The pit of relationship hell must be domestic violence as it corrodes both your emotional and physical strength. Your body hurts but so do your emotions and your heart. You feel violated physically and emotionally but fear, unworthiness and a glimmer of optimism battle for a place in your life. And this conflicting well of emotions is what immobilizes you? So what can you do to escape domestic violence? How do you find the courage to leave?
Be real! To find the courage to escape domestic violence you must take an honest look at your relationship and the emotions that it evokes.
a. Optimism. You have that nagging feeling that your partner will change and because they act extra nice after the violence you hang your confused emotions on this. But you have been here before and they have not changed. Why do you think that they will change now? What is your confidence based on? Your abusive partner's word? Has your abusive partner kept their word not to abuse you before? So why is today's promise from them any different? To get the courage to leave you must be honest with yourself and realize that your partner will not change and if you do not leave this domestic violence will kill you emotionally and maybe physically.
b. Fear. You are afraid that your abusive spouse will get so angry if you leave that they will become even more abusive than usual. They have trained you well with their violence so that you are now programmed to avoid making them angry. You will do anything not to make them angry. But again you have been here before; have all your efforts not to make them angry worked? Has all the walking on eggshells and fawning over them worked at stopping their violence toward you? Do you not realise that you cannot keep the peace with them as they are on the war path just waiting to pounce on you at the slightest hint of imagined wrong? Your fear of more abuse just keeps you in a position to get even more violence.
c. Isolated shame. When your spouse was first violent toward you, you felt incredible shame and so you hid this horrendous thing from your family and friends. And this was your first mistake because in a sick and perverted way it bound you to your abusive spouse as you now shared this incredibly horrible secret. You are ashamed that the person who is supposed to love you most in the world is raining such pain on you. You need to know that hiding shame does reduce it and it in fact magnifies it in your life and makes the prison that you built for yourself from it even stronger. To get the courage to escape from domestic violence you need to let someone you trust and who cares for you and who can lend you their support know what it is that you are facing in your marriage.
d. Unworthiness. An offshoot of domestic violence is a deep feeling of worthlessness. You feel like somehow you don't deserve to be treated better by your spouse. This is due to what your partner says when they abuse you as well as the shame you feel. To escape domestic violence you need to remember how you felt about yourself before the abuse started or to imagine how it would feel if you didn't have this cloud of violent abuse hanging over your life every single day of your life.
To escape domestic violence you must find the courage to leave your abusive spouse. To find this courage you must counter the lies and flawed attitudes that you currently have so that you can draw strength from the truth. You know the old saying 'the truth will set you free' well that is what facing reality in these 4 areas will do for you; set you free from the tyranny of domestic violence.
Rosy Anderson is a researcher in social economic issues and the way they affect decision making; and she enjoys writing and being in healthy, happy relationships. If however you have come out of domestic violence and your self-worth is low and you don't know how to rebuild your capacity to love yourself and others then I would strongly recommend these secrets to love and respect to help you heal and love yourself and others.
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