Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Finding your way after abuse

One in four women will experience some form of domestic violence in their lifetimes.  This staggering statistic may be too low given how hesitant many women are to report abuse and for good reason.  Fear of retaliation, financial insecurity, and lack of social support create very real barriers to leaving violent relationships.  Those women who have managed to escape often find themselves disillusioned and lost instead of hopeful and empowered.  So many of the women I have worked with, particularly those who have children with an abusive ex, say they worry it would have been easier to have stayed with their abusers than to fight daily to maintain boundaries and move on.  Let's discuss the re-victimization many women experience when they leave an abusive relationship, but have to maintain contact with their abusers.

Re-victimization.  If you thought your ex was controlling and manipulative while you were with them, you can likely expect things to get worse any time you make a move to establish your separateness.  Making reasonable requests in mediation, drawing boundaries around visitation, and signing divorce papers can all trigger escalations in the abusive partner's controlling behavior.  They may use guilt by telling you that you have ruined the lives of your children by breaking up the family, or they may use threats and intimidation.  All of these situations can feel very familiar and put survivors back in a vulnerable state of mind, one in which the goal to stop the hurtful behavior results in submission.

How to deal:  Minimize face to face contact as much as possible.  Make sure you are engaging in rigorous self-care before and after any interaction with your ex.  Working out, eating well, spending time with friends, completing a project, all of these actions put funds into your emotional bank account.  And while a trip to the gym won't magically prevent your ex from being controlling, it will put you in a better position to guard against personalizing his/her destructive behavior. Any effective action we take to build ourselves up lessens the charge of actions meant to break us down.  Finally, consider doing most of your emotional processing with a therapist.  Allowing an abuser to be the main topic of every conversation with friends and family allows the abuser to continue to take up your life space.  Focusing on other aspects of life, however mundane, is not about shame or avoidance, it's about taking out the garbage.  We make room in our relationships, our interactions, and our stories for those lost aspects of ourselves to resurface by refusing to fuel the damaging narratives of inadequacy abusive exes wrote for us. 

If a survivor is to avoid being roped in to a passive and fearful way of being, she must make a choice about her relationship with fear.  Abuse puts us into contact with our fragility as humans and with the darkness of which we are all capable.  It does not feel like a choice to let fear write our stories when danger is so close, but it is a choice.  Fear is a necessary emotion for safety, fear-based living is a chosen way of being.  By fully accepting the truth of our vulnerability we become strong.  By believing that acting on fear will keep us safe from all harm, we paint ourselves as powerless.  Any choice made in courage helps to rebuild the broken spirit, no matter how small we may feel at the start.

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