Recovering From the Trauma of Domestic Violence

The Main Contents

The Self-Help Information in the Article

Part One
The Normal Emotional Reactions People Have After Being Abused

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.
--Roderick Thorp, (Rainbow Drive)

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
--Oliver W. Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858

We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic.
--Cullen Hightower

A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
--Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942

Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin. --Grace Hansen

Jenny thinks:

Dawn says she's been a lot more jumpy than she used to be, and she gets upset when she sees violence on the television. But then, I bet a lot of people do that, even if they haven't experienced violence themselves! But I think she gets more upset for having suffered it. I bet all the things she's feeling and things that have happened to her and things she's experienced are common to a lot of people. It would be nice to think things could improve for them all. She said her yucky old husband David accused her of being stupid and insane, telling her it's silly to get upset about violence that isn't real, and laughing at her because she gets startled so easily, saying she's a "mental case". I know she's worried about whether she really is going mad. But this self-help book I've been reading says it's perfectly normal for people to have the problems she's having, and it's reasonable after what's happened. I'll have to tell her.

The Symptoms of Distress it's Common for Women to Suffer After Having Been Abused

Yes, this book says people don't have to worry that they're abnormal at all, because it's common for people who've been in abusive relationships to have a variety of symptoms, that can include:

• Having your heart beating faster, or starting to sweat, when violence comes on the television;
• Waking up in a panic after having nightmares about being chased by your abuser;
• Throwing your energy into something like cleaning all the time to try to stop yourself thinking about the abuse;
• Being scared to answer the phone in case it's the abuser;
• Not enjoying activities you used to like doing;
• Not feeling close to anyone;
• Not being able to walk down the street without worrying and looking around all the time to check if the abuser's anywhere near;
• Not getting much sleep;
• Yelling at people over little things;
• Feeling guilty about not leaving the relationship earlier, and about not being able to change the abuser, and if there are any children, about letting them see what was happening.

And there are other ones.

Maybe I'll ask Dawn if those things are happening to her. Well, I know some of them are.

The author says those things are part of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it's perfectly normal to get that after extreme stress. It doesn't mean the person who gets it is going crazy or anything. It's just what happens to people. The book says that other things that can happen are:

• Having unwanted thoughts or pictures in the mind about the abuse when nothing's happening to remind you;
• Suddenly reliving the abuse as if it's happening again;
• Getting distressed or upset when reminded of the abuse;
• Having the kinds of physical reactions when being reminded of the abuse that it's usual for people to get when they're frightened, like the heart beating faster, the breathing speeding up, the muscles getting tense, getting butterflies in the stomach, and other things;
• Trying to avoid thoughts and feelings that remind you of the abuse;
• Trying to avoid conversations, activities, people and places that remind you of the abuse;
• Being unable to remember some important things about the abuse;
• Losing interest in things like the job you were doing before, or the social activities or other things you used to like;
• Feeling detached or cut off from people around you;
• Feeling emotionally numb; so that would mean being unable to experience some feelings, perhaps loving or joyful ones, and being unable to cry;
• Feeling as if you're bound to die before your time or that you won't achieve anything in life; not expecting to live to raise children to adulthood, or to be able to get a good job, and so on.
• Having difficulty falling or staying asleep;
• Feeling anger and grief about what happened.

All these things can put people in an emotional state that abusive partners can pick up on and use to accuse them of going out of their minds or something. But they're not really; they're just experiencing symptoms that usually happen to people who've experienced traumatic things.

People can recover though. That's what this book's meant to help with.

The book says that in a way, some of the trauma symptoms are the body's way of protecting people. For instance, feeling on guard all the time and feeling extra jumpy could give people earlier warning of something that's wrong and extra energy to get away; and feeling numb, unable to experience a full range of feelings could protect against experiencing all the emotional hurt the abuse caused. Avoiding situations where anger is expressed or where you have to speak up and express your opinion that might be disagreed with is a way of possibly protecting yourself from the risk of being abused further.

But once out of an abusive relationship and safer, ready to move on with life, there isn't the need for that protection. The body will keep providing it automatically though, unless something's done to change things. Something can be done though. People can learn to feel much better even by changing the way they think about what's happened.

The author says he thinks three of the main things that keep trauma symptoms going are anger, guilt and grief. When those things have been worked through so they're not that troubling any more, trauma symptoms tend to die down.

(I keep thinking of this author as a he, but actually, I've noticed there are three authors, and two are female. I don't know which of them wrote which bit of the book. I'll probably keep thinking of the author as a he though, because his is the name that gets mentioned first.)

What Causes Trauma Symptoms

The book says trauma symptoms tend to be caused by things that cause extremes of emotion like terror, horror or feelings of helplessness. I once read somewhere that trauma's caused by very stressful things that happen suddenly, especially if they're unforeseen, and make people think a situation's beyond their control. It isn't caused by things that are stressful and distressing but not like that, like divorce or losing a job or something. Things like that can be very stressful but not traumatic.

And the book says that the more harm a person has suffered or witnessed, the more likely they are to be traumatised by it. Likewise, the more often they've been harmed, the more symptoms of trauma they might have, because their distress over the long term will be worse.

Also, something else that can make trauma symptoms worse is if distressing things are perpetrated by someone who was supposed to be a close friend, or if distressing things happen to someone close, such as when children of a battered wife see the violence or become victims of it.

Also, distressing things caused by humans are more likely to cause post traumatic stress disorder than things caused by nature, because you don't assume there's any malice involved when a natural disaster happens; but if it's caused by a human, you can torment yourself a lot by being angry and upset about why they did what they did, and guilty that you associated with them or whatever.

The author says he thinks guilt's more important than anger in causing post traumatic stress disorder, because if you feel guilty and ashamed, you'll have low self-esteem, and that'll give you depression, which will make you want to isolate yourself. So you can sit around with distressing thoughts going around and around in your head, instead of getting out and doing things that'll cheer you up. The more you let distressing thoughts and questions about how unfair what happened was and why it had to happen whirl around in your brain, and chide yourself with guilty accusations about how you shouldn't have let it go on for so long, the more upset you'll get about what happened. The more you keep distressing yourself like that, the longer it'll take to get over it.

Part Two
Adopting Healthier Attitudes to Life Than you May Have now

Stress is an ignorant state.  It believes that everything is an emergency.
--Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relation to do the business.
--William Makepeace Thackery

Looking After Your Needs

The book says a lot of battered women usually put other people's wants above their own needs, and think that to put their own needs first would be rude and selfish and would make them feel guilty. But really, you've got just as much right to get your needs met as anyone else has! And in fact, the better your own needs are met, the more energy and cheerfulness you'll be able to put into caring for other people's needs.

I remember someone who liked to be with me because it stopped him feeling so depressed; but he would very often come to see me without warning, so I'd be in the middle of something and have to just stop it immediately, and when I had something important to do, that got really irritating. So I got annoyed with him in the end. But if I'd set limits early on, even though he thought it was unfair to him, and said I'd be happy to see him after a certain time in the day on certain days but not at other times, or something, and he'd kept to that, then I wouldn't have got annoyed with him and we'd have carried on getting on well.

So I think that when we put our own needs first, it can be good for other people as well as ourselves.

Also, the book says when we're thinking about putting our needs first, we need to include long-term needs, like how we're going to be feeling and what might be happening to us in five years' time or so if we do a particular thing. I know some domestic violence sufferers have a lot of pressure put on them by their families, or if they're Christians, even by their churches, who say horrible things to them like that they should stay in the violent relationship because it's so important that families stay together. While it's best that a family that's getting along together or just have fairly minor problems that can be fixed stays together, because it's good for children to have two parents, it's not good for children to see one of their parents being abused, or to often hear violent arguments, so putting your own needs first and getting away will really be putting the children's needs first as well, even if you've been told you're not thinking of their needs if you get away.

Attitudes Towards Women in Abusive Relationships Among Some Christians

Actually, I read something horrible recently about how some people in churches use the Bible to persuade women they should stay in abusive relationships and let their husbands be the boss. They say Jesus said people should only divorce if their husband or wife's been unfaithful.

I don't suppose people like the apostle Paul imagined people would still be reading his letters in 2000 years' time! He might have made himself more clear on some things if he had. So it's bad to take little bits of verses here and there and make them sound far more important than the impression you get from reading a whole letter or the whole New Testament, which contradicts the impression you get from the set of out-of-context little verses someone's put together.

So it's important to make your own judgments about what you think is best for you when it comes to an abusive relationship, and not to be swayed by people quoting little Bible verses to persuade you to stay, or by advice you think you ought to follow because you think it's coming from people who know what God wants, when really those people might have their understanding of things all wrong and they're not taking your needs into consideration. Your needs are the most important things, especially when you're in danger.

Being Unassertive and Tolerating Disrespect

The book I've been reading says women with post traumatic stress disorder tend not to like to express their wants to others, and tolerate a lot of disrespectful behaviour from other people.

It says it's important that in the future, you stand up for yourself more, because then, you're more likely to get your needs met. People won't automatically know how you feel and what you want; but if you tell them, then a lot of the time, they might do what you want. There are ways of being assertive and standing up for yourself without being rude or aggressive. You deserve to be respected, and there are ways of letting people know you want respect and that you won't tolerate being unfairly treated any more, without sounding too demanding.

Doing Things Because you Think You're Supposed to

The author says women with PTSD often make decisions based on what they believe they're supposed to do or ought to do, based on things they've been taught, that aren't necessarily true. Things like that can often be in the best interests of other people rather than themselves. He says battered women often make decisions on what they believe they're obligated to do, rather than having a rational think about the situation, exploring all the options they can think of, and only then coming up with a conclusion based on what seems best to them. He says a lot of battered women stay in abusive relationships or go back to abusers after having a break from them because they believe it's what they ought to do.

I know that for some time you thought you couldn't leave David because families are supposed to stick together. I think the author's talking about that kind of thing.

Being Careful About Letting Feelings Control You

But this book says we shouldn't let our feelings make us think something's good or bad, or right or wrong or whatever, because even strong feelings can mislead us. So we should make efforts to think through intellectually everything people have told us, and all the feelings we have that make us want to do things, so we can work out whether they really are good ideas or not. The book says important decisions should never be made according to just how we feel about things. They should always be made after we've thought about the evidence for whether they're really in our best interests or not.

The author says that when people are highly distressed, it's much more difficult to think clearly, so any important decisions will be much, much harder to make if we're feeling distressed at the time we want to make them.

Oh yes, I've heard it's the same with anger or any strong emotion.

He says it's important that we don't just make the decision that'll make us feel better straightaway but might not be good for us in the long-term. For instance, if someone was feeling guilty about leaving their husband but thought it might be a really good idea, they might decide to stay despite the fact that they knew leaving was a good idea, and it might immediately stop them feeling guilty, so they would feel better for a while, but it might mean they get abused again.

So the author says it's best to do things that'll help us calm down before we make any decision we have to make, like relaxation exercises, or whatever helps us .

Being Unable to Deal With Hostility

The author says a lot of battered women find it difficult to deal with verbal abuse, and don't defend themselves but just take it; but they get hurt by it, because they don't question whether it's true but just accept what the person's saying.

Yes, that sounds like you. I remember when that nasty little man we met the other day thought you were stupid just because you were talking about not doing very well at school and you didn't understand what he was saying about politics, and he called you ugly and said people like you don't deserve to be alive because you're not intelligent enough to benefit the gene pool and you should have been aborted, and you didn't say anything like, "That's not nice; I don't deserve to be spoken to like that"; you just put up with it. I told him what I thought of what he said, but you'd just answered him as if you thought that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

But just because someone says something horrible to you, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. They might not even think it's true themselves. Some people just say horrible things for fun, without caring if they're true or not. They just say them because they think it'll be fun to get a reaction from the person, or because they're annoyed about something completely different and want to take out their anger on someone, and having a go at you is just a release for their anger, or things like that.

I know someone who says horrible things, and the more hurt a person seems to be by them, the worse he gets, as if he thinks it's just fun. But the things he says are just nonsense really!

So if someone says something horrible to you, ask yourself whether it's really true, and if it isn't, whether it really needs to bother you. They might not even think it's true themselves! Some people don't care whether what they say is true or not. They just think it'll be a good way of getting their fun or whatever else they want!

Blaming

Also, if someone blames you for something, it doesn't mean that you should just accept that it's your fault. Sometimes, when people think about it, they'll know full well that it's not the fault of the person they're blaming. They'll sometimes just be blaming them because they don't want to take any responsibility for what they've done wrong themselves, and they want to put the person they're blaming down because it makes them feel better, because then they won't have to feel bad about doing something wrong and they can feel superior to someone. It's easier to put the blame on someone else than it is to think about where you've gone wrong and make efforts to put it right.

Also, the book says that if you believe you're to blame and keep trying to do things to make things better for the person who keeps blaming you for things, they'll think it's allright to blame you for everything and they might get worse and worse, making unreasonable demands, fooling themselves into believing that if everything isn't just the way they'd like it to be, it's all your fault, so the solution is to have a go at you. But if you believe it really is all your fault and keep doing what you can to make things as perfect for them as it can be, they'll lose the ability to make things better for themselves, because they'll be relying on you so much, they'll forget how to do things themselves. For instance, if a wife's always the one who plays with the children because her husband thinks they're too noisy and thinks he deserves a quiet life, he won't be so good at it if he ever has to do it himself. So pandering to his every wish isn't good for him, as well as not being good for his wife.

Really, every time you get blamed for something, you can point out that blaming doesn't get anyone anywhere, because it just gets people stuck in arguments about what's gone wrong, rather than getting them talking about how to make things better. So you could tell the person blaming you that a better thing to do is for you both to spend the time thinking about and discussing the ways you want things to be better in the future, and what you can both do to make sure things improve, if the problem is something you can control.

Accepting Apologies

Another thing the author says it's important for battered women to realise is that no matter how much of an apology the abuser makes to them, it doesn't mean they have to go back to him, even if they forgive him. A lot of batterers apologise routinely every time they hurt someone, and then go back to doing exactly the same thing again later!!

Just because someone apologises, it doesn't mean they mean it; and even if they do at the time, they can very easily change their minds when the feelings that make them want to be abusive come over them again. Even if they cry when they apologise, it doesn't mean you have to feel sorry for them, because they'll probably quickly get over it, and when the feelings come over them that make them think it would be good to be abusive again, they'll feel completely differently about things. I've heard quite a few times that it's typical for abusive men to get apologetic and seem upset after they've been violent, but then to go back to being abusive again as if they were never sorry. So it's important not to feel pity for them and go back to them because of that, or to think that even though they went back to being abusive after apologising lots of times before, they might really mean they're sorry this time.

I've heard that abusers are well-known for being manipulative, and that often, they say and do things not because they really mean them, but because they think it'll have the effect on you they want to have. It's as if they're just doing those things to control you.

Talking to Yourself Disrespectfully

The author says a lot of battered women have thoughts going around and around in their heads that are just as unkind to themselves as the things their abusers say to them are, and that's bound to get them down. He means things like,

"I should have known better. ... I have bad judgment. ... There's something wrong with me. ... I'm stupid. ... I'm a fool. ... I'm a loser. ... I'm worthless. ... I'm stupid. ... I'm never going to be happy. ... My whole life's ruined. ... I may as well give up."

Actually, you do that kind of thing all the time, don't you, Dawn, when you keep saying you're not very bright or smart. And you've said that talking like that depresses you.

The author says that thoughts like that going around and around in a person's head are bound to make them depressed and ashamed all the time, and lead to them having low self-esteem, so they're less likely to get over what happened.

He says you can make yourself feel better by answering thoughts like that with more positive ones. For instance, here's the type of negative thought you might have and the kind of answer you might use:

"I should have known better. I wasted five years of my life with him! I could have prevented all that suffering.
If I start looking to the future instead of getting absorbed in the same old upsetting thoughts about the past, I'll end up a happier person."

The author says when therapy clients he's known started thinking like that, they took charge of their futures and started making plans to do things that would make them happier.

He says a good way to think is that the time we spend mulling over old past injustices done to us by others or the system, or old hurts, is time we're not spending working on ways of improving our lives so we have a better future.

You wouldn't want to say half the things you say to yourself that make you miserable to a best friend of yours who was in the same situation as you, would you. So why are you any less deserving of respect and being treated well than they would be? So you can think of how you'd treat a best friend who was in the same situation as you, and of what you'd say to comfort and encourage them if they said the kinds of things you say to yourself, and say the things you'd say to them to yourself to cheer yourself up and give you hope for the future.

If you do still want to say bad things about yourself, you can still change the way you think about them. You might think you've made a mess of your life. But instead of saying, "I'm a failure", you could change it to, "I've made mistakes in the past". That implies that you might do better in the future, whereas saying you're a failure implies that you're always going to be that way.

So you can rephrase some of the things you say about yourself so they sound as if you're talking about things in the past, rather than talking about them as if they're parts of your personality that you're going to be stuck with your whole life. After all, you can move on and do things better now.

Depressing Thoughts

But you don't have to believe every thought that comes into your mind. For instance, you might think you're a loser, but that doesn't mean it's true.

I knew someone who used to get into terrible depressions all the time. Things would trigger them off like his girlfriend saying she didn't want to see him for a while, and he would get really down and say things like, "My whole life's ruined! I want to go to bed and never wake up!"

I heard that's how people get when they're depressed - not being able to see any hope for the future when there is some really.

I heard it's because when people get into some kind of emotional state, the brain starts shutting down its intelligent side for a while because it gets so swamped with strong emotional signals that the intelligent side can't function. The reason it gets like that is a part of the brain's design, because it treats the emotional signals the way it would treat danger signals, and when people are in danger, they have to just act by instinct to escape quickly, if they think they've got a chance of escaping, rather than thinking everything through before they act, which might take too long to be safe. It's like if you pick up a baked potato that's just come out of the oven, the body's instinct will be to let go of it before you've even thought about it. The body's programmed to get you to drop it automatically, rather than to get the brain to spend time thinking through whether it's really too hot before you do.

When the brain's in an emotional state, it behaves more like that all-round, because it starts behaving as if everything's an emergency that has to be dealt with quickly.

But the downside of that is that it starts thinking more simply. It can't think through things that sensibly when people are in an emotional state, because it can mistake all kinds of other emotional states for danger signs, so people are more likely to think in simple terms - either life's wonderful, or it's totally ruined; either something's going to make you happy, or it's going to make you really miserable; either you're going to be able to cope with something well, or you're just not going to be able to cope with it at all. That kind of thing. That's how the brain can make you think when you're in an emotional state.

That's why it's best to try to calm down before making big decisions.

So if an upsetting thought about how life's hopeless or you're just no good or something comes into your mind, it might just be because your brain's in too much of an emotional state to see the full picture, so it's as if it's accidentally fooling you into believing things are worse than they are and they can't improve. Once you're calmer, you'll be able to see the truth better.

Making Sure Thoughts Govern Us Rather Than Feelings

The book says that because feelings can influence the way we think too much sometimes, it can be good to stop when you've had a horrible thought about life or yourself or something, and ask yourself if it's really true, and think through all the evidence you have that the thought is true, and all the evidence you have that it isn't at all.

Also, sometimes, we can have strong feelings and think that the way we feel is the way things really are, when it isn't really. For instance, we might feel overwhelmed sometimes; but we might be able to stop ourselves feeling like that if we think, "Hang on, I feel overwhelmed; but do I think I am? That's what counts. Aren't there things I can do to help myself, when I think about it, perhaps writing down a list of the things I have to do that I now feel are all crowding in on me, putting them in order of importance, and then doing them one by one?"

Or if we think, "I feel a failure", we can stop and think something like, "Yes, but do I really think I'm a failure? Or is it really just that I've made a mistake or two in the past, which in any case I can learn from and move on from?"

Or if we think something like, "I feel obligated to do ..." this or that, we can think to ourselves something like, "Hang on; do I think I'm obligated, when I examine the evidence? Am I really?" Then we can think things through. Our thoughts are what's important.

It's easy to let feelings govern the way we think and what we do, but we shouldn't really, because feelings can be so strong they can make our brains go into that mode where we stop thinking clearly. So it's best if we can calm ourselves down a bit somehow and then think through what we've just thought.

Asking Why? All the Time

The book says another harmful way we can talk to ourselves is if we keep asking why bad things happened to us. It's one thing to explore reasons why abusers become abusers and what makes people more likely to end up in abusive relationships as victims so they know what to avoid doing again; but what's unhealthy is if people keep mulling over a great series of questions about why the specific unfair things that happened to them happened, when they're unlikely to get answers.

The book says sometimes, asking yourself a great series of questions about things you can't change now in any case will just lead to you working yourself up into getting more and more distressed, for instance, if you had a train of thought that went something like:

"Why did I go out with him? I should have known better! Why did I marry him?! My family warned me against him! Why didn't I listen?! Why didn't I leave sooner? Why didn't I foresee he'd be the way he was? Why did I stay with him so long? Why did he do what he did to me?! How can someone who's supposed to love me hurt me? Why was he so cruel? Why did he keep telling me he loved me only to go and hurt me again? Why did I keep falling for his apologies and keep thinking he was really going to change this time when he never had before so there was no reason to believe he would now?"

That kind of train of thought is like having a go at yourself for not having done things differently, and bringing to mind all the bad feelings associated with the hurt in the relationship all over again, for no good reason, because all you manage to do is upset yourself all over again.

The book says that the war veterans who get over trauma the quickest or have less of it to start with are those who don't go over things in their minds again and again like that, stirring up guilt that they didn't do things differently and anger at the way things happened. It says the ones least affected are the ones who can dismiss the misfortunes they went through in the war as just bad luck, as if they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's partly the guilt and anger that make things so traumatic. So if you work yourself up into a distress of guilt with questions about why you didn't do things differently, and get yourself angry and upset all over again getting your thoughts absorbed in questions about how he could do what he did, it's as if you're traumatising yourself all over again, so it'll take you longer to get over what happened. I'd say it's far better to keep reminding yourself to focus your mind on having a go at planning how you can improve your future.

Starting to Feel More Positive

I think one way you can make yourself feel more positive is by reminding yourself that although you might have been helpless and powerless to control things at the time when you were being abused, you aren't any more, and you now have the opportunity to make improvements in your life, bit by bit, as much as you can cope with at any one time. Even if you feel helpless sometimes, you can remind yourself that it's only a feeling, and you don't have to still think you are helpless. I heard that if someone ties an elephant to a tree when it's a baby, it'll keep trying to get away but won't be able to, so it'll stop trying in the end. Then when it grows up, it could easily just snap the rope and get away if it wanted, but it's so used to feeling helpless to do anything that it won't. It'll just stay stuck there as if it can't break the rope. Some people can be so used to feeling helpless to do anything that they don't do things to improve their lives even when they can.

So if you keep reminding yourself that you're not helpless really, and sit down and plan ways you might be able to improve your life, you might end up more hopeful.

The book says focusing your mind on reasons why you can't solve your problems will mean they'll only get solved if you're lucky; but if you focus your mind on possible solutions to your problems, perhaps thinking about the pros and cons of each one, and then deciding what solutions seem best, and then planning how and when to carry them out, then you'll probably end up with a brighter future.

You might not feel as if you deserve to be happy, but you do really. After all, it wasn't as if you were the abuser in the relationship and need to be punished, perhaps by being sent to jail or something. You were the victim! It's about time you had a happier life. You ought to keep reminding yourself of that, I think. You deserve to be happier.

And abusers typically tell their victims a lot of things that aren't true, like that no one else could love them or like them; but often, what they say is just a load of nonsense! They just say it to keep you under their control, to try and stop you going off and looking for someone better than them. So you could keep reminding yourself that you are loveable and likeable really.

In fact, I've heard that some therapists recommend people think of the horrible things the abuser said to them in the past and write out answers to them, about what the truth really is.

So someone who kept being told that no one else could ever want them could write something like:

I can tell some people do still find me attractive. And I know some people like me, because they want to talk to me. I can't think of any reason why I couldn't get into a relationship with someone better.

Or if they told you you haven't got any talents over and over again till you started to believe them, you could think about all the things you are actually good at, or have been in the past so you could be again, and write them down to remind yourself.

And that kind of thing.

Feeling Sorry for the Abuser

I know it can be easy to start feeling sorry for David.

I've heard it's typical for abusers to act in such a way that the women they've just battered start feeling sorry for them. If the women leave, the abusers might beg them to come back, saying they just can't live without them, and even that they'll commit suicide if the women don't come back. They might cry and beg, and promise to change and claim undying love.

I know David's done a few things like that to you and you've been tempted to go back, and you've been surprised to hear that this is just typical behaviour for abusers - loads of them do it. I know you've thought you're the only one this is happening to. But it's really just something a lot of abusers do to get what they want. I think it's a tactic. I know it seems genuine, and you get worried and feel guilty about staying away when he talks about how upset he is. But abusers are typically manipulative; I've heard it's been found that they often just say things and behave in certain ways to get what they want, and then go back to behaving in the same old way again when they've got it. You know it's happened time and time again before, but you always used to believe it would be different this time and then it wasn't again.

I know that at least until recently, you've felt sure that you'd eventually be able to find a way to help him change, and thought you'd be one of the people most likely to be able to help him, because you thought you understood him better than other people, and could see him when he was upset about what he'd done, and you knew the kind of person he could be, because he could be so nice sometimes when he wasn't being abusive. But really, I think all experts would say that the only way people like him will change is if they get serious professional help.

Someone who isn't trained to give the kind of professional help that's been found to have better results than other types of professional help isn't qualified to help them make big changes, and I've heard that staying with an abuser like that often just gets more and more dangerous, because they get more and more abusive, whatever you try to do! And staying with a person like that makes them think it's allright to go on being abusive, because they know they won't be penalized for it.

So as I said, leaving him could actually help him.

I know you feel like a great big failure for not being able to help him change, and he used to keep telling you himself that if you'd only be nicer to him, he'd be better able to change. So now you think it's at least partly your fault that he hasn't changed and you feel guilty and as if you're a failure. But actually, people who work with abuse victims or abusers will say that he'll only really change if he wants to. And since you're not professionally trained to help abusers, you can't blame yourself for not being able to help him. The longer he can go on blaming you for his behaviour because you believe it's partly your fault he isn't changing so you accept what he says, the longer he'll know he can get away with blaming you while staying just as abusive as ever.

Don't let your feelings make you think you just have to go back. You don't; you're the one in control now, and you know your future is the thing that should count most. You need to put your own needs first. In fact, I've heard that a lot of women who've left their abusers have found it works best if they have absolutely no contact with their former abusers at all, refusing to get into conversations or email exchanges with them and so on. It means the abusers can't work on their emotions and manipulate them into going back. Some women who've got children only have any contact with their former abusers when arrangements need to be made about the children.

Starting the Day With a Positive Attitude

The book says we can feel more optimistic if when we wake up, we can decide each day that as far as it depends on us, we're going to have a good day. It says we're much more likely to have a good day then than we are if we start the day worrying that we won't have a good day if someone says or does something to ruin it. That's a helpless attitude; but we'll feel better with an attitude that makes us feel more in control, like thinking that we're going to do our best to have a good day.

Part Three
Not Holding Onto Anger

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
-- Francis Bacon

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
--Voltaire

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it."
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things.
--Bertrand Russell

Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
-- Buddha

The book says that while anger at the abuse can be a good thing at first, because feeling angry can give you the energy you need to get out of an abusive relationship and then keep you from giving in to going back so easily, it's not healthy to hold on to anger beyond that, even if your anger's perfectly justified and you've had very good reasons to get angry. It just blights your life. Holding onto it can stop you being happy, and keep the traumatic memories fresh in your mind so it takes longer to get over them.

Letting go of the anger doesn't mean you decide the abuser doesn't deserve to be punished any more, or that you stop taking any legal proceedings against him or anything you're doing to protect yourself against him. It just means you focus on moving on with your life towards a brighter future, instead of being stuck angrily ruminating on the past so you might ruin your day by putting yourself in a bad mood.

Expressing the Feelings That Lead to Anger

All that doesn't mean suppressing anger. If you feel under pressure not to express any negative feelings like anger, you'll just end up feeling depressed and tired and hopeless. But feeling angry all the time can get you down, and there are other ways of coping.

For instance, you can express dissatisfaction at something without getting angry about it. In fact, the book says that anger is often a reaction to another emotion, like a need not being met, frustration about something that's happening, and so on. So we can focus on what's bothering us, rather than on being angry, so we can think about changing it. Expressing negative feelings can sometimes be good, for instance if we say to someone something like, "I feel hurt when you do that; please don't do it again", and they change their behaviour because of it.

On the other hand, expressing anger with someone rather than hurt or some other feeling that might make people sympathise with us is almost bound to make other people angry in response, because it'll sound like an accusation against them, and they might not think it's justified, and they might say worse things to us. If we just explain what the problem is that's bothering us and maybe suggest some kind of solution, even if it's just something like, "Please don't do that again", then we're more likely to get what we want than we are by saying something that sounds like an angry accusation against them that'll put them on the defensive and make them want to argue.

The book says another reason anger isn't good for us is because it can contribute to health problems. Some people believe it can contribute to heart problems and high blood pressure and things.

One important thing is that when you're angry with someone, it's as if they're still controlling your feelings. It's as if they can still make you feel bad. They're not being affected by your mood. You're the one being made to feel unhappy. It's as if they still have power over you, the power to ruin your mood, when you're angry rather than happy. When you let go of the anger, it can be as if you shake free of their influence.

Choosing to Let Go of Anger

The author says it's possible to just let go of anger if we want to. He says it's fuelled by thoughts of the wrongs that've been done to us, and perhaps thoughts of how we'd like someone to suffer in return. So if we choose to stop getting absorbed in such thoughts, we can cut down the amount our life is being blighted by anger. He asks if we'd put spending time being angry on a to-do list for the day. If we wouldn't want to do that, then we'll probably think spending part of our day absorbed in angry thoughts isn't worth it.

We're bound not to be able to stop being angry all at once. But once we make a decision to stop mulling over thoughts of the wrongs we've suffered in our minds, we can try to catch ourselves doing it every time we notice ourselves getting absorbed in angry thoughts, and start thinking of other things instead. It'll be like gradually breaking the habit.

One thing you can do is to change the focus of your thoughts to the future. So, for instance, when you start thinking angry thoughts about someone behaving unfairly towards you, it can help if you stop and think, "What am I going to do to change things for the better?" If there's nothing we want to do or feel we can do, then spending time worrying over it and feeling bitter about it is just time we could be spending thinking about things we could change for the better. There's a saying, Living well is the best revenge. In other words, focusing on the future and improving our lives and making a success of things is the best way of showing someone who's tried to keep us down that they haven't succeeded.

Possible Ways to Get Anger Out of Your System

You might think feeling angry is the only way to get bad thoughts out of your system. But when you mull over angry thoughts, chances are you'll just make yourself angrier and angrier. And then if that makes you irritable with other people, then that won't be fair to them, and you'll be making them angry by getting angry with them, and when they're angry, they'll say hurtful things to you in their anger, and so you'll end up feeling worse.

Writing things down can sometimes be therapeutic and help to get things out of the system. The trouble is that spending time mulling over what you're writing can get your thoughts absorbed in it and depress you. I know some people write letters they don't post, but that say all the things they'd like to say to their abuser, expressing all their feelings. Then they get rid of them. That helps some people get things out of the system, but not everyone.

I've heard energetic exercise helps some people. The anger's like energy that you can work off doing something energetic. And if it's an exercise you enjoy, it might put you in a better mood.

You could try turning the anger into creative energy to spur you on to improve your future. Anger can stop people thinking clearly; but if it's controlled so it's not too strong, and channelled into something worthwhile, it can give you useful energy for planning and getting out and doing things. Remember that saying, Living well is the best revenge.

Part Four
Changing Your Attitude to Yourself

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I've met.
--Dwight Moody

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
--Thomas Alva Edison

The book says one thing that can keep people feeling bad about themselves is if they keep having critical thoughts about themselves going through their minds. The more you can stop putting yourself down, the better you'll feel. Often, people would like respect from others, but they talk to themselves in a far more disrespectful way than a lot of other people talk to them. The book says that if you can stop being unnecessarily unkind in the way you think about yourself and talk about yourself, you'll recover from the trauma more quickly.

The author gives a sample of what one woman wrote down during a week - the thoughts she caught herself having about herself, or things she said about herself:

"I'm going to lose it ... I should have done it better ... I am so stupid ... I feel overwhelmed . . . Why did I ask him for help? I shouldn't have ... I am so inadequate ... I feel overwhelmed ... I should have cleaned the house instead of going out ... I am so irresponsible ... I should have put the kids' lunch together last night . . . I'm a terrible mom ... I feel like I can't make it ... I feel like I'm going crazy."

By talking to herself like that, the woman would be making herself think all the more that she's no good. So she'd get depressed all the more, and more stressed, just as she might if someone else said those things to her. At least with it being her who's saying them, she'll be able to change the way she talks to herself.

Reasons People Can Think They're No Good

So should you be able to, I expect. You keep saying things to me about how you're not very smart, and how you haven't achieved anything in life, and how you haven't got any hope of making a success of your future, and how you don't do anything worthwhile in life. But I think you're underestimating yourself. Isn't it true that the main reason you think those things is because other people said them to you time and time again when you were little, and your husband kept saying them later, along with a few other people, until you came to think they must be true? And once you started to believe them, you lost your confidence in yourself, so you never had the confidence to go out and prove them wrong. So you couldn't find a reason to stop believing them. You're better than you think you are.

Some people say things like that just to be nasty, or because they aren't really thinking about what they're saying. I mean, if a child disappoints his parents once, like getting below-average marks in a school test, his parents might say something like, "You're useless". They might not really mean it. They might just be being careless in the way they talk. they might really only mean they're disappointed about the single test result, but just be expressing themselves thoughtlessly in their frustration. But the child will probably assume they really mean it, and start to wonder if it's true that they're useless at everything.

And then if you get abusive parents who say that kind of thing to their children all the time, their children probably will come to believe they're no good.

And I've heard that a lot of abusive husbands talk like that. Often, it's probably partly the way they learned to talk to others from when they were little and they heard their parents talking like that; but also, I've heard it's a way of keeping their wives under their control. If they know that kind of talk makes people less confident, or they can see it makes their wives less confident, they'll know they can use it to hurt them and manipulate them into doing what they want. I mean, if they're scared their wives will find someone better than them, they'll know that if they keep telling their wives how fat and ugly they are, or criticising them in other ways, their wives will come to believe they really are inadequate, so their husbands will think they won't be so likely to go off with other men.

And some other people can be nasty - if they find out that saying something upsets someone, they'll say it deliberately to be hurtful when they want to get at them for some reason, like maybe if the person's just said something critical of them and they want to get revenge. They might not really mean what they're saying at all!

So you're bound to have a low self-esteem and think you're no good after all that.

"I'm not as good as I'd like to be at doing this yet, but I'm working on it."

Like I said, when you're depressed or stressed, emotions take over the brain and stop you from being able to think so intelligently, so you can think things are worse than they really are because you're not calm enough to see the full picture. So sometimes, doing something to relax can help you think differently.

Types of Harmful Ways People Can Think About Themselves

The author says he reckons there are four ways people can make themselves feel worse by the things they say to themselves.

Actually it sounds like five to me:

1. Going into a series of thoughts asking why bad things happened, when there isn't much hope that an explanation will come to you, so you'll just upset yourself more and more.
2. Telling yourself you should have done that or you should be doing this, putting pressure on yourself to be better than you can be, or making yourself feel guilty over things you did in the past that you think you should have done differently but which you can't change now. It's one thing to plan how you can do things better in the future, and that's a good thing; but just upsetting yourself by thinking about what you'd like to have done differently in the past doesn't serve a real purpose; it only makes you feel bad. So the book says it's best to remind yourself of that if you catch yourself thinking like that.
3. Putting your whole personality down, by saying things like, "I'm no good!" "I'm stupid" " I'm so irresponsible" , and that kind of thing. Just because you do one thing wrong, or two or three or four or five or so, it doesn't mean your whole personality's faulty.
4. Saying things that make you think your feelings are controlling you and you have to do what they seem to be telling you, like saying, "I feel obligated to go back to him." You may feel as if you ought to, but what's really important is what you think, when you really put your mind to examining the pros and cons. Feelings can be misleading. So it's good if you can try and stop yourself when you notice you're thinking like that, and have a real think about what you've just thought when you start a sentence with the words "I feel", but then say something that either isn't a feeling at all, like the word responsible, or is part a feeling and part not one, like the word overwhelmed. If you feel overwhelmed, you can ask yourself whether you really are overwhelmed by circumstances, or whether in reality there are things you can do to make things better. I mean, you could try to think of all the things and people you can turn to, that'll help you out of the situation, and all the things you can do for yourself that'll help. That's what this book's saying. That's far better than giving in to the feeling, which is what you might be tempted to do if you think as if your feelings are governing you so you have to be dictated to by them. Your thoughts are what really counts. If you change your thoughts, your feelings will change as a result.
5. Apologising all the time, over far more things than it's really necessary to apologise for. Doing that might stop you feeling guilty or anxious about something you did, in the short term, but it's like taking responsibility for things, and when you're taking responsibility for things that aren't even your fault, then it must just make you feel worse about yourself and more of a failure than you need to.

The author says that when people become more conscious of drifting into those types of trains of thought, they often stop thinking in those ways so often. So catching yourself at it can help prevent you absorbing yourself in thoughts that are just going to depress you.

Keeping Notes of Harmful Thoughts to Remind you to Change

The author recommends people write notes when they catch themselves thinking that kind of thing to themselves, for several weeks in a row. He says it'll help to break the habit, not just because it'll help you become more aware you're having thoughts like that, which could otherwise go past so quickly they might depress you and flit past and leave you not realising it was them that depressed you, but also because writing notes will be something you probably won't like doing much, and so it'll be as if you're being mildly punished for thinking those things, which might help put you off thinking them a bit.

Maybe you could carry a notebook around with you for a while, and make a little note of the type of thought you've caught yourself having when you have one, at least a few times a day, for a few weeks.

The author says more about the problems with the types of thinking he says are harmful:

Why it can be Harmful to Keep Thinking you 'Should' Do Things

He says that when we're small, we learn lots of things about the way we're 'supposed to' or we 'should' do things, that might be all very well under normal circumstances, but which can actually be harmful under certain circumstances. For example, people learn that marriage is 'supposed to' be forever, and that people are 'supposed to' forgive wrongs done to them and start again as if nothing bad had ever happened. It's a nice idea, but when a relationship's abusive, a strong belief that you 'should' stay with a husband no matter what, and that you should forgive him and go back to the way things were, thinking that means carrying on as if nothing had happened, because marriages are 'supposed to' be forever, can be harmful.

The author says it's far better to think things through, examining all the pros and cons we can think of of doing what we think we 'should' do, and of doing what else we think we could do instead, and then decide for ourselves whether it's a good idea to do what we think we 'should' do or not. It's best if we end up doing what's in our own best interests, even if that goes against what we've learned we 'should' do.

He says the thing that's wrong with using phrases like 'could have' and 'should have' is that they'll often make you feel guilty, because you'll be thinking over how you wish you'd done things differently and blaming yourself for things that might not have really been your fault. Yes, you could probably have done better by behaving differently, but what people often forget when they're making themselves feel bad by going over old memories and telling themselves they should have behaved differently is they could only act on the knowledge they had at the time. It's easy to say what we should have done with the benefit of hindsight. But when we didn't know everything we do now, it would have been more difficult to make the right decision, especially if we were really stressed at the time so we weren't thinking clearly. It's easy to forget what was going on at the time when we did what we regret now.

For instance, it might be that we couldn't possibly have known at the time that doing something we did would lead to a bad thing that happened; but we assume with the benefit of hindsight that we should have been able to tell it would happen, when it wasn't that easy at the time.

He says another reason thinking thoughts like, "I should have done this" or "I could have done this" isn't healthy is that it just makes us feel bad. It lowers our self-esteem, just as it would if someone else kept going on at us about how we should have done things differently. And it just doesn't do us any good. A better train of thought to get ourselves on is, "OK, so how could I do things differently in the future?"

It's the same with things we can say to ourselves that make it sound as if our whole personality's no good, like, "I feel like a nobody"; "There's something wrong with me"; "I feel ugly and dirty"; "I'm stupid", and so on. Thinking like that doesn't make us want to try harder; it's more likely to make us want to hide away and stop even trying. It's better if we can think things like, "How can I learn to do this better?"

Using the Words 'I Feel' When We're Not Talking About Feelings

Some things we can say we feel aren't really feelings at all, like if we say, "I feel ugly" or "I feel defeated" or "I feel unsafe". If we catch ourselves thinking like that, the book recommends we ask ourselves whether we really are what we're feeling as if we are, since we're saying we feel something when it's really our thoughts that are getting us down, and it's our thoughts that count. If we feel defeated, but then we ask ourselves whether we really are defeated, we might be able to decide we're not really, and come up with ideas about how to improve things for ourselves, instead of just letting ourselves be pushed around by our feelings, like we would be if we just let ourselves feel defeated.

Or if you feel unsafe, you can think through the situation to decide how unsafe you really are. For instance, important questions you could ponder might be things like:

Do I have locks on my doors and windows at home?
Do I have a burglar alarm?
Do I have a smoke alarm?
Do I carry an attack alarm with me - (you know, one of those things you can carry around within easy reach of your hand when you go out that contains some kind of chemical, and if you press down on the top of the alarm, it somehow makes it give off a really loud high-pitched shriek that'll hopefully put any attacker off and get you attention from passers-by)?
Can I trust my neighbours enough to know I could run to them if I needed help?
Do police patrol my area often?
What's the crime rate in the area where I live like?

So if you feel unsafe, it's worth thinking things through like that to decide whether you really are unsafe.

Or if you feel safe, that can be worse, because you might not really be safe, like if you think it'll be safe to go back to the man who battered you because he's apologised and promised to change, and maybe he's gone to anger management lessons for the first time ever or something. If he does, it still won't mean you're safe with him. If you feel as if you will be, it's worth thinking things through to decide whether you really are, since the anger management lessons might not be working, for all you know. He might say they are to get you back. But he might be lying or wishful thinking. Or he might have gone to so few that they can't possibly have made a difference yet, and he might give them up as soon as you go back to him so they'll never have the chance to work.

So if you feel as if you'll be safe, it's worth having a really good think about that kind of thing, because your feelings might be misleading.

Or if we think, "I feel ugly", we can ask ourselves whether we really are; and if we still think we are, we can try to focus on what we can do about it.

The book says that a lot of things are part feeling and part thoughts. We might say we feel upset, or guilty, or angry, or a number of other things, and we'll be experiencing a feeling, but it'll be fuelled by thoughts we have.

For instance, if we feel guilty about something, our feeling might be intensified a lot because we're having loads of thoughts about how we shouldn't have done what we did and are so stupid for having made the mistakes we made, and how we're such a bad person for doing what we did, and that kind of thing. It might be that we did the only thing we could have done under the circumstances to survive, or that we did what we did, not knowing how things would turn out, so we couldn't have foreseen that they'd turn out as badly as they did, but we still feel guilty about what happened and keep telling ourselves what a bad person we are for having done it. Once we come to realise we did the only thing we felt we could do under the circumstances and think over the reasons we did what we did, and realise we're not so much to blame as we thought, our thoughts will stop being so condemning, and our guilty feelings will follow along and get much less.

It's similar with a lot of other emotions.

Not Trusting Feelings Too Much

The book says feelings can mislead us into thinking things are a certain way when they're not. We can think that because our feelings are strong, certain things must be true. But our feelings often come on because of the things we've thought; and if we've been thinking inaccurate things, like thinking something was all our fault when it wasn't, the feelings we get because of that won't be good ways of telling how things really are. When we start thinking differently, our thoughts will change. So no matter how strong our feelings are, it doesn't mean we should rely on them for our opinions about the way things are.

The book says a lot of women who've been battered are so used to feeling helpless that they still feel like that when they can actually do quite a bit more about their situation than they think. Feelings can make you think things that aren't true. They might have come on because those things were true in the past, but they'll still hang around when those things aren't true any more, making you feel a lot worse than you need to.

For instance, you might feel powerless. But you're not really. There might be quite a lot you can do to improve things nowadays. The feelings will probably go away when you start improving things.

I've heard that one thing that can help is acting as if you feel the way you'd like to feel. So even if you feel powerless, if you act as if you don't and try to do things to improve your life, the feelings will probably go away after a while, so you won't feel powerless any more; so you'll stop feeling as if you're just acting as if you don't feel like that after a while. You really will have stopped feeling powerless.

The author says there was a woman who came to him for therapy who'd keep her house doors and car door unlocked. She didn't really know why she did that until she thought about it. It turned out that she'd been severely beaten by a former boyfriend in his pick-up truck and been unable to get away because the door was locked. Her feelings had made her dislike having doors locked ever since, but really, if it was just her in her house or car, it would probably be safer for her to have the doors locked. So her feelings were making her think one thing would be the safest, when really, the opposite was the safest.

The author says there are quite a few examples of how that kind of thing can happen.

He says that when people's feelings are running high, like if we're anxious or angry, we're more likely to make bad decisions than we are if we can think more clearly because we're calmer. He says when people are in bad moods like that, they make decisions based on what will relieve their bad mood in the short term, rather than on what will be in their real best interests. For instance, if a batterer puts on a show of being really sorry about what he did, his wife might decide to go back to him, because she cares about him and feels guilty about not being there for him and wants to relieve her guilt feelings. But going back to him might be dangerous. So what makes people feel better immediately might actually be the worst thing they could do.

So if you ever feel as if you ought to go back to him, or he's putting emotional pressure on you by pleading or anything, think about what'll happen if you do go back. If you do go back, you might feel better at first, because he might be nice for a while, and you won't feel guilty about staying away. But if he hits you with the children watching or beats you so badly you can't look after them properly for a while or something, you'll probably feel far more guilty than you do about not going back to him! The book recommends you think into the future whenever you get the urge to do something important like going back to him, for instance thinking about what life might be like for you in a year's time if you do.

It's difficult to do that in a high state of emotion. So the book advises that big decisions should always be made when you're feeling calm. If you can find ways to feel more relaxed, it's recommended you treat yourself by doing them before making a decision that could affect your future.

Part Five
Physically Relaxing

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.
--Henry Ward Beecher

If you are losing your leisure, look out; you may be losing your soul.
--Logan P. Smith

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.
--Cicero

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
--Ovid

Loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.
--Christopher Morley

The book says there are techniques to relax our muscles, that we can do wherever we are. They involve doing something that sounds very unrelaxing at first, but can lead to relaxation afterwards. The technique involves moving our muscles so we increase the tension in them, and then relaxing them and taking notice of any sensations of relaxation we feel in them. For instance, we could clench a fist and then relax it slowly and feel the tension in it drain out.

The Kinds of Things That Can Increase Tension

The author says when the body's relaxed, the mind tends to relax as well. He says the muscles are always tense when we're angry, anxious, fearful or even depressed. But we can feel a bit better if we relax them.

He says sometimes, we can get stressed because of the way we think about things, rather than because they're harmful in themselves. For instance, he says that women who aren't assertive might well find situations where they have to stand up for themselves threatening, whereas women who are used to being assertive might see them as a welcome challenge. And women who've been abused might think of disagreements and raised voices as far more stressful (because of what they remind them of) than women who haven't been abused.

When we're stressed, quite a few things happen physically in the body. Stress hormones get released, and the muscles get tense. I've heard that too much stress can even make us physically ill. Headaches and other pains can sometimes be a sign of stress. Relaxing the muscles can make us feel less stressed, and so it can sometimes improve our physical well-being as well.

The author says stress can sometimes be caused by a series of little but aggravating things, like going through the day having to deal with kids misbehaving, running out of milk, getting stuck in traffic, losing something, and so on, or by a series of life changes like having to get a new job, having to deal with a parent's illness etc. The more big and little difficulties we have, the more of a build-up of stress he says we'll have, unless we can often do things to relax. He says even when problems are resolved, such as if we're stuck in traffic but then we get through it, our tension will go down, but not all the way back to where it was before. So a series of things that raise our tension that get resolved so we stop being so tense will still leave us feeling more and more stressed throughout the day, because each time our tension rises and then goes down, it won't go back down to where it was before, so it'll still end up higher than it was before each thing happened.

The book says sometimes our muscles can be tense even if we're not particularly stressed, so it's worth doing the muscle relaxation exercises even then. But it says the exercises can be especially valuable if we're stressed.

It says that as the muscles relax and people start to feel less tense, their heart rate goes down to more normal levels and their blood pressure drops - basically relaxation reverses all the physical symptoms associated with stress. The brain stops releasing so many stress hormones, and the breathing becomes calmer. All those things make people feel calmer.

Why a Low Level of Tension is Good

The book recommends people do the relaxation exercises often, saying it's good to have a low level of tension, for a few reasons:

Low levels of tension mean we're calmer, and when we're calm, we can think much more clearly than we can if we're in a high state of emotion, so we can make better decisions.

Also, the book says when we've got a low level of tension, we'll be able to learn how to spot little areas of our bodies that are getting more tense, because we won't be tense all over, so we might be able to notice little bits of ourselves that are getting tense that'll be easier to deal with because they're smaller than our whole body, so it'll be quicker to relax them. So, for instance, one bit we might notice getting tense could be our foreheads, where we might get a headache if they're too tense for a while, and we can just relax those bits.

It also says the lower our tension is, the easier it'll be to get it to levels where we're really relaxed.

Also, the book says that when we're tense, we're more likely to engage in bad habits, like saying horrible things to ourselves about how bad we are, or other things that depress us when we keep repeating them to ourselves.

Another reason a low level of tension is good is that stress weakens the immune system so we're more vulnerable to physical diseases. When we're relaxed, the immune system gets stronger.

Another reason why the book says it's good for us to have low levels of tension is that the lower our stress levels are, the less likely we are to lose our composure at any time and panic or get tearful, or lose our temper with someone. The book says a lot of battered women feel guilty about losing their tempers with their children over little things, but if you feel really tense to start with because of a build-up of stressful things, it won't take much at all to tip you over the edge into an outburst of anger or some other emotion. That's why it's good to regularly do things to get our tension levels down.

Actually, I overheard someone recently saying he did some really good exercise, and after that, for about twenty minutes, he felt so relaxed, and such a sense of well-being, that someone could have even come along and told him a list of his faults, and he wouldn't have minded.

So it'll be good if we can do things to get ourselves relaxed, both because it'll make us feel good, and because of all those other reasons. The author says a lot of battered women have post-traumatic stress disorder, and that can make people feel tense even some time after the stressful events they suffered. So it'll be good if you can deliberately do things to get your tension levels down.

The Muscle Relaxation Exercise Itself

The author says the first step in the process is to sit down in a comfortable chair, or lie on the bed or on a couch.

The first thing in the exercise he recommends is that a person clenches their right fist tightly, and holds it tense for about five to ten seconds.

He recommends you point with a finger on your left hand to where the tension is.

Then, he recommends you very slowly unclench your fist, and get your arm into a comfortable position. All the while, concentrate on how nice it feels to have the tension in your right hand being relieved, and how much nicer it feels now it's relaxing.

Experiment with unclenching it at different speeds, so you find out which one helps you feel the best sensations of relaxation as the tension's draining away from it.

He says we might notice when our right fist's clenched that there's quite a bit of tension in our right fore-arm. He reckons noticing that will give us practice for noticing where else tension is in our muscles.

He recommends we can do the tensing and then relaxing and focusing on the sensations of relaxation thing with all our muscle groups if we want.

So that would mean tensing up each one in turn for about five to ten seconds, and then relaxing it, perhaps focusing on the sensations of relaxation in it for about the same length of time, or longer if we're enjoying it, perhaps a lot longer if we like.

He says though tensing up our muscles will make them tenser than they were before we started, when we relax them, they should end up more relaxed than they were before we started.

There are a whole number of things he says we can do. He suggests a certain order to do them in, but it doesn't matter if we do them in a different order or forget to do some.

He recommends that we could start by clenching both fists and then relaxing them.

Then we could tense up both arms, bending them at the elbows and bringing them towards us, feeling the tension in them before relaxing them and feeling the sensations of relaxation in them.

Then we could tense our arms again, this time by holding them out straight in front of us, as if we're reaching out, before relaxing them.

Then we could raise our eyebrows till we feel tension in our foreheads, and then relax them, smoothing them out.

Then we could shut our eyes tightly till we feel the tension in them, and then relax them slowly and enjoy the sensations of relaxation in them.

Then we could put on a broad grin, and feel the tension in our cheeks and around the corners of the mouth, and then relax them.

Then we could tense our tongue by pushing the tip of it hard against the roof of our mouth, focusing on the tension, before relaxing it and taking notice of the growing sensation of relaxation in it.

Then we could press our lips together, before relaxing them.

He recommends people then put their heads back till they feel tension in their necks, and then roll their heads to the left, then to the right, and then straighten them up and put them forward till their chin's against their chest.

Surely you could get dizzy doing that if you aren't careful! Oh well, I'm sure people can just skip that bit if that happens.

Then the book recommends people tense their chest muscles by taking a deep breath, holding it for a while, and then breathing out, releasing the tension, and noticing how much nicer the growing sensation of relaxation feels than the tension did.

Then it recommends we hunch our shoulders up till they're tense, and then let them relax.

Then it suggests we could tense our stomach muscles by pushing our stomach outwards, and then relax it.

We could tense our stomach muscles again by pulling our stomach in and holding it in, and then relax it.

Perhaps it'll be best not to do that after a big meal though!

Then the author recommends people arch their backs by moving the small of their back inwards so the place feels hollow, and holding that position before relaxing.

I suppose if people have got back ache, they ought to check that things like that are allright with a doctor.

Then he recommends that with our legs straight, we point our toes downwards till they feel tense, before relaxing them.

Then he recommends we point our toes upwards till they feel tense, before relaxing them.

When and Where to Do the Muscle Relaxation Exercises

If we can do those muscle relaxation exercises every day, then we should hopefully notice we're feeling more relaxed quite a bit. I think the key is to notice the sensations of relaxation in our muscles when we release the tension in them.

It might take a while to remember the routine, but it won't matter if we do them in a different order or forget a few now and then.

The author says it can be good to do the relaxation exercises twice a day, perhaps once in bed at night before we fall asleep - the relaxation might help us fall asleep; and also when we first wake up, to help get us ready for the day. But he recommends we choose the times of day that are best for us.

But also, he recommends that at other times of the day, we could do the bits of the relaxation exercise that it's practical to do at the time without sitting or lying somewhere relaxing. We could be out somewhere, perhaps at work, in the car or wherever.

He recommends that when something particularly stressful happens to us, we do the muscle relaxation exercise straight afterwards. He says a lot of women who were battered by previous partners will have nightmares about the abuse, wake up in a panic, and then feel distressed all day because they keep thinking about them. He says that thinking about them won't do any good; but the distress can be made quite a bit less intense in five or ten minutes if you spend the time focusing on relaxing your muscles. And that goes for other stressful things as well.

He recommends people think about all their groups of muscles to work out which ones are tense, and then tense them up a lot more in turn and relax them as usual, but do it several times till you feel quite a bit more relaxed. He says most often, the most tense muscles will be in the face. And he recommends that after each time of tensing and relaxing the muscles, people think about whether they're relaxed enough or whether they'd like them more relaxed; and if they would, they can tense and relax those muscles again, and repeat the process.

He recommends that if possible, people find a comfortable chair, or somewhere relaxing anyway, to do that, and that just before they think about their muscles, they breathe very slowly and steadily a few times, since breathing slowly can help calm the system as well.

It might be difficult to tell which muscles are the most tense at first, but he says it will probably come easier with practice. But he recommends that as well as checking to see where our tension's highest at the times when we're particularly stressed, we could do it at regular intervals during the day, such as maybe after or before meals, or at set times throughout the day. He recommends that anyone who has a digital watch with an alarm could set it to go off on the hour, and think about their muscles to see if they can work out which ones are tense as soon as possible after that.

He says one reason that could be a good idea is because it can ground people in the present. If they're absorbed in distressing thoughts or something, and then they have to stop to do something else like the relaxation exercises, it can get them out of it.

I know there are quite a lot of ways to relax that this book doesn't mention. It might take a while to get used to the muscle relaxation thing. I think with these things, people sometimes take a while to find out exactly what works best for them and really get into it. So it's worth sticking with it even if you don't get much benefit from it the first time. But if after a while, you find it still doesn't work for you, it might be worth researching other relaxation exercises.

Part Six
Dealing With Guilt

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
--Edward Phelps

It is only too easy to compel a sensitive human being to feel guilty about anything.
--Morton Irving Seiden

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?
--John Steinbeck

How unhappy is he who cannot forgive himself.
--Publilius Syrus

The author says it's common for survivors of trauma to suffer guilt, thinking they're more, or sometimes much more, responsible for what happened than they really were.

He also says their guilt feelings can be a lot more severe than they might be otherwise, because if you're feeling distressed to begin with, even only a little thing you think you did wrong will make you feel really guilty, since guilt is part made up of the feeling of distress.

I know you keep talking about how upset you are that the children were disturbed by seeing you being abused, Dawn, and that you didn't leave sooner, and you wonder how you could have dated and married him in the first place, and other things, and you use phrases like, "It's all my fault". But it isn't really.

The author says a lot of battered women feel like that, as if they just forget the reasons why they did what they did at the time.

The author gives an example of something like that, saying a woman who'd been sexually abused by her cousin's husband came to him in therapy when she was thirty-eight, feeling guilty because she felt as if she'd been responsible for the abuse. She'd been twelve at the time, and she'd gone into his room. In hindsight, she thought it was possible that Her behaviour could have been interpreted as flirting. So she felt guilty, thinking the abuse was all her fault because she must have made him think she wanted sex. The therapist was finding it difficult to convince her it wasn't her fault, till he asked her if she had any nieces or nephews who were around twelve years old, and when she said she did, he asked her whether if she molested them they could be in any way to blame. She said of course they wouldn't be to blame! Then she thought for a few seconds, and realised it was as if she was thinking she could have thought like a 38-year-old when she was only 12, when in reality, she'd been young and naive, and when she'd been kidding around with her cousin's husband, anything to do with sex was the furthest thing from her mind! Then her therapist asked her if she'd have gone to his room if she'd had even the slightest idea that he'd molest her. She said, "Never!" And her therapist then said that that was proof that she can't have known what was going to happen, since she wouldn't have gone to his room if she'd known it would. So she couldn't blame herself. She couldn't have prevented it from happening if she hadn't known it was going to happen.

Bad Choices

The author says one reason battered women can end up feeling so guilty is that they have choices to make that'll make them feel bad whatever they decide.
For instance, they might decide to call the police, but then feel as if they betrayed their husband by telling on him; but if they don't call the police, they might feel guilty they let their husband get away with doing so much.

If you pressed charges against your husband, you might feel guilty about that, especially if he starts behaving all loving again soon after he abused you, which I've heard is typical abuser behaviour; but if you didn't get him arrested and he went on to do more damage, especially if he hurt the children or they were upset because they saw some of the abuse, you'd feel guilty about that.
You feel guilty about what he's going through now you've left him, and about how the children aren't getting so much money spent on them and they're losing out on a father; but if you'd stayed with him, you'd be feeling guilty about what knowing about the abuse was doing to them, and about how you were just letting him get away with the things he was doing, and other things.

The author says the good news is that once you realise you don't need to feel guilty about two or three of the things you feel guilty about, you'll realise you don't need to feel guilty about the rest, because you'll be feeling guilty because of mistakes in your thinking that make you think things are your fault when they're not, and the same thinking errors will be making you feel guilty about everything, so once you realise you don't need to feel guilty about a few things, you'll realise you don't need to feel guilty about the rest either.

Well, that's the theory anyway.

He goes on to explain the kind of thing he means:

Guilt at Not Having Left for Good Sooner

The author says he's asked battered women in therapy when they think they should have moved out, and a lot say they think they should have moved out the first time their abuser hit them, or that they shouldn't even have married him, or that they should have moved out before they got pregnant, or when their husband became obviously over-controlling or jealous or possessive. But really, at the time, they couldn't have known what was going to happen in the future. It's easy to say with hindsight that we should have done a certain thing, when at the time, we didn't know how things were going to turn out and hoped they'd get better, and thought we might be able to help turn them around anyway.

And don't forget at the time, there were lots of things that made you think it would be best to stay, like the fact that he could be loving at times so you thought the loving person was the real him, so you were always optimistic that he'd get like that more. And moving out would have involved all the hassle of trying to find somewhere else to stay, and your family being disapproving and critical of you because they thought he was so nice. And then when the children came along, you didn't leave for some time because you thought they needed two parents, and because you knew you wouldn't be able to afford to give them as much stuff as they could have, since he was paying for a lot of their things, and because when they went to school, you thought leaving him might mean you had to change their schools and take them away from their friends, and that kind of thing.

The author says people can feel really guilty about staying and forget all the things like that, so they can think they didn't have good reasons for staying.

The author says when he asks battered women in therapy what they should have known better that should have made them know to leave, they often say they should have known their abuser wasn't going to change or that they wouldn't be able to change him, or that they should have known he'd get violent again and things would just get worse, or that they should have known at the beginning that he might get violent and not have married him, or they should have known how the children would be affected, and things like that. But when they start thinking back to what was going on at the time, they can begin to think of a lot of reasons why things didn't seem as clear as that then.

The author says It's usually a long time after the battered women he speaks to in therapy say they think they should have left that they realise they should have left at that time in reality. So he says it's like a woman saying she should have left when she was first hit, even though it didn't occur to her that she should have left then till two years afterwards when she discovered her husband's behaviour was typical of abusers and that such behaviour typically just gets worse and worse. She forgets she didn't know that at the time when he hit her the first time, so she feels guilty about not taking into account the fact that such behaviour is typical of abusers and it usually gets worse and worse, and guilty about not using the knowledge to motivate her to leave when he hit her the first time. That's the kind of thing that can happen when people feel guilty about something. They forget they didn't know various things at the time they made their decisions.

The author says thinking you knew things you didn't so you should have known better is called hind-sight bias. He says it'll be worth remembering that term, so if you catch yourself thinking you should have known better, you could think to yourself, "This is hind-sight bias again."

The author says people looking back thinking they should have known better when really the issues were much more cloudy than they can remember them being will often say things like:

"There were warning signs ... red flags that signalled what was going to happen ... at some level I knew I was meant to leave ... I was making excuses ... I was fooling myself." It's as if you could have been sure right from the beginning that things wouldn't turn out any other way.

The author asks whether, if you knew with certainty everything that was going to happen, or could be sure things wouldn't work out any other way, you'd have stayed. He says if your answer's no, it's proof that you can't blame yourself and accuse yourself of staying even though you knew what was going to happen.

I think that's one problem with relying too much on feelings. Feelings like love can be so strong they stop us seeing things clearly, so we can overlook things we shouldn't, because we really want something.

But then, the author says some battered women blame themselves for staying in an abusive relationship because they had a feeling they should have left earlier. They forget all the reasons they didn't leave, and just remember they had the feeling. Or they remember they did think about leaving, but forget all the reasons they decided not to in the end, so they think they didn't have good reasons not to so they have to blame themselves for having stayed. Or they think they knew staying would lead to worse things than leaving would, so they think they're blameworthy for not having left. At the time though, they might have been sure they'd find a way to stop the abuse if only they tried hard enough, or they might have thought there were serious problems with leaving, like finding somewhere to go that they could afford.

The author says sometimes, women still blame themselves for not having left sooner, because some of the things that happened in the relationship were foreseeable, but not the worst things. For instance, he says a woman in therapy said she knew her boyfriend had a really bad temper and had got into fist fights before she moved in with him, but she still did. But she was forgetting that at the time, she was confident that he wouldn't actually turn his violence on her, and she thought he was trying to turn his life around and thought she could help him change.

The author says it can almost be as if people think they actually caused their abuse when they feel sure they could have prevented it but didn't, because they forget all the reasons they didn't leave or got together with the abuser in the first place. But he says one woman in therapy, reflecting on this, said, "You're right. I didn't pull his fist into my face."

Determining How Justified You Were in Staying

The author says sometimes, people feel bad because they think they should have done something when actually, the option just didn't exist at the time, and they've forgotten that. He gives the example of a woman who was sexually assaulted and came out of it without any physical injuries. She was relieved she'd at least survived, but thought that since she hadn't been injured, she should have fought back, and what happened was at least partly her fault because she hadn't. She'd forgotten for a while that at the time, she probably thought fighting back would be dangerous. She thought that since she'd been uninjured, that meant she would have been able to fight him and remain uninjured. But really, if she had fought, she may well have been hurt.

And there was a woman who'd been in an abusive relationship who felt bad because she thought she should have managed to leave when the children were small. She said she used to day-dream that she'd done it. But at the time, she couldn't think of a way how to. So chiding herself for not doing what she couldn't think of a way to do at the time wasn't doing her any good.

Realising There were Things you Should have Done Later That you Just Didn't Think of at the Time

The author says you're not being fair on yourself if you feel guilty because you didn't do something when you didn't even think of it at the time. You might think you should have thought of it, but if you didn't, it's not your fault that you didn't do it. And it's especially not your fault if you were under so much stress at the time that you couldn't really think clearly. The more stressed a person is, the less they're able to think with all their logical faculties. I mean, I think when people are really anxious or angry or under the influence of some other strong emotion, the less they can calmly weigh everything up.

People's Reasons for Staying in Abusive Relationships

The author says he asks women who were abused in their previous relationships and who are convinced they should have left at a certain time in the past what all the reasons they stayed were, so they can remember more about why they didn't leave at the time when they now think they should have. He gives a list of some of the reasons women have given:

• Some felt they had a duty to keep their marriage vows;
• Some were convinced their children needed a father;
• Some felt sorry for their husbands and were convinced their husbands needed them, and were sure they'd feel really guilty if they abandoned their husbands;
• Some said they didn't have any money or anywhere to go;
• Some were afraid of what their husbands would do to them. Some husbands threatened their wives that if they couldn't have them, no one would. Some wives were scared their husbands would kill them.
• Some women said they still had hope that things would get better;
• Some said they wanted to avoid the stigma of being a divorcee;
• Some said their families would blame them for the break-up;
• Some said they felt as if they'd already failed at one marriage and didn't want to fail at another one;
• Some said they didn't want to feel like someone who gave up on things;
• Some were afraid their husbands would get custody of the children.

Actually, I was talking to an old friend of mine whose husband sometimes hits her recently, and she said she won't leave him because he's part of the family and you don't abandon family. I'd have thought family members who harm you don't deserve the same consideration as the rest. She says it's not as if he hits her every day. She's got young children as well and thinks her children would be a lot better off growing up with a father. But I heard on the radio recently that there's been some research that found that though most of the time, it's true that children are a lot better off growing up with two parents, where one's abusive, the children can do better without them.

But the author says that women who remember all the reasons they had for staying at the time will often realise they don't need to feel so guilty they stayed, because staying seemed the best option at the time.

The author says it's often the case that women stay in abusive relationships because they developed a set of beliefs they were taught as they were growing up that they believed firmly, like that women should stand by their men, keep the family together, be forgiving, put everything they could into making the relationship work, and not break their marital vows. Going against their beliefs when they still had hope that the relationship could work would have led to them feeling guilty and miserable.

Things like that can be forgotten later; but if they're powerful reasons why some women stayed, they're reasons why they shouldn't feel guilty that they stayed.

The author says another thing that needs to be borne in mind is that women in abusive relationships will often be so distressed by what's happening they can't think clearly. Everyone gets like that when they're feeling really emotional.

I know myself that the more emotional I feel, the less easy it is to sit down and weigh everything up logically and make a rational decision about something.

The author says some women feel guilty about not having made the decision to leave before, forgetting that they were so distressed a lot of the time that they just weren't in a fit state to sit down and come to a calm logical conclusion about what the best thing to do would be. He says that can happen to even really intelligent people. Emotions do that to everyone when the emotions are really strong.

Other Things That Cause People to Stay in Abusive Relationships

The author says the reasons people stay in abusive relationships won't just have to do with immediate reasons they can think of, since all kinds of things can happen to bring about the final decision, sometimes stretching right back into history.

For instance, someone might stay in an abusive relationship because they're scared their family will disown them if they leave; and the reason they think that is because it's considered shameful in their culture to leave a husband, no matter what, so their family will condemn them for bringing shame on the family; and the reason it's considered shameful in their culture goes back to some time in the past when the tradition of that way of thinking grew up; and the reason it grew up was because perhaps children were being abandoned by some mothers 1500 years ago, or who knows what, and so a tradition grew up of pressuring families to stay together, and it turned into a cultural attitude that it's shameful for a wife to leave her husband no matter what, or something. But all those things will lead up to the decision of the woman to stay in the abusive relationship.

And it might be that if it was just her family who'd have to know about it, her family wouldn't mind; but one reason they would disown her would be because they'd feel they had to take a stand because of what other people in their community thought; and those people might think they would have to speak out because of what other people might think if they didn't, and so on. So all those things might be contributing to pressure on the woman to stay in the abusive relationship, not just her family's attitude.

The author mentions some more things women have told him that led to them staying in abusive relationships, which didn't have to do with the immediate issue of how badly they were being abused and whether that made it more important to leave than stay, but were factors that still led to them deciding to stay. He says some of the contributing reasons women have given, which mean they shouldn't condemn themselves and feel guilty for having stayed, have been:

• All the good times they remember having with their husband or boyfriend;
• Being brought up to believe marriage should be life-long;
• Being encouraged to stay by a religious authority figure, such as a church minister;
• Learning to think that it was normal to stay in abusive relationships because their mother stayed in one;
• Being taught as they were growing up that if you make your bed you have to lie in it as the old saying goes;
• The abuser reminding them they promised him they'd never leave him;
• Being encouraged to stay by friends and relatives;
• Being brought up to believe children always need their father;
• Being brought up in a way that made them feel guilty very easily, which made it easy for other people to play on that guilt to get what they wanted;
• Being brought up to believe that if a marriage doesn't work, it means the people in it are failures.
• Being brought up to believe that if someone apologises, it means you should go back to the way things were before, always giving them a fresh start regardless of what they did;
• The abuse of their husband or boyfriend making their self-esteem get so low they started thinking they didn't deserve any better;
• Their abusive partner convincing them they'd never find another man who'd accept them for who they were;
• Their abuser convincing them that the children needed him and making them feel guilty about thinking of depriving them of a father;
• Their abuser making them feel guilty about thinking of leaving by convincing them he'd fall apart or commit suicide if they did;
• Being isolated from former friends and family, and so not having access to the opinions of others that could have been weighed up and helped them get a different perspective on things;
• The difficulty of being able to afford to leave;
• The abuse they suffered that made them develop PTSD, that damaged their ability to think clearly or concentrate well, so they found it much more difficult to make rational decisions;
• Their abuser's threats that he would physically harm them or the children if they left;
• Their naivety or lack of knowledge about domestic violence that led to them not realising things that might have made them more likely to leave if they had, such as that their abuser's behaviour in breaking down and apologising after the abuse, only to go back to doing the same thing again, was typical of abusers who don't change, and not unique and always holding fresh genuine promise of change, as they'd thought;
• Coming to believe as they were growing up that all relationships were abusive, so they thought getting out of the one they were in and getting into another one wouldn't solve anything;
• Lack of knowledge about resources available to help victims of domestic violence, like support groups, help-lines or shelters;
• Coming to believe the violence was always their fault, perhaps because their abuser kept telling them they were making them abuse them;
• Developing the attitude that the violence was something to be ashamed of, and being too ashamed to tell anyone;
• Feeling so psychologically beaten down by the abuse that they started believing it would be impossible to get out of the abusive relationship;
• Their abuser's threats that he would try to get custody of the children;
• Their abusive partner's threats that he'd harm their parents or other family members if they left;
• Coming to believe their husband or boyfriend would eventually change and stop abusing them;
• Their memories of how charming and wonderful their husband or boyfriend seemed at the beginning of their relationship;
• Taking drugs or alcohol that clouded their judgment and reduced their ability to make logical decisions;
• Using drugs or alcohol that did that, because their abusive partner put them under pressure to use those substances;
• The apologies and promises to change that their abusive partner kept making that convinced them there was still hope things would get better;
• Feeling that their child or children needed them to stay so they could be with their father;
• Being brought up to believe people have a duty to always keep promises;
• Romance novels and films that showed the heroine influencing nasty men to change, that made them believe it was possible;
• Wanting to avoid the social stigma of being a divorcee or single parent.

The author says the more of such things any one person had influencing their decisions, the less they can blame themselves for having stayed in the abusive relationship for so long.

It's likely that any woman at all who was influenced by the same number of factors you were would have done just the same as you did.

Other Things That Can Make People Think They Were More Responsible for Staying in an Abusive Relationship Than They Were

The author says some formerly battered women make the mistake of assuming they could have influenced things that were in reality out of their control. He says that anyone who does that is being unfair to themselves, just as someone would be if they were given a job that meant they had to make sure everyone in the company got to work on time and that they didn't leave before they should, and they expected to be able to carry it out. In reality, it would be impossible to make sure everyone was at work whenever they should be all the time. After all, there are so many reasons they might come late or leave early.

So an abuser might blame his wife for the abuse, saying that if she'd only cleaned the house better, or something ridiculous like that, he wouldn't have got angry and hit her. But she might have had no idea he wanted the house cleaned perfectly or he'd hit her. But she might still blame herself for being hit because she didn't clean it perfectly. In reality, the abuser would probably just be making a silly excuse for hitting her, saying that thing about wanting the house cleaned perfectly when it wasn't all that important to him really; he'd be blaming her, to get out of the responsibility of hitting her.

The author says another mistake people can make is thinking that because they feel guilty and responsible for what happened, they really are. But feelings just come on because of things we've thought or done, or things that've happened to us in the past that the brain associates with a current situation so it gives us similar feelings to the ones we had then. They don't always mean anything significant in themselves. For instance, some people might really worry about their children getting ill and start to feel anxious about it; but their anxiety won't mean their children are more likely to be ill; it will have just come on because of all the worrying they've been doing. Once our thoughts about any given thing change, our feelings will usually follow along and change as well.

The author says another thinking mistake people can make is believing that everyone is entirely responsible for their own destiny - that people get themselves into situations and it's entirely their responsibility to get themselves out as efficiently as possible, and not to do so is to be fully responsible for staying in them. He says that doesn't take into account all the reasons outside a person's control that led to them getting into the abusive situation and not getting out when they did. That would include what they were taught in their upbringing, the influence their partner had over them, and so on. The author says it's likely that any woman who had the same learning history and found themselves in the same situation as any one abused woman would behave the same.

Feeling Responsible for Everything That Happened After you Think you Should Have Left the Abusive Relationship

The author says abused women typically feel guilty for not having left when they thought they should have; but also, since they think they should have left then, they can blame themselves for every bad thing that happened after that point in the relationship. The author says it's important to realise you weren't really to blame, as you might think you were. He gives a list of things that prove you can't have caused the bad things that happened, that women who were abused have told him happened in their relationships, and which they couldn't hold themselves responsible for at all, because they were in reality caused by other people or circumstances outside their control. They're the kinds of things that might have affected a lot of other women:

• Their abusive husbands or boyfriends who inflicted the abuse on them;
• Their abusive partner's history that had turned him into the cruel person capable of criminal acts he was;
• Their abusive partner's exposure to family violence while he was growing up that led him to accept it as the thing to do and to develop the personality problems he did;
• Their partner feeling resentful towards his mother for not protecting him from his father's anger, that led him to hate women;
• Their partner's use of alcohol or drugs that made his violence worse;
• Their own use of alcohol or drugs that made them lose respect for themselves and numbed their feelings to help them cope better, so they didn't feel like making so many efforts to get out of the relationship.

And so on.

The Feeling You Caused Harm by Staying, for Which you Deserve to Condemn Yourself

The author says a lot of women who've been abused think they did wrong by staying in the abusive relationship and feel really bad about it. But he says that given all the things that influenced them, they're not nearly as guilty as they think. He says wrongdoing is defined as deliberately causing harm. So he asks a couple of questions to prove that the harm that resulted from abused women staying in their relationships can't have been all their fault. He asks:

• Did you intend to cause the bad things that happened as a result of you staying in the relationship, such as his continued abuse?
• Did you know those bad things were going to happen when you decided to stay?

He says if you answered no to both those questions, you can't condemn yourself for deliberately causing harm by deciding to stay in the relationship.

He says that some people feel guilty and think they did wrong, when actually, whatever choice they made, something would have gone wrong. For instance, it might have been a choice between leaving and so depriving the children of the standard of living they were used to when the father's income was coming into the house, and staying and risking the children being traumatised by seeing the abuse. If you think you did wrong because you chose one of those options, you shouldn't feel guilty in reality, because there was no option where things would have turned out perfectly, so to have chosen the option you thought would cause the least amount of harm would actually have been a moral choice.

The author says another mistake people can make in their thinking that makes them feel much more guilty than they deserve to is thinking that something minor they did wrong that led to an unforeseeable tragic outcome was actually something terribly wrong.

For instance, he tells the story of someone who felt guilty and condemned herself for years because she'd played truant from school one day, and something bad happened to her when she did. When she'd been a young teen, she'd been infatuated with a boy at school who was five years older than her. He turned out to be a sociopath, but she didn't know that. He one day suggested they play truant together and go and enjoy themselves on the beach. She agreed. On the way, he said he had to get something from his home. She went in with him and he raped her. Even though she couldn't possibly have known that would happen, she felt really guilty for years about playing truant from school, thinking that if only she hadn't, she wouldn't have been hurt. But in reality, playing truant for the day was a minor thing to do and she couldn't possibly have known what would happen. If they really had enjoyed themselves on the beach as he'd deceived her into believing he wanted them to do, she'd have looked back on the day she played truant with fondness, not guilt.

Thinking About Other Issues That Make You Feel Guilty