women in this thread have mentioned not one, but several abusive SOs. My female cousin does this. As soon as she dumps or is dumped by one loser, she picks another.

The first one was an alcoholic.
The second was an alcoholic biker.
The third was a really nice guy except he had this little drug-dependancy problem.

And on and on. They all hit her and she can never seem to find some average guy that doesn’t beat women.

Admittedly there are more abusive men than are known about but it is still the exception rather than the rule. Surely, wife beating is not so common that a woman repeatedly just stumbles into these relationships by chance. Could it be the excitement? Low self-esteem? What?

Why can’t they find someone normal?

Testy

37

Hmmm… my dad’s girlfriend said the same thing to me. I guess that makes us forum sisters.
Well, not exactly the same thing. She said “you just can’t find a man because you’re fat, but some guys like that - don’t worry, you’ll find someone who will want you.”

Of course, I didn’t feel like explaining to her that I’m not gay, not really. Gender just doesn’t have any effect at all on my feelings about a person, after first impressions. What they look like also has very little effect. The thing that really does matter to me is who they are inside, what they think and feel.
If my wife were a man, I think there would be very little difference in our relationship. When asked my orientation, I will say gay, though, out of respect for my wife and our relationship.

My mother also told me since I was very young that if I could do anything in my life and she would still love me. Also, that I should not be like her, make a better life for myself. That I shouldn’t smoke or drink or do any sort of drugs, and that I should be with someone that loved me.
She was actually a really good mother with a couple of really big holes. I love and respect her very much, even with her faults.

38

Wew! Where to start…I’ll start close to this post and work backward.

Catsix

Huh? So you are saying if he doesn’t stick up for himself and hit her he’s all done? Sorry but he needs to stick up for himself and get his ass out of the relationship. I say this knowing that doing this (getting out) is usually more difficult than putting up with the abuse. Physical violence is never the anser, I don’t care what Gender you are.

Astro

Women need to curb their own initiating violence in order to reduce the overall instance of domestic violence? You lost me Astro, this puts the majority of the onus on the woman? Leaving what percentage for the man, who should have responsibility for his own actions. No? I’m not sure I understand the implications of where you were taking that last statement. I was with you in the beginning of your post, but lost you when your percentage went out of whack for who usually initiates. I do agree women do play a role, but people in these relationships need to be responsible for their own actions, no matter how difficult.

Bojon

Seems this is what many an abuser has said.

Missy - My heart goes out to you. However I must ask you something. In the past two weeks you have posted threads where you have eluded several times to your flirtatious behaviour. You even had a man who wants to leave his wife for you, and a recent hot-tub party. You have given us every reason to think that yuo have little to no self-esteem, however you love your child to no end. In counseling, we teach people when dealing with a patient with low self-steem to love themselves first. When they have mastered that, they can conquer much more than if they do not ever master it. So I ask you. Is it possible to channel your emotions, into your ownself? To learn to love your own self? An emotionally strong woman is a formidable force. A child IMO should be raised by a pillar of strength. You do have that with-in I hope you know. Good vibes to you…

39

I didn’t see where I was putting the large majority of the onus on the women. My point was that studies have shown that women are more or less on a par with, or slightly ahead of men, in the initial lower level physical acting out (ie pushing, shoving,slapping, kicking etc) in otherwise typically verbal arguments, and that this behavior tends to escalate the conflict, and leads to the “big fight” where people get injured, and that to the extent they do this they need to do their part to curb this intiating violence.

The mirror identical point can (and should) be made for men who intiate violence, and in real world terms men do have a greater responsibillty to restrain themselves if things get out of hand, because of their (typically) greater capacity to do serious damage.

Part of the problem on a basic level is that a number of women do not accept personally, socially or operationally that this lower level initiating physical acting out is “violence”, and indeed in society at large, it’s a slippery “you’re beautiful when you’re angry” slope, where a woman’s slap or kick or other attack might be considered a prelude to romance or a 911 domestic violence call. When called on this physical (slap, shove etc) acting out women are often baffled that anyone would consider this “violence” and generally lump it under the category of “being upset” or “being emotional”, and men are generally willing to go along with this categorization as long as they don’t get hurt too bad. The problem is that if engaging in this type of behavior becomes a habit, it can desensitize both parties to responding violence, and that is prescription for all kinds of bad stuff to happen.

There are creeps out there that will beat on women just for fun and these people should be locked under the jail, but the vast majority of domestic violence is not a predator-prey dynamic, but is typically an argument that got out of hand. Stopping domestic violence needs to address all the complex inputs that lead to the point some one is injuredm and both women and men need to be aware of, and take responsibilty for, their behavior to the extent it initiates and accelerates some of these conflicts.

40

phlosphr

[quote]

You even had a man who wants to leave his wife for you, and a recent hot-tub party.**

WHAT??? You had better do a search, buddy, cause THAT WASN’T ME!!! I would appreciate an apology.