Dear Teni:

I’d like to elaborate on my short reply of yesterday:

About your partner, you shared: “My partner is a person who deals with problems by getting mad… they get annoyed/ mad/ sad when I sleep earlier than them… if I oversleep or during sleep in like midnight… they have said this a lot, like ‘I think I would kill myself if you broke up with me“.

About yourself: “I don’t like getting mad at all… I am usually sensitive to anger, whether its light or heavy… I don’t feel comfortable sleeping earlier than them… I get anxious when I sleep… I get scared showing my feelings as I get anger back…  I want to end but, but I am afraid they might hurt themselves“.

As I see it, within the relationship, your partner is often, or predominantly angry and you are predominantly anxious, and your partner’s anger fuels your anxiety (everyone is scared of being the target of someone’s anger)

About compatibility: “I am unsure if we probably are not compatible because of the differences in anger“- unfortunately, the combination of a predominantly angry person and a predominantly anxious person is a combination that is “compatible” in the context of abusive relationships: the Angry person being the Abuser, and the Anxious one- the Abused.

Most often, both parties are suffering, but one person’s (inadequate, distorted) solution to their pain is to Attack. The Attacking party gets to feel empowered by witnessing the Anxious party surrendering. For the otherwise powerless-feeling individual (the Attacker), the feeling of power over the other individual is pleasurable and addictive, so they want more and more of it.

Your partner asserts power-over you when threatening suicide. An abusive relationship is about power-over, not love, but with a twist: there are times when the abuser is authentically vulnerable, honest and lovable. But those are only moments within an abusive relationship, confusing moments. Confusing because unlike in cartoons and some fictional movies, where the bad-guy is always bad, in real-life, no one is always bad, and everyone has moments when the good, loving child-within expresses itself through the abuser.

And when it happens, the Abused may want to help the loving, lovable child within the Abuser, but alas, the adult abuser won’t let you because they are already helping themselves to you.

anita