Do you ever wonder where abuse comes from? I do. I know abuse comes in many forms, mental and physical and uses techniques such as manipulation and force. You can be abused by your partner, your parents, your children or your friends. Can all abuse be traced down to a single behavioral error on someone’s behalf?
Somewhere along the way the abuse started and I have always wondered where.
Being abused myself by multiple people it was time to think about this problem I continuously experienced throughout my life. Once you start to change behavioral patterns you notice the quality of your life rapidly changes. So after some digging into myself I started asking myself this question. One of the things I learnt when talking to my sister about it, was that when you freely give out a lot of information about yourself, you gift another person with easy tools to manipulate you. Here we are one step closer to the root cause of my problem. I am a talker, I love to talk. When I meet a stranger and this stranger asks me what I do, they can expect an elaborate story varying in subjects and themes even though this all started off with a single question. Why do I automatically hand out all my life information to strangers and is it wise to do so?
I guess it is my nature to trust people when I meet them, but the next question is whether I should automatically trust people or not. I find this difficult, I’m an optimist and I like to trust people.
I like to think that most people are good and this also results in meeting authentic and nice people. So even though some abuse may come out of it, I still like the viewpoint where I trust people that I meet.
Let’s take it a step further then. I noticed a similarity between all forms of abuse and this similarity is what I like to call “the gap” and the gap causes a huge problem in relationships all over the world. The gap forms when one of two persons meeting each other, finds the other person to be of more or less value. A disbalance occurs that is hard to take back later and this disbalance is what I mean when I mention “the gap”. When you meet someone that you admire (more than yourself) you create space for the other person to abuse you. It doesn’t necessarily mean the other person is going to abuse you, this all depends on the nature of their character of course. But when they do start to abuse you, you will notice that sooner or later the relationship is out of balance. You start to do all sorts of things for this person, whenever they ask anything from you, whether you like it or not. And once you start doing this the gap will usually widen.
Takers can keep taking without getting tired of it, but givers, they tend to eventually lose their minds.
Once I noticed this gap in all relationships I had that were of abusive nature, I started to evaluate this. Is the other person (the person that I admired from meeting them) actually better than me? When this relationship had gone a bit further I noticed that in all cases this was not my truth. It was in many cases even far from my truth. Maybe the person possessed the simple gift of wooing me during our first meeting that I couldn’t see it clearly anymore. The gap that occurred simply wasn’t meant to be there. This whole disbalance was created by me, myself and I.
Well, this is a great observation, because if something starts off from my own wrongdoing, it means that this is something that I can change.
This is the time where I really started to ponder. I like to think of myself as somewhat of a philosopher and I don’t mind seeing my ugly parts. And it seemed that even though I had worked for a long time to boost my self-esteem, my low self-esteem dating from my childhood was still intertwined in certain behavioral patterns such as this one. In other words, it was an old habit that I had created. This was something that I needed to change right away as at that point in my life I was in an abusive relationship. Even though I had met this lady only two months prior, she was living in my house with her son and I was walking her dog three times a day. Yes, this really happened. All because I thought that she was better than me, that I needed her.
But really, when she’s living in your house and you are watching her child and dog, doesn’t this mean that she needs you more than you need her? By this time the relationship had worn me down. I was tired and my thought patterns were rapidly spiraling down towards negativity. In this particular situation I chose to end the whole relationship immediately as it was so out of balance that there was, from my end, no will to fix it.
And once I saw this negative behavior that I had dragged along all my life, I started releasing it. This is of course a work in progress. As I mentioned before, I like to trust people when I meet them, but ever since I noticed this gap I created myself, I started paying more attention to new people in my life. I started to think more about what I thought of people. Do I actually think they are perfect or is it just a first impression? Do I actually think I am worse than them and does such a thing even exist?
The more I think about it, the more I see it does not exist at all, only in your mind.
One way to test people on their behavior is to mirror back at them. Whenever someone asks you a question during your first conversations, ask them the same question back. You will be able to judge them on their own answers. Are they sharing anything with you or are they not? When they are only interested in finding out about you and not sharing their own life with you, this is a definite red flag.
Equal relationships are about sharing both your lives, sharing instead of taking and giving. I wish I could teach this to children all over the world. Some grow up in a huge gap-situation where they are constantly abused by their parents. I wish I could tell them that their parents are only human too, and that they sometimes express their hard times upon their children. I feel like children in these sorts of households will later in their life be abused by all sorts of people, simply because it was their jumping off point. The older I became, the more I began to see the struggle my parents were dealing with, from their childhood and then on. Eventually it made me forgive them as well as I forgave myself, but I wish I knew sooner that it should not have affected my adult life in such a way. These days I am practicing my releasing skills and I notice that it has become easier over time. Some people aren’t meant to stay in your life, they are meant as a test, to see whether or not you have learnt your lessons.
You don’t have to become vengeful, you don’t have to hold a grudge against them. They are just people too, with their own past and their own experiences.
Sometimes it is what it is, but at least now you know that you can make a conscious decision whether you continue a relationship or not. They say that when the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window. Maybe it is time for us to trust on this. Maybe when you are in a difficult abusive relationship, it is time to close that door and open that window. Maybe it’s foggy, maybe you don’t see the window yet, you just have to trust it is there and take the leap. It might change your life completely.
I wish everyone that feels stuck in an abusive relationship all the courage to find their window, to step out of it. Take that chance, it is always going to feel better than being abused.
“When you know your worth, no one can make you feel worthless.”
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are my own and are based on my personal life experience. Content is for educational and inspirational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice.
