How to Tell If It’s Time for Divorce: Being Abused

There are a number of reasons why someone can get ‘locked’ into an abusive marriage — peer pressure, children, financial dependency, and blind love among them — but the reason that is the most confounding for outside observers is that some people simply don’t understand that they’re being abused. It can be extremely challenging for people who are living abuse-free lives to understand how someone who is suffering abuse at the hands of their spouse can fail to understand their situation.

But the simple truth is that every single one of us tells ourselves stories about our lives. We all construct narratives that explain how and why things happen, and when things happen that don’t fit those narratives, our instinct is to either ignore them, or to create a special exception for them. Human beings almost never simply discard a narrative, and that tenacious clinging to the story of a marriage can result in someone staying with an abuser long, long after an outside observer who doesn’t have any attachment to the story would have left.

When the Narrative Says ‘You Deserve It’: Becca’s Story
One writer who shared her story on Quora tells of the profoundly psychological quality of physical abuse:

[A]busers have this ability to corner you until they make you hit them first, just using words, they make you hit them first so that they can hit you…make it so that you think you’re the aggressor, twist you up and abuse you psychologically until you hit out – so that they have an excuse to hit you – and then they also have that example to use over you ever after.

…Every time he hit me he was profusely apologetic and deeply wounded by his action…I had to emotionally support HIM through his abusing me. …it was my job to be sympathetic to him – support him and tell him that it was all going to be alright. …I was made to think of and verbalize all the ways in which I deserved the blows that he gave me to reassure him that he wasn’t a bad person. When you have to say it aloud that makes it so much more solid and real.

When you’ve been deceived into telling yourself a story that says you don’t deserve better, the chances you’ll ever strive to find better are near-zero.

When the Narrative Says ‘He’ll Get Better’: Pam’s Story
Another whose story appears on NewChoicesInc.com talks about how her abusive husband easily flipped between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

We know he does not have to be this way; he acted entirely differently when we met and fell in love. …I remember pleading with my new husband: “You are not the man I married; you are his evil twin. What have you done with him?” And later in anger: “How dare you show me how wonderful you can be and then not be that way?”

When we start to give up hope, the man we fell in love with comes back. We are constantly off balance because he keeps changing from the man we fell in love with to monster boy. When do we leave? When things are wonderful and the man we fell in love with is loving us? No, life is too wonderful, and everything is fixed and right with the world. When we are battered? No, we don’t have the strength or desire to live, much less fight. So we give up. We give in. We disappear. Our only existence is keeping him happy so he won’t hurt us. He begs us to cheer up, he makes promises, he woos us back.

When the Narrative Says ‘You’re Powerless’: Gabbe’s Story
Perhaps the most disturbing abusers are those who don’t cycle from good to bad and back again like the previous two, but simply change without warning from ‘great if a bit jealous husband’ to out-and-out evil. We’re not going to quote this story because frankly the details are extremely disturbing, but suffice it to say that when the relationship goes from mild verbal abuse to being forced to take heroin, being told that the body-wide bruises he’s inflicted are ‘sexy,’ and being forced into bestiality over the course of just five days, the question of “why didn’t you leave” is a bit misplaced. A better question would be “Why do these abusers think they have the right to abuse in the first place?”

The average abused spouse requires nine attempts at leaving before they finally break away and remain free of their abuser. That’s how powerful the psychology of abuse is. Don’t ask these people why they’re still there (or why it took them so long to seek divorce) — because in every single case, the answer is “because their abuser keeps them there.” It’s not the victim’s fault that they stuck around. Not ever.