A book that has really helped me & big lesson learnt – Don’t date too soon!

[Eyesopening]

Hi all,
Just wanted to share, I have been feeling really low for a while now. I am out but I live with my parents, my dad can be abusive and set me off down a spiralling hole of preffing to be back with my ex..Leaving one abusive situation and going to another is so difficult. This book really helped me, becuase it makes me understand, how they actually get into our heads, they change our thinking, they brainwash us. We minimise what they did becuase they brainwash us and we use their words as our own. This book has been great for me and I have read so many.

Don Henessy, ’How He Gets into Her Head: The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser’

Also a lesson I have learnt and I wanted to share incase it helps someone, dating too early will do you no favours, I thought I was ready, I was bored, wanted male attention, worried about my body clock ticking, so I went on one date. It ended up as quite a long dating situation, he messed me up with not commiting, but acting like we were in a relationship, on paper he was everything my ex wasn’t – was a responsible adult and didn’t play to those gender roles. I attached to him so quickly it was quite scary how out of control I was. He started portraying red flags. I didn’t care. I knew them, I saw them, I didn’t have the strength to walk away. He ended it luckily and I was devastated and so so hurt. The whole time I was with him, I hardly though about my ex, I thought everything was ok. As soon as he ended it, it was like a tornado of all the past months healing that I hadn’t done, all came hurtling down onto me. This was the hardest time, it was as hard as when I first left, like even some work had been undone. So my advice, don’t date, wait. We are so vulnerable, even when some days we may think we can do it and we are having some good days. Years of brainwashing and trauma bonding don’t go away quickly. I think my trauma bond just transferred to this new guy. I think what WA say about waiting 2 years may be quite right.
Much love
x*x

[Wants To Help]

Hi Eyesopening,

This is such a great post and a very brave one as it’s so raw and honest. I agree with everything you have written.

I believe that recognising abuse and acknowledging our abusive relationship also includes recognising and analysing our own behaviours too and making sure that we also change our ways so that we can ensure we don’t end up with another abuser. This often leads to facing our fears or worries of being on our own and having to be on our own for periods of time we’ve never been before since we were old enough to enter relationships. I know for sure now that it is better to be alone on your own than to be ‘alone’ in a relationship.

Your recent struggles of looking back to your relationship in those wonderful rose tinted spectacles (we all have a pair!) are probably not so much about missing him but missing having someone to share intimate and loving moments with. We all know that our abusers are not horrible 24/7 and when we get nostalgic we look back on those good times with affection instead of the bad times with horror. One of my best holidays abroad was with my abuser, but also one of my worst – and I’m talking about two different holidays here, not one. After spending a whole two weeks with him having laughs and love I convinced myself that the abuse was all down to his stress at work, stress at home, me expecting too much from him, me not being understanding enough, me needing to try harder etc. Looking back, I think that in all the years we were together those two weeks were the longest we ever went without conflict. On another holiday it was an absolute nightmare, I wanted to fly home early and he drove off in the hire car leaving me stranded with no money or passport (we didn’t have mobile phones back then) for hours and I just had to wait hoping he’d come back for me. He eventually did many hours later, didn’t apologise and said he hoped I’d learned my lesson for being so selfish!

These men love us and hate us, punish us and reward us, give to us and take from us, and we never know which it will be. A loving relationship should be consistent with kind, caring, thoughtful loving behaviour, but what we end up with is being caught in a TRAP which is all about issues of trust, respect, abuse and power.

We need to give ourself lots of time and space to understand ourselves and tackle our own issues before we can be with someone else and start to understand if they are the one for us.

xx

[Author]

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