These steps will help you clear your thinking after weeks or even years of abuse.
Over time, you’ve likely developed some side-effects of abuse that weaken your ability to exercise personal choice and freedom. The beauty of these first steps is that they create and support confidence and clarity – two characteristics that will help you to say goodbye to abuse and/or your abuser once and for all.
1. Accept that you cannot control your abuser or when he abuses.
This idea creates confusion in the minds of many abuse victims. I mean, don’t we spend every waking moment trying to soothe him or do what he expects to avoid abuse? Don’t we sometimes “hurry things along” so he’ll explode and we can get to the honeymoon period?
Doing those things gives us the idea that we have control over a portion of our abuse. Fighting fire with fire (despite your good intentions) does not solve the problem. It only escalates or increases the frequency of the abusive cycle. We need to think a bit higher. Instead of attempting to control if and when he abuses, we could control how we react when he does abuse.
Another rotten thing about controlling his behavior is that we’re still wasting the majority of our time thinking about him instead of finding our solution to end the abuse.
Additionally, I challenge you to pay attention a little more closely. You’ll soon realize that you can spend eight hours or zero hours on abuse prevention, but the fact remains: if he feels a need to abuse you, he will. No matter what you’ve done to prevent it. You may as well let go of your attempts to control and move on to better activities.
2. Reach out to friends, family outside your home, and resources in the community.
You must do this to break his hold on you! You’re fighting a powerful abusive enemy, and he wants to keep you fighting his game. You’ll need all the help you can get. Your silence is his most powerful ally – stop giving him the advantage.
- Call national or state hotlines.
- Break Your Silence by sharing your story on this site (anonymously is fine).
- For goodness sakes, call a family member or friend and talk to them!
- Visit a domestic violence support group (call your local department of social services).
- Join an online message board with other abuse victims and survivors.
- Connect with others like you on my Facebook page.
3. Educate yourself about all types of abuse and control methods.
Recognizing abusive behavior and putting a name to his control methods will help you to see your situation and your abuser in a new light. Read everything you can on the subjects of abuse and controlling people. Verbal abuse is a great starting point because it underlies every other type of abuse. Read about “logical fallacies” online to see not only how our mind tricks us, but also how abusive people use inaccurate logic to corrupt and control us. Educate yourself on brainwashing to see how your abuser warped your heart and mind to believe they were necessary.
Remember that your current friends and family, due to cultural outlooks, may be horrible helpers! Some people still believe it is okay to “smack a woman every now and then to keep her in line.” If you find this to be your situation, don’t sabotage your recovery or strength by listening to more nonsense. Call hotlines or join online groups instead.
4. Develop self-reliance through detachment and personal boundaries.
Writing my own boundaries gave me a sense of personal strength and responsibility to myself to end the abuse I once so willingly accepted. I stopped seeing myself as a victim and started seeing myself as an agent of change, both for myself and my relationship.
When I began enforcing my boundaries, the abuse increased. My abuser was like a little child being denied his comfort blanket. He didn’t take to my new reactions well. He lashed out physically, and I left him.
As much as I didn’t want to leave, I will not go back to that relationship ever again. The outcome for your relationship may be different. Some women, after changing their reactions to abuse and undergoing counseling with and without their husband, find saving the relationship possible.
5. Design a safety plan.
This is a must whether you think you’ll leave the abuser or plan to stay with him. Your safety plan will give you the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can leave when or if you must.
My husband’s abuse was always very subtle, but over time, it exacted a horrible toll on my inner psyche.
He’s a sex addict, a public voyeur, but he would always practice his illness with me in tow. He was careful never to do it when we were with anyone he was trying to impress. I always knew if he valued certain friends because he would chose not to stare at very young girls in their presence. I was never given that courtesy.
When I say stare, it was a hideous, objectifying, and aggressive stare that lasted as long as the poor girl was in our presence. He made sure that she was always about 20 feet away from us. He seemed to be raping her with his eyes. Some girls gave me a look that said, “curb your dog!” That he did this horrible behavior, as well as other sexually objectifying behaviors, in front of me, is critical information.
Other voyeurs are very careful to keep their activities secret,but he wanted to hurt me.
I always pretended that I didn’t see it, but I would feel like I had died when it happened. He would also flirt with my very best girlfriends if no young girl was available for him or if he was with people he cared to hide his addiction from. Either way, I was “getting it” from him.
He would deny me sex, then masturbate in our bed, night after night after night…once again, denying me attention, affection, and pleasure.
He would criticize me, give me a look of constant irritation, and otherwise remain distant from me and our son most of the time. I took it because it was the way my father treated my mother. She never rebelled but always took it until she filed for divorce.
My greatest fear now is that he seems to want to change, but there is still that secret behavior, now even more subtle than before, that allows him to get in his digs. I have an inborn fear of him that surfaces with my insomnia and other health problems.
He was totally addicted to pornography until I put parental controls on the TV, took away the laptop, and installed eblaster on our main computer, which remains in our bedroom. He was particularly addicted to nighttime sex sites that featured college girls (we live in a college town). He also visited many, many raunchy hook up sites.
I’ve been tested for STDs (I’m clean) and he submitted to a lie detector test that determined he had never had an affair when we were actually married. He’s a voyeur, so he doesn’t want real sex. That I knew.
My greatest fear is that he is a master at flying under the radar, even the radar of trained therapists. The sneakiness and the subtle nature of his abuse is actually the worst part. His mother used to beat him mercilessly, so he is basically afraid of women. He’s especially afraid of their ability to reject him and to get angry with him, which explains his subtle behavior.
He wants to hurt, but he’s petrified that we will strike back. Subtle hurts are difficult to prove, but my gut senses immediately when he is trying to hurt me. If I can transform into a person who does not get jealous, does not get angry, but stays firm and protects her boundaries, I’m not sure how he will respond, but that is who I must become. I must become strong and defend myself.
I know deep, deep inside that he needs a person who will take the abuse and not ask for the things most wives require as basic aspects of marriage, like love and respect. I look back to our first year together. He spent the entire time stringing me along, sneaking out with other women, all the while maintaining a secret sexual relationship with me. Our dates were always during the day and out of town so no one would think that we were a couple. This left his evenings free to prowl.
Why I didn’t realize that sooner is part of my illness. I had friends who spent over an hour trying to talk me out of any relationship with him, but I insisted that only I could save him. I’m this sounds very familiar to this list. Subtle abuse is difficult to prove but my gut knows it when I see it.
THIS IS TO FINISH FROM LAST REPLY ACCIDENTLY SENT
Of course, my marriage was still on the rocks. Well to make a very long story short he told me he wants me out of his house and does not want a woman in his life, so I started to make arrangements to move out and now he is mad that I have found a new place to live and have started a new social life. He threatens me, while it is perfectly okay for him to go out to bars every single day and night. He continues to talk very bad about me at his bar to his friends, to the point I feel like a social outcast. I know this awful, I am just waiting for my next check to get out of position. I feel imprisoned with a dictator. He continues to hit me up for sex also.