Query about others in bad relationship?

[Sunflowersandstars]

Do any of you pick up on warning signs in others relationships? Approach or not? On the one hand I think it’s not my place to interfere but then I wonder if someone had approached me in a sensitive manner if it would have helped me. Any advice/experiences greatly appreciated.
SaS

[Dragonfly]

I’ve seen it but it was with a work colleague and his wife. He speaks to her like she’s a child and also being very rude. This is over the phone so I’ve never met her but she seems to take it. I’ve jokingly said to him “ooooOOOOOOoooo feeling the love here” but he just mumbles and gets on with his work.

One of my friends desperately tried to warn me, told me what my ex did to his ex wife. Did I listen? No. In fact I told him what she said then within the month we were no longer friends! Been best friends for 30 yrs and he managed to get me away from her. We’re back to being best friends now though 🙂

[Dragonfly]

Do you think your situation would have been different if someone had approached you?

[Tiffany]

I wish someone had been able to point out to me in a subtle way that I was being abused. Now that I am out I feel like it would have helped. But honestly, in the last year of my relationship with my abuser a work colleague, who I had a great relationship with and whose judgement I trusted asked me straight out if my partner was abusive and even though I was having ydoubts about the relationship by then I just denied that there were issues and defended my abuser. Saying that I did get out less than 6 months after this – so maybe it did help.

[Sunflowersandstars]

I’m not sure I think it would have depended on who it was and the manner in what it was approached. I doubt it would have made me leave at that point but it maybe would have made me think about things and if I hadn’t felt so alone I might have had more strength. It’s hard to say. It’s a tricky one eh.
SaS

[HopeLifeJoy]

That’s a difficult question…because even if you see from the outside what is happening and you want to warn someone, when you are in it, you just don’t see it.

My sister saw what was happening to me and told me, she didn’t actually use the words domestic abuse but she mirrored his behaviour to me but I couldn’t see it in the same light.
Only when my own body started to get panic attacks because of him I knew I had to get away quickly.

So it’s a tough call to say the least.
I think that if it’s a friend of yours you can offer your support and friendship and listen respectfully to her. Ask her is she is open to hear about information on domestic abuse. It doesn’t have to be about her. Tell her about your own experience. Maybe she recognises some behaviour in her partner and start to see her own relationship in a different light.

[Dragonfly]

It is a difficult question but maybe now, going forward I think we can recognise signs and hopefully stop it in its tracks by getting out before we get in! Personally I cannot see me having another relationship ever. Too many red flags everywhere which is quite sad to some extent. I’ve had a lot of ‘self’ taken away from me as I’m sure we all have.

[survivorandproud]

Numerous people warned me about my ex partner, none of my friends liked him or my family. They could sense he would be bad news. Despite this, I still gave him a chance and unfortunately they were right! Even when he was hurting me, he would beg for forgiveness and I still went back. There’s only so much family and friends can warn you, in the end and they start cutting ties. So in reality I feel like we can be warned but it’s up to us what we do with this information! Abusers are great at manipulating the situation and making us think everyone else is wrong and that we ‘belong’ with them. The positive thing to take from this is in the future when we suspect warning signs, we need to get out as soon as we can, because more than likely, they are always right!! So yes I think you should inform your friend, maybe offer some helplines or support groups, but don’t be hurt if they ignore your advice, everyone has their own timeline and when they say enough is enough. Good luck x

[KIP.]

I think if someone had mentioned domestic abuse during my relationship I would have denied it however if they had explained that domestic abuse isn’t about a drunk man beating up his wife then perhaps I would have realised at an earlier stage there was far more to domestic abuse than that. So I would tread carefully. I know a friend of mine asked about her neighbour and I gave her my cope of Living with the Dominator to pass on with the national helpline number. I remember a lady at a dinner table I had just met was telling a ‘funny story’ about how when her and her husband went shopping and the cashier asks him if he would like a ‘bag for life’ he always responded ‘no it’s all right, I’ve already got one’ and points at her. That’s just the sort of hurtful thing my ex would do and hide behind it as a joke. The others at the table laughed but I really felt sorry for her. A few years ago I might have laughed too. But I could see her unease.

[Rockandrolldreamscomethrough]

Unfortunately I have tried to warn a few people, most of them were my friends, about their abusive partners. My first experience of a friend being in a DA relationship was when we were , (age removed by moderator) she had met a guy at college, he was a little bit older than her and seemed nice enough. Until he started getting angry when she would leave his to go home. In the end he would physically stop her from his or he would make her feel so bad that she stayed. In the end she ended up moving in there permenantly, we barely saw her. When i did see her she would tell me they had been arguing and he had been accusing her of cheating all the time. But she still loved him and wanted to stay with him. We tried to get her out, me and our group of friends offered her to live at ours. We told our parents and even they spoke to her and told her what was happening was wrong. But she went back each time. In a way I can understand why, she didn’t have any real family of her own and was looking for a place to call a home but that wasn’t it. After  years she did leave him.
When I was (detail removed by moderator) I heard one of my work colleagues crying in the toilets on the phone to her boyfriend, she was apologising because she had a stomach bug and he had gotten angry with her when she asked if he was able to come pick her up from work and bring her home and she wasn’t well. I just remember hearing her say ‘I know, I’m sorry’ over and over again. I had seen her upset a couple of times due to him attempting to cheat on her with girls from his work numerous times. She also told me that he had told her not to eat as he liked her a certain weight. She was always tearful and on edge in work and I wanted nothing more than for him to leave him as I could see her deteriorating mentally and develop an eating disorder. I told her to come live with me as I had a spare bedroom. Countless people in work told her to leave him. One of the managers pulled her into a room one day and asked her if everything was okay at home because she had noticed her getting thinner and more stressed. It didn’t help. She loved him and had told me she wouldnt leave him because he could be nice ‘sometimes’. When I left to have my daughter she stopped replying to my messages and dropped off the radar. She’s still with him now I gather. I think you can definitely warn people and offer help but they will only leave if they want to. No one warned me about my ex because he had everyone fooled. I saw a couple of warning signs at the start like trying to control what I wore and being jealous of other men that I knew. I put that down to him being insecure though. I never dreamed it would be anything more serious. When I was about 5 months pregnant and things started getting really bad between us I was signed off work due to being ill with my pregnancy. He wasn’t working so I was just stuck with him in the house most of the time. I do believe that if I’d been well enough to go to work and be around people who weren’t abusive that I’d of been able to see clearer about what was happening. That is all hindsight though.

[still here]

Hi. People witnessed my daughter’s father’s behaviour towards me when he was on the telephone to me, and he was unaware I was in company. They never said anything to me other than ‘just as well’ we weren’t together. I think what is beneficial is when you learn about something like Women’s Aid and domestic abuse and can go and read something up on it and recognise what is happening and KNOW that there is help out there for you to reach out to when you feel you can. So you can see that there is a bigger picture to this and its not just your own relationship but something that happens widely. Then you don’t have to walk around feeling like its just you. I remember a young woman I saw once in a town centre and the man she was with, presumably her boyfriend, was being a bully with her. I stopped and lingered, looking at her and I saw that she saw me and must have seen the look of concern on my face. I didn’t know what to do because I thought if I interfere in any way it could have made things worse for her and I made sure he didn’t see me looking (I pretended I was rummaging through my bags). I wished I’d had a card in my pocket with the local domestic abuse advisory service on it, but even if I had managed to pass it to her who knows how he might have blown up if he had become aware of it? So I just waited uncertainly until they went back inside a shop.

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