Comments on “The Mystery of Loving an Abuser”
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154 Responses to “The Mystery of Loving an Abuser”
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Josh150
Dear Dr. Carver,
My friend, a stockholm syndrome survivor, has taken a very positive turn: She is going to contest her divorce from a savagely abusive husband and her therapist is going to write a statement to support her case of stickholm syndrome as a cause for contesting their divorce. Something seemingly miraculous has begun to happen for this one victim; only God knows how far she will go in exposing her abuser and fighting him for custody of the children, financial compensation, etc., but it is evident she has had a major internal change and is now revealing the truth of her abuse to friends and family. I want to see her victorious, of course, and as healthy as she can be, and well-armed with all the support she can gather against a very shrewd and ruthless abuser, and so I ask you: Are there any S.S. specialists in the New York area who could help her with “de-programing” and also aid her in her case of exposing her abuser and contesting his absolutely crimnal divorce agreement?
Also: Are there women’s support groups (battered and sexually abused women’s support groups…again, in the N.Y. area)which you know of that have successfully testified on behalf of wives in divorce cases?
Thank you so much for having this post. You have helped so many people to understand the unexplainable. God bless you. And thanks for any and all advice and guidance.
Josh -
Wendy149
To Andrew:
Don’t worry about how you expressed yourself in your posts - your story came through loud and clear. I know it seems very personal and unique, but it is also very typical. It sounds as if you have really “seen through her” now, and although your instincts tell you to try to help her, your knowledge of the situation tells you you cannot. Very frustrating and sad, but lots of people go through this. Hope you have continued to separate from her, and that you are doing OK.
To Nicky:
How are things going? Have you escaped? Hope you are managing OK. I loved the concept you mentioned of “escalation of commitment”. In my situation, I realized this was happening but I didn’t have a term for it. Having invested as much as I had in a friendship I believed in, the worse it got the harder I tried! And the better I became at sidestepping his landmines. In the end, to justify his anger, he simply had to make up stories about me and accuse me with those. That’s what it took to make me finally see the light - that I could not maintain this relationship, and that his behaciour had nothing to do with my actions. Again, common themes.
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148
Hi All,
For those of you in the south Florida area of the United States, I’ll be presenting a workshop on “How to Identify, Avoid, or Detach from Manipulators, Controllers, and Abusers” on May 20th in West Palm Beach, Florida. The workshop will be held at the Palm Beach County Convention Center and is sponsored by Loserrx.com. Additional information and registration is available on the Loserrx.com website. I want to give special thanks to Dr. Greg Mulhauser of Counselling Resources for his support of this workshop. Thanks… Dr. Carver
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147
To MiaFran: Congrats on returning to a healthy life! You’ve shown the value of making an “Exit Plan” as I describe in my articles. As you mention, the eventual escape is the result of a combination of positive things - our faith, our supportive and caring others, new information available to us, and a change in our attitude. You’ll find that your family and friends were waiting patiently for you to return, actually fearful that you would never escape and be lost forever in relationship hell.
Dr. Mulhauser and I are happy to have contributed to your escape and your new, healthy life. Best wishes and welcome to a good nights sleep. Dr. Carver
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MiaFran146
I left comments last July on the Are You Dating a Loser blog. Since then, steps were taken to exit from the psychologically abusive relationship I was in, and wow.
The first thing I noticed is that I can sleep at night.
I can study for school without feeling guilty about being in school.
I get up, rested, and go to either school, or work.Before I left, I looked for people who God put in my path to guide me.
Some knew and some didn’t know, it wasn’t important for everyone to know what was happening.
All the help I could imagine, appeared. There was good counsel from my counselor, student to keep my mind on my least favorite subject, math, so I could pass with a smile on my face,Thank you and I hope we meet again! Professor who said she understood and was encouraging to me, relatives, all who helped keep my head above water.
Every one of these people cares and is respectful toward me, unlike my husband, soon to be X.And yes, I am very disappointed. When I got married, I didn’t sign up for WORSE. I signed up for”To Love and to Cherish from this day forward, to death do us part.” Hmmm. I made an OK hood ornament for him, but I had no partner. Just a manipulator.
Ahhh. Freeeeeeeeedommmmmmmmm.
I did have one PANG once, after I left and filed for divorce.
It was that, “Gee, I wonder if he’ll be ok without me…..” thing.I made a lousy “Martyr”. For me the need to be teary-eyed got boring and stupid, kind of like the other woman he was with.
I thought, how pitiful that I can’t think for myself. Who the hell does he think he is? God?Yeah well, anyway, that repugnant Baggage Handling job? It’s up for grabs. Any Takers? That other woman may yet be interested. They can be teary-eyed together, comfy and cozy.
As for me, I have the need to continue healing. I appreciate this website very much. Very helpful stuff.
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Nicky145
Dr Carver
Thankyou, I have just read your articles on identifying a loser & stockholm syndrome. I have been with my partner for seven years and I believe I have this syndrome and the man I am with has seventeen of the twenty characteristics of a loser. I am working on my exit plan again! I am hoping this time will be successful and I will finally be free. This hope would not be possible without the love and encouragement of my family, the abuse is never mentioned anymore nor are insistences that I should leave. They simply let me know that I am much loved, that they are proud of me and there is a spare room with my name on it. Without this support an exit plan would not be possible, so I consider myself a very fortunate woman.
Oddly enough my partner & I were friends for a year before becoming romantically involved and I believed him to be the sweetest man I’d ever met. Everyone loved & respected him, there were no signs. Everyone still loves & respects him, with the exception of my family, although they treat him in a friendly and respectful manner. He is the operations manager for a successful civil engineering company and is held in high regard. Friends find it extremely hard to believe he could be so violent so encourage us to make up, ‘you’re such a great couple’, ‘we love you guys’ ‘you seem so right together’.
It has been nearly 10 months since the last violent attack in which I really believed I would die. He strangled me three times whilst bashing my head against the wall, whilst strangling me the second time my eyes started bulging out of their sockets, he told me he knew he would go to gaol for this but he didn’t care, I then blacked out. Interestingly I didn’t fight back, my arms were by my side the whole time, like I was surrendering to my fate. When I came to, my whole body was jerking and twitching on the floor and he was standing with his back to me playing with his video camera. I stood up shaking with adrenalin, fear and idignation and asked him stridently how he felt, if he felt like a big man now, he strangled me again, this time I carfully positioned myself and kneed him in the groin, he then backed off and it was all over. I then went and had a cigarete. When I came back I helped him up off the floor where he lay crying amongst the debris of a broken chair, broken glass and damaged computer, which he destroyed before he turned on me, and put him to bed. My family do not know of this incident.
Over the next six months I became a master of control and manipulation, ( I had a good teacher, I knew his every move)I felt my life depended on it, whilst I planned my escape. Unfortunately this resulted in severe depression, I felt I had lost myself that I had become someone I no longer respected, this coupled with the high level of anxiety involved in controling another persons actions, I burned out and lost my courage.
I have since abandoned the previously stated survival tactics of manipulation and control and am no longer depressed. I also no longer take his insults, put-downs and punishments personally. My new weapons are courage and a clear mind and the love and encouragement of my family is my armour. I am alive and I am not afraid and one day I will be free.
I have tried to leave three times in the last ten months (eight times in seven years). On my second attempt I managed to get as far as one days drive of a six day journey away( my family live five and a half thousand kilometers away). I always thought it was love or desperation or the lack of finances or options which kept me coming back but I have recently discovered the concept of ‘escalation of commitment’ referring to business where managers throw more and more resources into a strategy that is inefficient & ineffective because they are unwilling to accept that they made a wrong decision. It seems as your article suggests that this is the case. This is very encouraging, ‘fore-warned is fore-armed’. I can simply acknowledge that it was the wrong decision and be a responsibe manager of my life and refuse to invest any further in a relationship or person where there is no ‘real’ hope of return. This is the new mantra, like wearing garlic to keep away vampires, I will keep this in my heart & mind and hopefully when the time comes for him to play on my heart & hope strings and urges me to give it one more try, that he finaly ‘gets it’, that we’ve come so far and invested too much to give up now, I will remember that the evidence clearly suggests that it would be wiser to invest elsewhere and more wisely ( like family, friends, not his, education and a life)and never throw good love after bad again.
So it seems there is a return for all this investment but it comes only upon leaving. The gaining of wisdom is not such a bad return after all. Wish me luck.
Thankyou again. Here’s to freedom, cheers.PS perhaps you could make this site accessable under the domestic violence search also. I only found this site because I googled stockholm syndrome. Perhaps more people could be helped and sooner if it was more accessable. This is the only online information I have found to be helpful in my situation.
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Andrew144
I reared my comment again and it is a jumbled mess of a composition. :)
Just one funny bit for those still suffering:Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen
:) -
Andrew143
ps. I am not much of a typist really as you can see and not a native speaker. I did not reread what I have written. I can advise to all victims that the best help they can get is from their families and humour, at least those were the factors that have helped me to finish the matter I think. My personal motto is in the matter is.
WHAT DOES NOT KILL YOU … MAKES YOU STRONGER. -
Andrew142
Dear Dr Carver
I have been a victim of female abuser for a long while. Just lately I have recognized this and I hope, no I am certain I have ended the matter permanently. Well I hope I have ended it though I feel that by trying to find explanation to the things that have happened I might still get under her influence, but this feeling is confronted by my reason which tells me i should get behind this phenomenon. I have just read few of comments and the strange thing is that i have known about Stockholm syndrome did even a bit of superficial research about it on the internet. What would interest me is the person of the abuser. Why has she become well… those people who try to find cure and healing will know how to name them… (this is a public forum after all… sometimes it is hard to say that monster is a good word to describe them.
Would it be possible to be in a multiple abusive situation, meaning that one person controlls and abuses another who in her turn also abuses another (who happened to be me in this case). I am wondering if this is the result of me trying to shift the blame from my abuser to the one on top of the … so to say “food chain”. The thing that scared me almost silly that by trying to somehow cope with the situation i have tried to copy my “abused abuser”, my girlfriend. I started having fantasies about her being abused by the top man, and i feel that by doing this i have very much deepened my I have dependence of her. Finally I managed to escape and tear myself away from her influence (at least i am now quite sure i have escaped)by confronting the man on the food chain… who is an older man about (my exgirlfriend and me are both very much younger). The impulse that drove me to the confrontation with him was mostly the combination of jelousy fear of what i might find out about my ex and finally i wanted somehow protect her from her “tormentor”. Finally the whole confrontation ended in civilised conversation with him, frankly in the end i almost felt compassion for the man who described himself as a person who can not make my girlfriend understand that it is over between them, and he is also so to say a victim of the situation. He also showed concern for her just as I did though in a more reserved way, and he was and still is I think controlled and blackmailed by my ex. He is married by the way and does not want to upset the peace of his home. He said or rather hinted that when my ex-girlfriend so to say admitted her love and affection towards him, he was tempted and agreed to start a liason, thinking my ex would sort of grow out of this passion. I was somehow concerned that something was wrong with my ex, because she sort of left hints that have led me to this. I interpreted this as a sort of cry for help, by which I know now that she only wanted to strengthen the bond between us or more exactly to be able to influence me a lot more. I have to admit that i think her a very intelligent person… or at least a very cleverly manipulative one.
Dr Carver please after reading this short description of the case, which is not a full account since I have left out a lot, tell me if there is a slight possibility that my ex could have been a victim of some assault or some kind of trauma or if she is also a victim who tries to cope with the situation just as tried to do.
I now see thru her quite well and know her also very well and i see how confused she is that i am not reacting to my usual behavioural pattern that she knows and knows how to use to her own intentions.
I have come to the conclusion that by resisting I either make her reaize how twisted and well let me admit in some way evil she has become or she would block me out of her life as she does in situations when she is not in control. I am relieved that I have freed myself of her, I somehow pitty her and would like to try to help her, but I know it is not really possible for me.
To finish in a way I regard my entry not only as a question but - as the result of self analysis - as an answer that I hope I have found. -
Kira141
I’ve read your artical and other like it on a few seperate occasions. the reaction I have to them is always kind of the same, but I’ve never tried to post any questions to the authors before. See, I don’t want to give a faulty portrayl because I’m emotionally worked up, but I think I need help. I know I need some kind of answer. I think I am in a mutually abusive relationship. I don’t know when or where things started, or how, or if it was all just accidental. I met my husband when I was 15, he was 19, we dated for awhile, secretly, until my grandparents who I was living with at the time found out and told us we were never to see one another again. I never dated again until my husband and I met again several months after I moved out of my grandparents home at 18. I had a decent job for a kid ust starting out with no college and no parental support, and a nice little nest egg of eight hundred dollars. Enough to have moved into my own place, I was living with a friend who’s mother was charging me 200 dollars a month to live there, a very nice deal, even for a tiny room in a full and busy house. Then my husband came for a visit to see the older sister of my friend with whom he’d been friends for a long time. Three months later we decided to move in together to save money since we had lived in seperate towns and were seeing eachother constantly and couldn’t aford the gas money. A year later we got married and I was 5 months pregnant. I was pretty much isolated from my family due to gas concerns and because I was not particularly close to my family as it was. I was also no longer working because I had been laid off and my husband told me it was fine and he liked me being home. I had actually gone back to work for a while but the pregnancy forced me to quit because I could not stand up for more than a few minutes without nearly fainting. We lost that child and six months later got pregnant again hoping for a successful pregnancy this time. I don’t know what I was thinking, I’d never liked children, but the romanticism and adorable little girls I saw every day at my job seemed to have sabatoged my good sense. The second pregnancy was sucessful and I hated being a mother. My husband worked all the time and would never watch our son for more than an hour so I could nap, even on weekends. He’d almost never change a diaper, and house chores? I’d never done them before really, but now I was exclusively responsible for them. I think both of us were far too young to consider having kids. I considered giving our son up for adoption, not wanting to give him to my own family members and hoping to find a home for him that would take him in and adore him and never pass him around like I was a kid, and hoping to avoid letting my hormones and building frustration allow me to cause him harm emotionally or physically. My husband talked me into letting his mother, who is agressive, loud, very mean verbally and who I hate and who hates me, take him for a few weeks and said that after a few weeks I’d want him back. I didn’t. My husband never explained anything to his mother, never. He didn’t tell her what was going on, why she was watching him or for how long. She had no idea that my only experiance with babies was one or two bottles and diaper changes. She wouldn’t really even talk to me, or rather, she wouldn’t listen. She’d talk a lot, about how horrid I was, what I was doing wrong, what to do, and not about just my son, but the entire time I’ve known her about -everything-. The way I sweep, the way I wash dishes, the fact that I’m a bad housekeeper and that I need to be doing that and on and on and on.
My husband was raised in a house hold with a very dominant woman who, though she works, is also very particular about upkeep on her house. His family bassically felt that a woman should be “Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen”. While my husband says that he doesn’t feel that way, he also refuses to do any housework himself. For three years I was stuck in a house isolated from eveyone outside of his family because we had no money for gas. We couldn’t afford for me to go get a job because we were too far away from the jobs for me to look, much less actually get there for the first week or two before I would get my first check. For three years I begged him to get us moved. I didn’t want to leave him, I love him, Leaving him hadn’t even occoured to me. Then one day we realized we had access to free wireless internet in our appartment. I began making online friends who told me that I was in a bad situation. I realized I really was. I began to reassess things an finally I realized that I could not spend the rest of my life living like that. So finally I told my husband, “look, we have to get moved to somewhere where I’m not trapped like a rat, to where I can go back to school and get an education and a better job so that we don’t have to live in poverty anymore, or I am going to find a way to do it myself, by myself.” Nothing changed until he lost his job a few months later, partly because our fights and whatnot were making him late to work. My husband has never hit me, he has pressured me into doing things I didn’t want to, but I retaliate when he makes me upset by biting, poking, pinching and scratching, not hard, just enough to make him notice because he doesn’t notice my “No”s or get my “That really upsets me”s, or my “Let go”s. But maybe I’m the abusive one blaming him for my own messed up self. He never defended me to his mother till we moved, and I’ve never actually witnessed him doing so. He reacts badly to the idea of me leaving him. He’ll scream wordlessly like a wounded beast, then he’ll put his head in his hands and start crying soundlessly, he’ll make me feel like a monster for considering it. I’m convinced by things he’s said and how he’s reacted that he’ll break down, go into a massive depression and his life will be bassically over. He’s told me that I’m the only woman he’s ever loved or ever will love. He’s lied to me and others about the strangest things for the oddest reasons. He’s convinced me that I will never find someone to replace him because I’m too selective. His brother’s are both violent destructive criminals, and while my husband has no record some of the things he’s told me he’s thought up to do to someone who really pissed him off make me worry abuot what he might do if I left, not perhaps to me, but to others I encounter in the future. I wonder here if I am simply paranoid.
We have moved to a town with a community college where he got a job after he was fired. I’m going to school now, but I still feel like this might not be the reliationship for me. He says he’s changed, and that he is changing, but he hasn’t much. But maybe I’m too demanding. He has nerve damage, sleep apnea and works a very physical job. So maybe I’m expecting too much to want his affection, to want to have time where we talk and reconnect, to have a little help with the house chores, like, I dunno, him to take out the trash once in a blue moon, or wash a few dishes? Maybe I’m the one being abusive, maybe we both are. I’m so confused and lost and I don’t know what to do. I love him. I don’t want to leave him and hurt him, or be alone, but I want to follow my dreams freely, I want to have room to grow, to maybe find someone who has more in common with me, someone who can understand my passions, not just say they want to help me reach them. Someone who was raised in a way that made them turn out as honest and inquisitive as I am. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’re both just growing up and I need to give things more time. Please, I desperately need some direction.
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