Dear tinywandrelust/ Reader:

There are many things to learn and re-learn from reading the quotes above. Some things that come to mind: an abuser blames the abused for displaying the consequences of the abuse. It is as insane as if a person stabs another with a knife and then blames the victim for bleeding. In child abuse, when the child reacts to the abuse by being anxious and spaced out, for example, the parent will blame the child for being anxious, easily scared, a coward and for being spaced out.

While the parent caused the injuries leading, naturally, automatically to these consequences, symptoms, the parent blames the child victim for naturally and automatically reacting to the abuse.

There are other things, but there is one thing that speaks to me the most today, and this is it:

You knew all along he was abusive, from an early point on. You knew the truth, you felt peaceful and empowered knowing the truth. Then you felt weak and lonely-

and you no longer knew the truth: this is why you went back to him.

You knew and then you didn’t know; then you knew again and didn’t know and so on… until in therapy, your trusted therapist told you what you knew and this time you kept what you knew for a longer time than ever, long enough until you met a decent man.

The reason you needed your therapist to tell you what you already knew is that you didn’t know it.

It is my experience that in childhood, certain truths, certain realities are too distressing to acknowledge, to see As Is. Certain truths are too scary to see as is and live with. So we close our eyes, we not- know what we know. And so we can survive what is too threatening to see.

There is a benefit of this, and it is surviving. And there is a price to pay: our knowing becomes fragile. So in future relationships that are wrong for us, we sometimes know but when we are weak, as we were when children, we go to what was safe then: not knowing.

So we go between knowing and not knowing ….

You repeated the point that there was a trauma before the start of the abusive relationship with this man. I believe it is that trauma or traumas where the not knowing was applied.

It is a process requiring lots of courage and support (and you had the support of a long term therapist and friends), to know and keep a knowing through times of weakness, loneliness and distress.

anita