Woman In Abuse Relationship

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

With this short note, I want to share my thoughts, observations from practice and draw attention to the importance of prevention and self-care.

“We do not choose each other by chance …

We only meet those who already exist in our subconscious.

First, we draw a person in our imagination.

and only then we meet him in real life."

Sigmund Freud.

On the vastness of the world wide web there is a lot of information on how to recognize a psychopath, narcissist, sociopath, how to determine that you are in a destructive relationship, many films have been filmed about this, there are many books and blogs. There are also support groups for women, where they share their experience and literature, help each other in difficult moments with words, warmth, and participation. But this does not help to minimize the formation of such pairs. And for some reason I did not come across information about the risk group. What kind of women are at risk, and sometimes, paradoxical as it may sound, strive, somewhere in the depths of their souls feeling that their ship is entering dangerous waters, to connect their lives with a man, relations with whom will destroy it? With this short note, I want to share my thoughts, observations from practice and draw attention to the importance of prevention and self-care. After all, it is easier, cheaper and less painful to prevent a problem than to heal and then restore a wounded soul.

There are often women in my office who live in destructive and unhappy relationships with their men. How is it that love turns into a battle for expanding the personal sphere of influence and violation, conquest, seizure of boundaries and personal space from a partner, and a woman finds herself in the role of a victim of psychological or physical violence? How is it that the relationship has become a use? How is it that in the inner world of a woman, instead of self-respect, self-love, trust and care, their opposites appear? The woman discovers that her relationship with her man has changed her, and not for the better, her man has changed and not for the better. These changes are not sudden, they did not happen in one day, because in the relationship something remained out of sight for a long time. And the situation that these relationships have become possible at all is preceded by a rather long period of time, the starting point of which can be considered the date of birth. What is meant?

A destructive relationship is a meeting of two people with a distorted idea of boundaries, about their own and about others. The closer people get in these relations, the more the line between them is erased and they grow into each other, merge. It should be noted that some merging in any long-term relationship is normal, but it is normal when everyone has personal space, their own desires or not desires, as well as the right to refuse something without the threat of drowning in guilt. There is the experience of a man's development and the experience of a woman's development, how they were brought up, how they were cared for. What the parents told them about life, about love, about what she is and what options there are in her life. They tell about this not in words, but in their approach to life, attitude towards themselves, their example, how they themselves treated life, how they treated parenthood, what they taught by these relationships. Whether they taught the give-take balance, or just take, or just give.

If in the parental family intimidation, devaluation, threats of deprivation of love, manipulation of feelings were the norm, then this idea of the "norm" is carried into adulthood. It is in the parental family that the girl learns to endure, suppress anger, resentment and indignation, or express them in any kind of flagrant protest. With these skills, she goes into adulthood, meets “her soul mate” with whom she builds and reproduces communication familiar and dear from childhood. This is a traumatic developmental experience, and the trauma tends to repeat itself, unconsciously, of course, because no one will voluntarily seek out unsuccessful destructive relationships. Nevertheless, the psyche tends to repeat such relationships in an attempt to survive them. In the unconscious, everything is present, and the early trauma is experienced many times in different variations. Does it happen that the same rake is taught, taught, but the heart still believes in miracles? It happens. You probably know of cases when a woman from one destructive relationship fell into the second and third, the same, or worse? This is about the fact that the psyche seeks to reproduce the usual experience, the usual interaction, to reproduce the trauma, in order to get rid of it at last.

You can say a hundred times that a woman herself is responsible for her boundaries in a relationship, that she herself allowed herself to be treated this way and it will be true, but how does this help? In normal relationships, issues of violation of personal boundaries arise at the stage of acquaintance and grinding, and it is not so acute that you need to fight for them. The trouble is that women with already distorted ideas about their boundaries and about relationships, what is permissible in them and what is not, fall into destructive relationships. They do not know where their borders lie, they do not know their internal geography, but they guess where the gap lies. They know where the sore spot is and it seems that by meeting such a great partner of such a sparkling strong man - they hope to heal their wounds about these qualities. A woman seeks to be saturated with this strength, confidence, to fill her inner emptiness, but it turns out that it is these sore spots that are exploited to control and use a woman in order to heal herself for herself. Although at the beginning of a relationship everything is like a fairy tale - a woman is so elated that he is the only one in whose eyes she is reflected as beautiful, magnificent, it seems to her that her wounds have been healed. A woman loses her vigilance and misses signals of danger, or rather pushes them into the background, since a man in love does not care about reality.

Remember the movie? "We are abandoned for what we fell in love for." Tony fell in love with Giorgio for his magnificence, grandeur, theatricality, revelry, perhaps next to him and she felt like that, bathed in the light of his magnificence, and thereby tried to compensate, fill her inner insufficiency. Remember in the scene after the first sex, she opened up to him in her lack of confidence in herself as a woman, lack of confidence in her sexual attractiveness - she entered a relationship already wounded, where the first injection from her beloved came, which she chose not to notice.

Let me summarize. Each person has weaknesses and complexes. Someone knows about them and takes it as a fact. Someone works on themselves if something does not suit him. Or a person does not see in his shortcomings something pathological or something that needs to be ashamed and in every possible way to hide or deny. This is me about a healthy attitude towards myself, about a loyal understanding of my weaknesses and strengths and their adequate use in life, about accepting myself. When you are aware of your flaw or weakness and accept this in yourself, it makes you less vulnerable. Then there is no need to pretend, disguise, put on "make-up", highlighting the merits and hiding the flaws, hide and turn into the opposite, be afraid of exposure and defend themselves by attacking in response. And most importantly, you do not need to look in the outside world for someone who could strengthen these weak spots with himself, heal, someone with whom you can feel valuable, significant, confident, beautiful, desired, loved, sexy, intelligent, unique and further down the list. Such a person is always next to you - it is you, you just need to find him in yourself and grow! Believe me, he is looking forward to it!

Timely psychotherapy is the prevention of destructive relationships and significantly improves the quality of life!

Take care of yourself!

Yours Karine Korczaka.