When I was working with our local advocacy center as a client, I think I knew even then that I would become an advocate someday. When I thought about all of the things they did for me, I just knew I wanted to give that gift to others as soon as I was strong enough.

I couldn’t help anyone if I couldn’t first help myself. It took a few years for me to get to a place where I felt I had dealt with my past enough to help others deal with their issues. Now I find I have been an advocate long enough that I am comfortable with the role.

There were some unexpected effects that came from my training. I should have seen it coming, but oddly I didn’t. It just kind of snuck up on me, slowly I found my self more and more intolerant of not just extreme abuse, but the more minor variations as well.

I see the way people sometimes treat other people, and where I might have been able to overlook disrespectful comments made by one partner to another I can’t anymore. Before I know it my mouth has opened and I am preaching again.

I don’t know what else to call it, it isn’t religious in nature but it is preaching just the same. Nobody has the right to make anyone feel inferior, ever, yet I hear one spouse do it to another and I cringe. This is supposed to be the person they love most in the world, and they choose to hurt them?

I’ve learned what not to say to a victim, even though it may be true in some cases, you still never tell a victim that someone who loves you would never abuse you. Because that is OUR definition of love, but theirs is different.

What right do we have to tell them that the person they love doesn’t love them? To take away the only form of love they know? They already feel unworthy of the love they have, and us taking what small glimpse of love they do have away does them more harm than good, no matter how well meaning.

The same thing has to happen with all of the people we try to help, in essence we must help them learn to redefine love, and that process begins with teaching them to love themselves. That’s really all there is to it.

Some people define it as man-hating, but we help men as well. Some say we are just feminists, out to destroy the real man for the sake of woman, that we want to demasculinize men and make women into combat boot wearing radical guerrillas in the war between the genders, nope, not really.

All we really want to do is teach those in abusive or painful circumstances is that they deserve better, we all do. I don’t want my daughters to hate men when they grow up, but I do want them to accept nothing but respect from any partner romantic or otherwise. I want my son to respect women, but I also want him to respect himself.

Life is too short to be wasted in misery. I spent a great many years there, it isn’t a pretty place to be. Looking back all of the memories from the times I have suffered from abuse are dark and hazy, no matter what time of day the memory takes place, in my mind I always see it as night.

I didn’t know what was going on was abuse, because I never had any black eyes, I never had any broken bones. Most of what I had were hurt feelings. Sometimes the thought would cross my mind that this was not love, that love wasn’t supposed to hurt more than it felt good...

I would think it and push it away before it really took hold. I couldn’t afford to think like that because I needed to be loved and I had to find a way to earn that love. If I just let them do whatever they wanted, they would stay with me. I wanted someone who would love me, and I wanted someone who would not leave me, even if that meant giving up myself.

It never occurred to me that I deserved to be loved just because I was me. I didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to do everything right, someone who really loved me would not punish me, people who love one another don’t punish, they work through it.

The funny thing is, I don’t even know why I thought that way. The only thing that changed from then until now is my thoughts, that’s it. I see things differently now.

If you want to help someone in an abusive relationship, you simply show them what love really is... you model healthy relationships for them, and eventually they will see the difference for themselves.