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.
However it may help to understand that you may never get the apology owed to you and maybe try to come to terms with that.
I hope this helps and good luck
I never understood why on top of everything they have to take the strength and the energy of their victim too.
You said you hope Karma eats his behind up. That's funny, you can make your journal entries about him funny. Anything that will ease the tension inside of you.
For me, I see my user and abuser as really dirty and I have these purifying routines after thinking about him, it helps to get rid of the disgust.
The other thing about fighting emotions is, to me, it's like pushing on a brick wall to try to get it out of your way. You become fixated on the wall, the wall is all there is, but no matter how hard you push, all that happens is exhaustion and pain. If instead, you accept that the wall is there and take a step back from it, you are free to look at alternatives - ways around the wall. You don't have to get rid of the wall to progress, you just have to stop focussing all your energy on it. The equivalent with anger for me has been to accept that yes, I'm angry. I have every right to be angry at what he did to me, at the dreams he stole from me, and even more so because my son will never know a safe and loving father. In fact, my son is growing up without a father at all. Now, I am well aware that him not having his father around was the right choice for me to make, but it's a choice I should never have had to make. And so, even now, sometimes that will make me angry. Doubly so whenever he tries to make contact.
So, having accepted that I am allowed to be angry, I also recognise that my anger is one of the things preventing me reaching out to him to try to bring him back into my son's life, or even from allowing him to manipulate me into allowing him back in. My anger reminds me that he is not safe, reminds me that I already gave him way more chances than he deserved and that not one of those chances worked out well for me. And when I remember those things, I am comfortable with my anger, I'm happy to nurture it - not give in to it, but allow it space in my life. And then I can move on to other things - whether it be doing something else or focussing my attention on another aspect of my life. Because I'm not consumed with fighting back the anger, it just retreats.
It took a lot of time, and a fair bit of practice for this to work, but for me it's been the best way to deal with it, in part because the act of accepting my anger has been a huge part of learning to accept me as I am, in a way I never learned to do as a child and was never allowed to do in my abusive relationships. And it stopped me doing that thing of "I don't even like me right now".