Post by TheBumble on Apr 12, 2016 1:34:53 GMT -5
I just recalled I had, at one time, kept a journal on Penzu and, after trying every email and password combo I could think of, it opened.
1) I was SHOCKED to see entries from 2013 that say exactly the same things I fret over today. Shocked, I tell you. Nothing new.......I have been insanely rehashing exactly the same thoughts for at least 3 years......that's embarrassing!! I have made NO progress at all in my thinking. All the writing I have done over the past 3 years -- ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. Jeezus!!
2) Below is a copy-and-paste of nuggets from around the web (EP and some other places) that I'd gathered in 2014 as inspiration and self-help. This is long, but maybe there's something in here that will help someone (maybe even ME, fuck yes!) Some stuff was written to women, some to men, but it's all gold, imho.
*******************************************************************************
What in the world is there to love here?? Read what I bolded from your post! Someone who does this to you is not a good person or worthy of your love. Why cant you leave, do you not work? What are you afraid of, being happy and having self worth? It will never get better until you stand up for yourself and change the behaviors that are enabling him to treat you like garbage. If you wont do that, then work on getting the courage to leave, otherwise welcome to the next 30-40 years of your "life".
__________________
Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.
...please consider your partners feelings in whatever you do. Life is too short to not be in love. Let it take your breath away.
You DON'T love him! This sounds like the BS you tell yourself to explain *why* you haven't left yet; why you've taken YEARS of this emotional abuse!
You don't LOVE him - you're afraid!
You don't LOVE him - you love the 'dream' of what your life could have been; what you thought it was GOING to be when you married him. But LIFE AIN'T A DREAM!
Bonding is a biological and emotional process that makes people more important to each other over time. Unlike love, trust, or attraction, bonding is not something that can be lost. It is cumulative and only gets greater, never smaller. Bonding grows with spending time together, living together, eating together, making love together, having children together, and being together during stress or difficulty. Bad times bond people as strongly as good times, perhaps more so.
Bonding is in part why it is harder to leave an abusive relationship the longer it continues. Bonding makes it hard to enforce boundaries, because it is much harder to keep away from people to whom we have bonded. In leaving a long relationship, it is not always useful to judge the correctness of the decision by how hard it is, because it will always be hard.
Strangely, growing up in an unsafe home makes later unsafe situations have more holding power.This has a biological basis beyond any cognitive learning. It is neither rational nor irrational. If survivors can come to see that part of the attraction is, while very unwanted, a natural process, they may be able to understand those feelings and manage the situation more intentionally.
Trauma bonding
Where one person exerts power or control over another, with the result that the other person feels intimidated or confused, harmed or diminished in some way, we can say that abuse has taken place. The abuse can be physical, verbal, psychological, financial or spiritual, and can be intentional or unintentional.
The term “Trauma Bond” (also known as Stockholm Syndrome and the Betrayal Bond), describes a deep bond which forms between a victim of abuse and their abuser. Victims of abuse often develop a strong sense of loyalty and compassion towards their abuser, despite the fact that the bond is detrimental to the victim. Such a bond seems quite bizarre and incomprehensible to an observer of the relationship, who can see quite clearly what is going on.
Why do people develop trauma bonds?
Survival
The way human beings respond to trauma has a biological basis, which is neither rational nor irrational. People who are overwhelmed with distressing emotions suffer from an overload of their system and shut down emotionally, feeling frozen or numb, in order to cope. They simply cannot take action, even if it would be more helpful for their longer term well-being to leave the dangerous or unhealthy situation. The immediate priority is to survive, whether that means protecting themselves physically, or remaining emotionally intact.
Internal consistency
People tend to seek consistency in their beliefs and perceptions.
When a person’s behaviour conflicts with your beliefs about what you think he or she is like, you might experience cognitive dissonance. Consider the following example. A woman begins a relationship with a man she is attracted to because of his apparently kind and caring nature. He then drops into conversation that he once caused grievous bodily harm to somebody in a pub who disagreed with him. The woman is likely to experience cognitive dissonance, because her initial impression of the man (as one whose values fit with her own) conflicts with what she has just heard. There are various ways in which she can reduce this dissonance: she can walk away from the relationship there and then, she can deny, minimise or distort what she has just heard, she can focus on the positives, or she can give him the benefit of the doubt: “Maybe I misheard him” or “There must have been a good reason why he did that” or “That was in the past. He’s a different person now” or “He’s the perfect partner otherwise”. The woman’s response will depend a lot on how she sees herself and others. If she sees herself as trusting, and others as basically trustworthy, she is likely to give him the benefit of the doubt.
This seems a healthy enough response. But trauma bonds become stronger over time, and strategies of denial and distortion severely undermine people’s ability to accurately evaluate the state of their relationship and impairs their ability to see or even look for a way out. Even when people do realise that their relationship is abusive, by that time they have invested a lot of time and energy and resources in it, making it all the more difficult to leave.
You may be caught in a trauma bond if:
You stay in relationships with people who use you or treat you badly
You cover up or make excuses for your partner’s anger, abuse or addictions
You continue to support someone who is financially irresponsible
You repeatedly invest energy in trying to get your partner to “see the light”
You don’t listen to trusted friends who are worried about your situation
Your partner expects you to isolate yourself from others and always behave as expected.
You and your partner have destructive arguments in which you hurt each other physically or verbally rather than try and resolve the issue
You have given up your sense of self to meet the needs of someone who is selfish and uses you
You are preoccupied with a previous partner who hurt or used you.
Leaving a trauma bonded relationship
In a healthy relationship, a stable internal object representation (feeling memory) of an important person makes separation manageable. While it is very easy to become attached to a very chaotic and inconsistent person, it is simply not possible to form a consistent internal object representation about them, so that when separated from them, the urge to make contact is usually intense.
During the separation, the survivor may find it difficult to relate to anyone, even family or old friends, except superficially. This creates a feeling of isolation and emptiness. At first, it seems as if only going back to the abuser can relieve these feelings. When out of the relationship if feels right to be in it, and when in the relationship it feels right to get out. Therapy can provide a safe and supportive relationship in which people can gain clarity and self-understanding and make necessary changes.
Why does trauma bonding occur?
Trauma bonding occurs when your safety, happiness, or security depends upon your abuser. It’s in your interest to keep your controlling abuser happy. The bond works for your abuser: it keeps you tethered to him. It also, at times, works for you: if you resist and challenge your abuser you are more likely to be injured. For many in abusive relationships, the bond is a strong one – and you will see it as essential to your physical and/ or emotional survival.
What you do when the trauma bond is at work
You make excuses for your abuser’s behavior – to yourself and others. He’s not mean, really: he’s just had a bad day and he really doesn’t like the short skirt that I’m wearing
You deny the abuse is happening. That doorknob hit you in the face again, right?
You feel there is no way out – you think that you can never leave him, and when you do get out, you go back to him
You worry how you will survive financially, or practically, on your own. After all, you’re not used to making decisions on your own – how will you ever manage without him?
You are isolated from friends and family, and believe that nobody would understand how you feel or be able to help you
You live in wait (or hope) that he will return to the good guy he once was. You know, the one that treated you like a princess? He promises sometimes but he never does. You carry on waiting and hoping
You feel that you’ve already invested so much time in the relationship, and made so many allowances for him, that payback on your investment must be coming. It isn’t
Your self-confidence is so low that you believe nobody else would ever want you. And anyway, he has complete control of you and your life, and would kill any man that even looked twice at you, yes?
You start to think like him and modify your behaviour accordingly: if I make sure his dinner is on the table when he gets home, he’ll be pleased and won’t abuse me. If I don’t talk to my friends, he won’t be insecure and he won’t abuse me. If we have a baby, he will know I’m not going to leave him and he won’t abuse me. It doesn’t work.
1) I was SHOCKED to see entries from 2013 that say exactly the same things I fret over today. Shocked, I tell you. Nothing new.......I have been insanely rehashing exactly the same thoughts for at least 3 years......that's embarrassing!! I have made NO progress at all in my thinking. All the writing I have done over the past 3 years -- ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. Jeezus!!
2) Below is a copy-and-paste of nuggets from around the web (EP and some other places) that I'd gathered in 2014 as inspiration and self-help. This is long, but maybe there's something in here that will help someone (maybe even ME, fuck yes!) Some stuff was written to women, some to men, but it's all gold, imho.
*******************************************************************************
What in the world is there to love here?? Read what I bolded from your post! Someone who does this to you is not a good person or worthy of your love. Why cant you leave, do you not work? What are you afraid of, being happy and having self worth? It will never get better until you stand up for yourself and change the behaviors that are enabling him to treat you like garbage. If you wont do that, then work on getting the courage to leave, otherwise welcome to the next 30-40 years of your "life".
__________________
Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.
...please consider your partners feelings in whatever you do. Life is too short to not be in love. Let it take your breath away.
You DON'T love him! This sounds like the BS you tell yourself to explain *why* you haven't left yet; why you've taken YEARS of this emotional abuse!
You don't LOVE him - you're afraid!
You don't LOVE him - you love the 'dream' of what your life could have been; what you thought it was GOING to be when you married him. But LIFE AIN'T A DREAM!
Bonding is a biological and emotional process that makes people more important to each other over time. Unlike love, trust, or attraction, bonding is not something that can be lost. It is cumulative and only gets greater, never smaller. Bonding grows with spending time together, living together, eating together, making love together, having children together, and being together during stress or difficulty. Bad times bond people as strongly as good times, perhaps more so.
Bonding is in part why it is harder to leave an abusive relationship the longer it continues. Bonding makes it hard to enforce boundaries, because it is much harder to keep away from people to whom we have bonded. In leaving a long relationship, it is not always useful to judge the correctness of the decision by how hard it is, because it will always be hard.
Strangely, growing up in an unsafe home makes later unsafe situations have more holding power.This has a biological basis beyond any cognitive learning. It is neither rational nor irrational. If survivors can come to see that part of the attraction is, while very unwanted, a natural process, they may be able to understand those feelings and manage the situation more intentionally.
Trauma bonding
Where one person exerts power or control over another, with the result that the other person feels intimidated or confused, harmed or diminished in some way, we can say that abuse has taken place. The abuse can be physical, verbal, psychological, financial or spiritual, and can be intentional or unintentional.
The term “Trauma Bond” (also known as Stockholm Syndrome and the Betrayal Bond), describes a deep bond which forms between a victim of abuse and their abuser. Victims of abuse often develop a strong sense of loyalty and compassion towards their abuser, despite the fact that the bond is detrimental to the victim. Such a bond seems quite bizarre and incomprehensible to an observer of the relationship, who can see quite clearly what is going on.
Why do people develop trauma bonds?
Survival
The way human beings respond to trauma has a biological basis, which is neither rational nor irrational. People who are overwhelmed with distressing emotions suffer from an overload of their system and shut down emotionally, feeling frozen or numb, in order to cope. They simply cannot take action, even if it would be more helpful for their longer term well-being to leave the dangerous or unhealthy situation. The immediate priority is to survive, whether that means protecting themselves physically, or remaining emotionally intact.
Internal consistency
People tend to seek consistency in their beliefs and perceptions.
When a person’s behaviour conflicts with your beliefs about what you think he or she is like, you might experience cognitive dissonance. Consider the following example. A woman begins a relationship with a man she is attracted to because of his apparently kind and caring nature. He then drops into conversation that he once caused grievous bodily harm to somebody in a pub who disagreed with him. The woman is likely to experience cognitive dissonance, because her initial impression of the man (as one whose values fit with her own) conflicts with what she has just heard. There are various ways in which she can reduce this dissonance: she can walk away from the relationship there and then, she can deny, minimise or distort what she has just heard, she can focus on the positives, or she can give him the benefit of the doubt: “Maybe I misheard him” or “There must have been a good reason why he did that” or “That was in the past. He’s a different person now” or “He’s the perfect partner otherwise”. The woman’s response will depend a lot on how she sees herself and others. If she sees herself as trusting, and others as basically trustworthy, she is likely to give him the benefit of the doubt.
This seems a healthy enough response. But trauma bonds become stronger over time, and strategies of denial and distortion severely undermine people’s ability to accurately evaluate the state of their relationship and impairs their ability to see or even look for a way out. Even when people do realise that their relationship is abusive, by that time they have invested a lot of time and energy and resources in it, making it all the more difficult to leave.
You may be caught in a trauma bond if:
You stay in relationships with people who use you or treat you badly
You cover up or make excuses for your partner’s anger, abuse or addictions
You continue to support someone who is financially irresponsible
You repeatedly invest energy in trying to get your partner to “see the light”
You don’t listen to trusted friends who are worried about your situation
Your partner expects you to isolate yourself from others and always behave as expected.
You and your partner have destructive arguments in which you hurt each other physically or verbally rather than try and resolve the issue
You have given up your sense of self to meet the needs of someone who is selfish and uses you
You are preoccupied with a previous partner who hurt or used you.
Leaving a trauma bonded relationship
In a healthy relationship, a stable internal object representation (feeling memory) of an important person makes separation manageable. While it is very easy to become attached to a very chaotic and inconsistent person, it is simply not possible to form a consistent internal object representation about them, so that when separated from them, the urge to make contact is usually intense.
During the separation, the survivor may find it difficult to relate to anyone, even family or old friends, except superficially. This creates a feeling of isolation and emptiness. At first, it seems as if only going back to the abuser can relieve these feelings. When out of the relationship if feels right to be in it, and when in the relationship it feels right to get out. Therapy can provide a safe and supportive relationship in which people can gain clarity and self-understanding and make necessary changes.
Why does trauma bonding occur?
Trauma bonding occurs when your safety, happiness, or security depends upon your abuser. It’s in your interest to keep your controlling abuser happy. The bond works for your abuser: it keeps you tethered to him. It also, at times, works for you: if you resist and challenge your abuser you are more likely to be injured. For many in abusive relationships, the bond is a strong one – and you will see it as essential to your physical and/ or emotional survival.
What you do when the trauma bond is at work
You make excuses for your abuser’s behavior – to yourself and others. He’s not mean, really: he’s just had a bad day and he really doesn’t like the short skirt that I’m wearing
You deny the abuse is happening. That doorknob hit you in the face again, right?
You feel there is no way out – you think that you can never leave him, and when you do get out, you go back to him
You worry how you will survive financially, or practically, on your own. After all, you’re not used to making decisions on your own – how will you ever manage without him?
You are isolated from friends and family, and believe that nobody would understand how you feel or be able to help you
You live in wait (or hope) that he will return to the good guy he once was. You know, the one that treated you like a princess? He promises sometimes but he never does. You carry on waiting and hoping
You feel that you’ve already invested so much time in the relationship, and made so many allowances for him, that payback on your investment must be coming. It isn’t
Your self-confidence is so low that you believe nobody else would ever want you. And anyway, he has complete control of you and your life, and would kill any man that even looked twice at you, yes?
You start to think like him and modify your behaviour accordingly: if I make sure his dinner is on the table when he gets home, he’ll be pleased and won’t abuse me. If I don’t talk to my friends, he won’t be insecure and he won’t abuse me. If we have a baby, he will know I’m not going to leave him and he won’t abuse me. It doesn’t work.
