Dear Janice:

This is my understanding: when you were a child, you loved your father and you wanted him to love you. But he hit you and it hurt when he did. Like all young children, you figured that you  must have done something wrong, or that there was something very wrong with you, and that is why he hit you. You then tried to be a good girl, a good daughter to him, but he hit you again and again.

Fast forward, you are now a woman, you meet this man who sometime in the relationship starts hitting you with words, and his words hurt you. And just like when you were a child, you figured that you must have done something wrong, or that there is something wrong with you, and that is why he hit you with his words.

And he himself told you that you have done something wrong (had sex  before meeting him) and that you are stupid, that is, there is something wrong with your intelligence.

And just like you tried to be a good girl with your father, when you were a child (so that he will love you and not hit you), you tried to love this man more, or better so that he will love you back and no longer say hurtful things to you (“I thought if I stayed long enough and convince him that I love him, he will change”).

Your efforts with this man failed just as they did with your father, because both your father and this man, when they hit you, physically and with words, they were after power, not love.

I wrote to you yesterday that what this man communicated to you with his words is something like: “Don’t look at me like I am your equal, look at me as someone superior to you who is kind to you, the inferior one”-

-love is about equality of value:  the parent viewing his child as of equal human value to himself and therefore not hitting the child, and the man viewing his girlfriend as of equal  value to himself, and therefore he will not hitting her with words.

Power is about hitting  so to have power-over a person, to be the superior one in human value and the other, the inferior one.

anita