Physical & Emotional Abuse Support Group
Abuse is a general term for the treatment of someone that causes some kind of harm (to the abused person, to the abusers themselves, or to someone else) that is unlawful or wrongful. No one deserves abuse, period. Abuse can be emotional, physical, or sexual.
So, I've been trying to figure out how to approach this subject without sounding any more crazy and pathetic than I feel right now, but I can't think of any way but to put it out there. At our first session (the first in a long time anyway), the crisis counselor asked me to start remembering and writing down incidents that have happened in my relationship. I didn't and she asked again at this last session, so I started doing it last night. I mean I hadn't really forgotten them, I don't think anyway, just kind of pushed them to the back of my mind, I thought. So....writing them was easy in a weird way. I mean the details started becoming crystal clear the more I wrote and more things started coming to the front of my mind as I wrote, stuff I had clearly forgotten about. As I reread what I had written I felt horrified, but in a detached way, almost as if this had happened in a dream or to someone I only vaguely knew. What's most concerning to me is that I can't understand where this stuff went. How could I EVER justify, minimize, and forget crap like this. How could I have thought I was in control, to any extent, and that things weren't that bad. How can I sit here and feel so detached from it all. I understand that the human mind protects itself from overload but this seems extreme even to me. I was going to start writing some more, probably still will, but right now I'm feeling physically ill from what I wrote last night. I honestly am wondering if I have had some kind of mental break and god I can't even explain what I'm feeling right now. Has anyone had this happen to them before?! (God I pay someone has!)
You have survived.
You've done what
you had to to
survive.
Now. . . . you'll do
what you have to
to survive from
here.
Sending you my
love and prayers
for all good things
in your life.
It's incredibly scary to have the realisations you are having. Devastating, almost. But you are not devastated. You are growing stronger as you see what was happening. What I'm particularly loving is that you do not appear to be beating yourself up. It's not your fault. Even the fact that you "allowed" yourself to be trained is not your fault. No "normal" human being does this to the person he (or she) supposedly loves, so how on earth could you have had a frame of reference with which to accurately see what he was doing to you? Of course you could see that the violence was getting less. And a big part of the "training" was to keep you focussed on all the things that were supposedly "wrong" with you, so the uneasy feeling, the fear, was just another thing "wrong" with you - just another one of your "problems" or "issues". You know now that it wasn't a problem, that it was your gut screaming at you to stay safe.
One of my favourite quotes is from Maya Angelou: Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. Allowing yourself to be trained was the best way you knew to protect yourself. Going back after his threat to kill you was the best way you knew to protect yourself. "Forgetting" much of what he did to you was the best way your psyche knew to protect you.
You are so incredibly strong, to be able to face these realisations.