The cycle of love and violence from an abusive spouse can be such a mind-boggling emotional roller coaster to deal with. Sometimes, it’s hard to find out which one is real anymore: the overly romantic words of affection, or the passive-aggressive behavior that easily escalate to life-threatening acts of violence?
Can someone who loves you really hurt you?
If your answer is “yes” then think about this. No one who loves you will intentionally hurt you, so it’s either your partner hurts you even if they don’t mean it and they are just incapable of protecting you even from themselves, or they just don’t love you anymore. Either way, it’s not a good place in a relationship to be.
Where does the abuse come from?
It’s important to get to the root of the abuse if you want to deal with an abusive spouse or partner. After all, the over-the-top rage and aggression is not normal. Most often, there’s something that screws up with your partner, causing them to get out of control. It could be drugs, alcohol, substance abuse or addiction, or even mental illness.
And you know what–love isn’t going to fix this. Your violent spouse may have already figured out how easy it is for them to keep you hanging around despite the physical, verbal, and emotional abuse you’ve been getting. There will even be times when they would blame you for their own behavior. The blame game would even go on for so long for so many times that you already believe that it’s your fault.
Furthermore, you may simply overlook everything out of, of course, love. Yet, the more you overlook and tolerate this, the worse it becomes.
The same goes with addiction. The more you tolerate the substance abuse, the worse it becomes as you enable your spouse to continue using. And if your spouse is using drugs or alcohol and is abusing you, then it’s twice the trouble for you.
Here’s what psychologists say about this. If you don’t separate yourself, such as leave them, sooner, here’s what you can do.
Phase 1: He’s angry. You’re strong.
So, just like always, a violent episode happens. You or a neighbor calls the police. Your partner gets angry and indignant (even in denial) about what happens. Still, you stand your ground.
Phase 2: Critical phase.
They will manipulate you to ease up and forgive them. They will do and say anything to get your sympathy and take them back once again, as you did before. They will push all those buttons they know so well to get what they want, and not because they care about you or your feelings, but because they want to get bailed out of the sticky situation.
They will minimize the abuse to try to prove you wrong, and probably because they’re afraid of the legal repercussions of their actions.
However, once you give in to them, the abuse would still definitely come, sooner or later.
Phase 3: What you can do
This revelation can be so heartbreaking for you, but you have to see beyond all the drama. Although you love your partner, the best act of love you can do for them right now is to let them deal with the consequences of their behavior in a place where they won’t be able to do any further harm to the people close to them. While this can take a lot of courage and conviction to pull off, it will be worth it.
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