Whether Victim or Willing Participant, You Are An Adult

Recently some anonymous people left comments about a woman they feel is being battered in an abusive relationship. They wrote in their comments that this woman came to them for help, got help, but at the urging and insistence of her family and friends went back to the man abusing her. I deleted these comments. I don't have a problem with the gist of the comments, what I had a problem with was the use of this woman's name (and those of her alleged abuser and family members) without her permission. This woman is an adult and as an adult, she is free to make whatever decisions she chooses to make. She chose to go back. She is a willing participant in my eyes. I don't know why she has chosen this for herself, and I am sure many others see her as a helpless victim. I don't, and I won't because such a perception when I was in this situation did not help me in any way, it just reinforced the chosen helplessness I'd decided to wallow in.

I am truly grieved that this woman decided to reject the help offered to her and return to the abusive man, but that does not make her helpless. It makes her stuck in crisis mode. She is a full-grown adult and as such I'm going to respect her adult rights. Unless she wants her name on my website, it's not going to be on here. Period.

This blog entry written by Trula Breckenridge. Thanks for visiting Beyond Battered!

I Remember Isolation

A huge sign that you are in an abusive relationship is that the person abusing you tries to isolate you. This is usually before any physical violence has started, but not always. In my case it was before he started hitting me. Why didn't I see this as a sign or at the very least, why didn't I think this was crazy or odd for him to twig out whenever I wanted to spend time with my family and friends? Hmmmmmm...I remember thinking that he must really love me to want to spend so much time with me. Before he got physically violent and just flat-out forbade me from seeing my family and friends, he would try to convince me from seeing or talking to them by putting them down and/or telling me that they didn't really like me or care about me. I remember thinking that he must really care about me to be so watchful and concerned with how other people viewed me and treated me. In some cases he wasn't far off or even being irrational; one of my friends at the time had 'stolen' two boyfriends from me before and some members of my family did disrespect me and talk bad about me. My parents had not done a good job at keeping me safe while growing up. But rather than encourage me to develop healthy relationships with any of these people or develop decent personal boundaries for myself, he amplified the sense of paranoia and personal shame I felt about myself to suit his own ends of making me a possession.

The isolation intensified after he got physically violent. Then the violence intensified the more and more isolated from other people I got. If he could not or would not go anywhere with me, I wasn't allowed to go. At the end the only place I was allowed to go by myself was to my part-time job, and that was only because he took my pay so it was like free money for him. One time my mother was in the hospital and he refused to let me go by myself. First he didn't believe she was really in the hospital, then he didn't believe I would go to the hospital; I'd sneak off somewhere else to be with some other man. Then he believed if I did go I would start talking to some man at the hospital. He had a great fear of me talking to men, even a doctor in a hospital about my mother's condition. Because he saw me as a thing he owned, because he could do whatever he wanted to me without any repercussions, because he saw I had no control at all in my 'relationship' with him, he felt I had no control of myself period, with anybody. He would say that often; that any man could come up to me and say anything and I'd go off and have sex with them. He had no trust or belief in me whatsoever and would say the most terrible things about me, over and over.

I really think the job I had at the time helped save my sanity, because it was the only place I had to go where he could not come in and run me down. I would go to work and pretend like I had a normal life. I could talk to other people who didn't seem to think I was this ugly, disgusting, horrible, nasty, slutty creature. This animal who deserved to be spit on and beaten and locked away. Then I'd go home to him and hear this and worse, for hours sometimes.

If you are going through this you know exactly what I mean...probably nothing I can say will help you see that what he says is not true. You will have to break free of the isolation you have allowed someone else to put you in. You can set yourself free. I did, and have not looked back.

Subscribe to Beyond Battered by Email