Why Can’t I Just LEAVE?

Reasons You Might Stay

So many people beat themselves up over the question “Why can’t I just leave?” Do you want the easy answer? You aren’t ready to leave yet.

You

• haven’t been convinced that the abuse warrants you leaving, or
• you lack financial resources, or
• you’re in business with your abuser, or
• the kids are too small, or
• the kids are almost out of school, or
• the abuser needs you, or
• fill in your reason here.

Notice I said fill in your reason here. These are not excuses.

“The reasons you stay may sound like excuses to someone else, but don’t let anyone belittle your decision to stay. I really want to end that sentence with “to stay for now” but truth is that you may never leave. You could be 70 years old and wondering how your spouse is managing to exceed life expectancy, them being so miserable and nasty and all (lots of people are doing this right now).

“I want you to be okay with choosing to stay, because making decisions is empowering. Staying is a choice you can make.”

Why Leaving an Abusive Marriage Can Take So Long

Your reasons are only part of the answer. Abuse also changes how you see the relationship, and that makes leaving harder than it looks from the outside.

After Physical or Sexual Violence

Physical and sexual abuse are definable events (sexual coercion, rape, bruising, death). Unfortunately, in the throes of an abusive relationship, abuse victims dismiss physical and sexual abuse as mistakes on the part of the abuser or blame themselves and quickly try to make things right with the abuser.

The abuser plays into the victim’s (undeserved) guilt in different ways.

• The abuser may promise not to physically or sexually abuse their partner ever again. Those promises can accompany tears, admission of guilt, and excuses designed to make the victim feel sorry for the abuser.
• But sometimes, the abuser meets the victim’s desperate pleas for forgiveness with stony hatred, blame, and the attitude of “Yeah, that was stupid. You shouldn’t have acted that way.”
• And sometimes, the abuser denies the event ever happened.

People outside of the abusive marriage may read this and think, “What the hell? None of that makes a lick of sense!” and blame the victim for being so gullible.

If you are one of those people, understand this: physical and sexual violence doesn’t need months or years of verbal and emotional erosion first. It isn’t going to happen during the honeymoon period, before anything is wrong, but it doesn’t take nearly as long as people assume either. My husband held my face to a burner within the first six weeks of our marriage. However long the runway is, one incident, or several, doesn’t automatically break the spell of brainwashing. The tears and promises (or the stony denial, or the blame) usually do the opposite: they buy the victim’s continued loyalty and reset the clock.

There’s a reason it doesn’t happen on the first date, or in the earliest days of a honeymoon. Too soon, and the person has nothing invested yet, nothing keeping them from seeing it clearly and naming it—”this guy I’m dating raped me”—and walking away. An abuser needs some bond in place first, some hope already built, so the same act gets excused instead of named. That timing serves the abuser. It’s not a sign of how ready or aware the victim was.

Brainwashing Hinders Leaving

Brainwashing through verbal, mental, and emotional abuse is relatively easy to achieve and is no reflection on the intelligence of the abuse victim. Usually, verbal, mental, and emotional abuse is not so easy to tell apart from normal interaction, especially when the abuser shrouds the abuse by saying things like, “I’m only saying this because I love you.”

There is no magic formula that we can identify and say, “If this is said to you, if this is done to you, then you are being abused.” Abusers tailor their abuse to your unique personality and personal hang-ups. The key factor in deciding if you’re abused is how you feel and think after or during an attack. Of course, you must first be able to recognize an attack for what it is (no matter how sweetly your abuser says it).

Again, brainwashing makes it difficult to even think of leaving an abusive marriage because the victim often does not realize they are abused.

Symptoms of Abuse Make Leaving Harder

Another problem with leaving an abusive marriage is that the long-term symptoms of abuse cloud your emotions and thoughts. Verbal, mental, and emotional abuse causes victims to blind themselves to what others so easily see as manipulative abuse.

To make it worse, abuse causes victims to forget to pay attention to who they are. The victims of the unseen abuse dissociate themselves from their own thoughts and feelings. Instead, they place their focus on deciphering how the abuser is feeling and what the abuser may do next. Only by being in tune with the abuser can the victim more safely navigate through the volatile relationship.

Abuse victims usually do not realize how they feel or what they’re thinking because how they feel and think is not important. It’s what the abuser thinks and feels that is the primary motivator and activator in the relationship. When the victim loses touch with themself, then it becomes less likely the victim will consider leaving the abusive marriage. This happens because the focus never falls on how the partner treats the victim, only on how the victim can make life better for the abuser. The victim’s dreams fall to the side, and they live life for the abuser.

It can take a great shock or sudden realization to jolt an abuse victim from the spell of abuse.

Irresponsible Advice

It would be very irresponsible of me if I don’t say a few things at this point.

• I want you to end your abusive relationship. Life is too short and precious to spend it with a person who hurts you.
• If your abuser physically assaults you, I hope you leave right now. Verbal abuse escalates to physical assault and assault escalates to death. Additionally, you may not be the only one to die -your abuser could murder you and then your children and anyone else on the scene.

Point is that choosing to stay with an abuser will have very serious emotional and/or physical consequences to you. It is only a matter of time.

Leaving An Abusive Relationship Is Not Your Only Option

Honoring a person’s choice to stay in an abusive relationship is a relatively new concept to domestic violence social workers and other domestic abuse helpers. You might find helpers who support you no matter what you decide to do. On the other hand, you might find helpers who decide there’s nothing they can do for you if you do not leave the abuser. That hurts, I know, but just because they’re the experts doesn’t mean they always know the right thing to do.

Additionally, many of your closest friends and family members may distance themselves from you if you choose to stay. Often we tell ourselves that they’re tired of listening to us complain when we won’t do anything to change it. Remember though, the ones who love you need to keep themselves sane, too. If they’re in the battle with you, they may not be strong enough to pull you out if you change your mind and leave the relationship.

Don’t take it personally if people don’t support your decision to stay, and please don’t beat yourself up because you feel you can’t leave. Let’s just roll with this for a while and see what we can do for our mental wellbeing when we choose to stay.

Key Concepts to Accept About Your Abusive Relationship

You cannot make your abuser happy, therefore you cannot make them mad, either. You do not have magic powers that control your abuser’s words or actions and no combination of your words or behaviors will result in an end to the abuse.

Most everything you do and say will be “wrong”, and if you are right today, you’ll probably be wrong tomorrow. So you may as well do exactly as YOU think best at all times. Make your own decisions, act on your hunches. It doesn’t matter what you do, the abuse will continue.

You are in a relationship that thrives on your honest disclosures about yourself. However, unlike healthy intimate relationships, your significant other uses your deepest secrets against you. You cannot trust your abuser with your heart, so keep your mouth shut about it.

There will be moments of joy and pleasure in your abusive relationship. Go ahead and enjoy the sex, the compliment, the joke, etc. But leave the joy in the moment. Don’t assume that because s/he smiled a minute ago that the smile will be there when you look again. Humans need joy in their life, so grab all you can.

You need a safety plan. Period. Abusers are unpredictable and you never know when you’re going to have to get away from them. Thinking through a safety plan during moments of peace will help you to think more swiftly and clearly during moments of danger.

Keep people on the outside of your relationship close. Isolation is the abuser’s best friend, not yours. When you’re isolated from others, you lose the most valuable lifeline an abused person can have – ideas from people other than the abuser. You increase the effects of abuse by only hearing your abuser’s opinions, so stay connected to the world outside your home.

Educate yourself about domestic violence and abuse. Search words and phrases like verbal and emotional abuse, side effects of abuse, gaslighting, crazy-making and brainwashing. Learning a little bit each day about how your partner manipulates and controls you lessens their ability to do it.

Concepts to Accept About Yourself

You are human; a delightfully imperfect person who can do the very best you know how to do in this instant. Every instant.

You are lovable.

You deserve respect.

You can choose one thing today and another thing tomorrow.

You are powerful.

You can learn, grow and adapt.

You do not have to accept or absorb lies, even if the lie has a grain of truth to it.

You hold God’s hand, even when you cannot feel it, but sometimes you must do something differently so your higher power can help you in a different way.

You decide who stays in your life.