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 role 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.

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, show them what love really is...

Have you ever been in a situation where someone exercised an excessive amount of control over you and your life? It doesn’t just happen in romantic relationships, sometimes it is a friendship, others it is a business relationship, some have even experienced that control through the government or legal system.

Bullies weren’t just something we had to deal with during our school days, they grow up, and if they never faced any serious consequences for their behavior their controlling behaviors only increase over time.

When we observe such a relationship from the outside it is easy to ask why someone would tolerate such an abuse of power. It is easy to say we would never allow ourselves to be placed in such a position, but could it still happen?

A large part of the problem lies in the shadows. What lurks in the shadows is usually overlooked entirely, even by those who are direct parties to the relationship. Those dynamics that are at work from the very moment a relationship begins.

Studies have been conducted in nursing homes, and what they found with the inhabitants actually gave us the key to understanding all unbalanced relationships. They were trying to understand why so many residents didn’t seem to care what happened to them, they had given themselves over to apathy.

What they discovered about institutional life taught us a lot about what happens to a person in an abusive situation. Stripped of their unique identity, often of the things that were most important to them they became isolated.

All decisions they had once made for themselves were now made by outside forces. When to wake up, and when to rest, what they eat and when they eat it, even the most mundane choices were taken from them and given to others. Their privacy was stripped away, and replaced with rigid rules that controlled their lives.

By stripping them of their independence it encouraged an unhealthy dependence on their caretakers. Hope is useless, every facet of their daily life is controlled by those in power. Eventually they withdraw inside of themselves, no longer even taking interest in what is going on around them.

Stop and think about someone you know who has fallen victim to apathy. Their head is bowed, they don’t really interact with others, there is a certain isolation factor, and whatever hope they once had has been replaced by indifference.

Why don’t victims leave their abusers? Because a certain dependency exists. In the same way a drug addict has a love/hate relationship with the chemical of their choice, no matter how much they want to leave it behind, they are convinced they can’t live without it.

One thing common to most victims, no matter what the situation, is the feeling that they have no choice in what happens to them. When working with them as advocates, our job is to offer them choices. We know that in the beginning they will reject many of those choices, they have often lost the ability to accept that power, to even believe it exists at all.

Yet we offer, and keep offering, and hopefully, one day they will finally see the choices before them... and reach out and begin to take them one by one.

When dealing with any kind of bully, there is little difference. They find a point of control over another person and they use it. Each incident strengthens the control, digs it in a little deeper, takes away a little more of the freedom of choice, a little more of the dependence, a little more of the person that once was.

Dependence on anything or anyone outside of yourself is a slippery slope. Giving away not just control over your life, but the very power of choice. The next time you are faced with a situation and you feel like you have no choice in the matter... remember you always have a choice, always.

Blessings...

I remember the first time I heard someone talking about their inner child. I thought it was something new age and hokey. It just sounded silly, the idea of reparenting the child you were. Those times are gone, and there is nothing we can do about them.

I’m not sure when I finally understood the idea behind it for the first time, it just finally clicked and made sense. It hit that logical side of my brain that I weigh everything against.

I’m not into fairy tales, the supernatural, the unknown. It interests me, but I don’t really believe in ghosts, or aliens or bigfoot. I don’t not believe in them either. I just can’t buy into things I haven’t seen myself. So how New Agey is the idea of reparenting your inner child?

It’s not, not when you stop to think about it. Wrongs did happen in your past, didn’t they? They happened in all of our pasts. When we think back about those hurts, the wounds open right back up again. We can feel the hurt almost as bad as we did when it happened.

Time does dull that pain, but it is always still there under the surface isn’t it? Is that where our things like addictions come from? All of us just trying to cover up some kind of pain? Doing our best not to think about those things that hurt us, but the more we try not to think about them the more we feel them? Sometimes I suspect that’s where many of our problems in life come from. The simple fact that humans will do anything to avoid pain.

We think about what happened, but how often do we allow ourselves to think about what should have happened, or what we would have liked to have happen. What if we allow our minds to change those memories gradually so that we can actually begin to believe that it happened the good way instead.

Instead of memories of our father drunk and passed out in the hallway, we change it to what should have happened. We imagine our dad being the dad we wanted to have instead. This one didn’t drink, he taught us how to play cards. This one didn’t hit us, this one gave us a hug and laughed when we made a mistake.

If we can allow our minds to do that, and each time we find ourselves thinking about that hurt in our pasts we don;t shove it away but we allow it. We allow it long enough to just shift it, just to nudge it a little more in the right direction each time we think about it.

Instead of thinking about how much abuse you have taken in your life time, imagine yourself stopping it. Standing up to the boyfriend who had you by the throat at a party that night.

Instead of nodding your head and complying with him because you were afraid of what else he would do, you look him in the eye and tell him never to touch you that way again.

Instead of allowing that man to touch you, you imagine yourself standing up to him. Stopping him. Reclaiming your body as your own.

It can work with almost any situation that doesn't seem to go away, it's not a form of denial as much as a way to correct the situation, if only in your head. You will always know the reality, but taking back the power then can help you take back the power now.

I don’t know if it will work for everyone, but it worked for me. That is the beginning of reparenting yourself. There are times in your life when you felt alone or abandoned, you can go back and fix them the same way. You can tell yourself the things you needed to hear as a child.

It doesn’t work right away, and it does take some practice. You will undoubtedly feel silly at first, but try it for awhile and see if you notice any results. Visualization is a powerful tool, and it isn’t rooted in some far of eastern faith it is simply rooted in the science of the mind.

The mind can be trained to do anything with enough practice.