Many survivors of abuse loved and still love their abuser. This can invoke feelings of shame and self-betrayal. We might think “How can I love someone who did such horrible things to me?”. Whether the abuser was a romantic partner, a parent, or a family member, whether the abuse was emotional, physical, sexual, mental, spiritual, or all of the above-it’s okay to still care about and love someone who caused you tremendous pain and suffering. Your ability to love this person even still after what they’ve done to you is a testament to the enduring strength and resolve inside you. A more critical part of you might see this love as a weakness. Why would anyone love their abuser? Abusers have a way of using our compassion, empathy, and love for them to take advantage of and exploit us. If applied without wisdom, empathy and compassion can send us back into the arms of the abuser time and time again, hoping that this time, things will be different. In fact, from a more spiritual perspective, many survivors stayed stuck in abuse because they didn’t love their neighbor as they loved themselves-they loved their neighbor more than they loved themselves. And they kept on receiving a twisted version of that “die-to-self” message while bearing a burden of sin that was never theirs to bear. Abusers Exploit EmpathyThe abuser high in narcissistic traits might sneer at and consider the ability to empathize and love as a weakness-a weakness that deserves to be taken advantage of. In reality, they sneer at traits such as love, compassion, and empathy because they’re unconsciously aware that they don’t possess those qualities. They’re aware on some level that they can’t experience true joy and vulnerable connection with other human beings, and they’re envious of your ability to create and enjoy those experiences. Loving your abuser is one of the most painful things you can ever do. You love them while they’re hurting you, stealing from you, violating you, lying to you, hitting you, mocking you, screaming at you, slandering you, and criticizing you. You love them so much that even when they’re hurting you, you worry about them. You empathize with them. You know why they act the way they do, what difficult past they had, you can see and feel how much they’re hurting. And they weaponize it. They remind you after they’ve hit you that you did xyz and caused them to hit you. They tell you after they’ve molested and raped you that you were just asking for it, that you’re their child so they can touch you and do whatever they’d like with you and you’d better not tell or they’ll go away to prison, or they tearfully tell you about their own sexual assault at the hands of a family member when they were just a child like you. They threaten to hurt themselves or end their lives if you try to leave. Because they know you care. We empathize with them, want to see them happy, want to close the disconnect and resolve the conflict between us and them, want to ease their pain. Our brains rationalize “If I can just love them enough, then things will change”. Children living in dysfunctional families blame themselves for the abusive parent’s behavior “If I had gotten an A, dad wouldn’t have had to hit me”. This is how the abused mind maintains a semblance of hope in a circumstance where there is little safety or self-agency. It confuses the brain that someone we love is the source of so much pain and fear. The Cost of Loving The AbuserWe see things in the abuser that we love-their humor, intelligence, acts of kindness, and generosity. These are the qualities that keep us hoping that if we can just love them enough, they’ll show us this side of them again. It’s not all bad, we reason. When it’s good, it’s great; when it’s bad, it’s…terrifying. Heart-wrenching. Overwhelming. Despairing. Isolating. Exhausting. Physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually painful. Some of those positive qualities we love are parts of who the abuser might’ve been had they made different decisions in life. However, many of the endearing, positive qualities that we see in the abuser often belong to the false self that the abuser projects onto the outside world to get what they want. The false self is the person the abuser pretends to be to appeal to people, to gain trust, status, achievements, and love. The false self is made up of the qualities that the abuser admires in others but is aware on an unconscious level that they lack. The abuser’s personality is often made up of fragments of other people that they envy and wish they could become. Their sense of self is so fragmented that they can easily mold their identity to suit the needs, interests, and desires of their intended target. This is why many victims of abuse will say that the abuser first appeared to them as their dream partner. As children, we see glimpses of the people our parents might’ve been had they made different choices. Out of a need for safety, a child will convince themselves that their abusive parent is truly a loving and compassionate parent who has no choice but to harm them because they are such a “bad” child. Whether we are the child or the romantic partner of the abuser, we can desperately expend our energy trying to resurrect the person we love and bring them back to us. As the child of an abusive parent grows older, they might struggle to come to terms with the reality that the parent they love so much treated them in horrific and exploitative ways. This is further complicated when the child has knowledge of the abusive parent’s own traumatic upbringing. It can feel like a betrayal and a lack of love towards the abusive parent if the child acknowledges the pain the parent caused them. Is It Unloving to Hold The Abuser Accountable?The choice to cut ties with the abuser is often a last-ditch effort after doing all they could to save and preserve the relationship. This time, the survivor had to choose to save and preserve themselves. Oddly, our culture has a way of faulting the victim of the abuse who chooses to walk away, while simultaneously faulting victims who stay in abusive relationships. We’re told that we’re unloving, vindictive, unforgiving, and hard-hearted (especially in spiritual communities) for setting boundaries with and refusing to participate in abusive relationships any longer. Yet, we rarely hear the truthful validation that the abuser was selfish, controlling, egotistical, entitled, violent, manipulative, exploitative, sadistic, and cruel. Our decision to set boundaries wasn't what caused the end of the relationship. The abuser's choice to be abusive did. It’s not unloving to set boundaries. It’s actually unloving to enable dysfunctional, abusive behavior to continue when we have the means and the self-agency available to us to put a stop to it. Leaving takes away the abuser’s ability to continue to inflict pain and suffering on another human being. Leaving forces the abuser to be alone with themselves, and although it is rare and unlikely, gives them the incentive they need to seek help and become accountable for their behavior. In many instances, leaving an abusive environment protects the people around us-ourselves, our children, spouse, friends, pets, etc from being exposed to the abuse. You can leave a relationship and still feel love for the other person. It might not be the type of love that is mutually gratifying, deeply connected, and vulnerable. This type of love holds people accountable. It holds them to a higher standard. It allows them to face the consequences of their own actions, because shielding them from those consequences and continuing to keep their secrets and enable their behavior is hurting us, and it’s keeping them from facing the real-world consequences of their actions that they need to deal with if there's any chance at all of them learning from them. This type of love regards the abuser as an equal adult who holds responsibility for their life decisions and is capable of learning new ways of thinking, being, and relating to others. It refuses to continue to provide them with the ammunition to go around hurting others-in essence, refusing to give the drunk alcoholic the keys to our car-because we don’t want to get hurt, we don’t want others to get hurt, and we don’t want them to get hurt. Removing ourselves from the relationship and effectively keeping the abuser from having access to us prevents them from causing us and the people we love any further harm. It also allows us to live out our life's purpose in a meaningful and fulfilling way, making contributions to the world that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do under the weight of the abuse. This love acknowledges and respects the abuser’s right to make their own decisions and doesn’t attempt to control or change the abuser. It’s the type of love that says “I respect your sacred right as a human being to spend the life you have in this way, and I cannot force to you change no matter how much I wish you would”. Then it steps out of harm’s way-because this type of love also acknowledges our right to be treated respectfully and lovingly. Unsafe People and How They Retraumatize SurvivorsSome accuse survivors of abuse who choose to cut ties with their abusers, particularly adult children from abusive families and women in religious communities who divorce abusive husbands, face backlash on a social and cultural level. The underlying shaming sentiment is that if we hold our abusers accountable, end the relationship, and tell the truth about the abuse, then we are unloving, unforgiving people. We don’t want to be misunderstood and perceived in this way. We loved our abuser so much, and lived so long telling ourselves that if we could just extend them enough love and forgiveness, the abuse would finally stop. Our love for them was weaponized against us and used to keep us trapped. Many adult survivors still feel like they did in childhood; they feel they must continue to lie to uphold the public image of their family and continue to keep the terrible dark secrets of what the abuser did to them. Abuse thrives in secrecy. Evil thrives in the dark. Children who grow up abused spend their entire childhood trying to create a loving relationship with their parent only to wake up as adults and realize their childhood was effectively taken away from them. It was spent trying to appease and striving to earn the unobtainable, conditional love of an abuser. When the reality of abuse does come to light, our society regards the horrors of the abuse like entertainment, attempts to come up with an explanation and rationalization for the abuser’s actions, or refuses to acknowledge the reality of the abuse altogether. It’s easier to hold the ugly reality at arm’s length and pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to assume that we’re all well-intentioned people simply doing our best, than it is to acknowledge that evil is real, and people can choose to do evil. When abuse survivors use their voices and tell their stories, people get uncomfortable. Discomfort isn’t an emotion most people have a great capacity to sit with. In general, humans don’t like being uncomfortable. If it’s uncomfortable for you, the listener, to hear the survivor disclose the reality of the abuse that was perpetrated against them, then I wonder how much more uncomfortable and painful it must’ve been for the survivor of the abuse to endure it? I wonder, if we as a society on both a cultural and spiritual level focused on protecting and supporting survivors, and less on explaining, justifying, and attempting to pressure reconciliation with abusers, how many victims of abuse would still be alive and free from their abusers today? If we shifted our empathy and compassion towards the survivor rather than towards the offender, I wonder how much healing we as a society might experience? If we stopped tolerating, defending, and attempting to rationalize dysfunctional behavior, and instead held people accountable for their actions, would this not make our communities and homes safer places? Would it not make other offenders think twice before they harmed another person or child? What does it say about us as a culture and as individuals if we are willing to overlook the suffering of survivors of abuse in favor of empathizing with the abuser? What does it say about us if we place the pressure and responsibility for reconciliation of the relationship onto the survivor’s shoulders, often without even holding space for the survivor’s pain and offering to walk alongside them as they heal? Often, what I’ve found is those who push so hard for survivors of abuse to reconcile with their abuser do so because to acknowledge the reality of the abuse causes them discomfort. And rather than consider the survivor’s painful uncomfortable reality, they would rather shame the survivor into silence and pressure them to go back to their abuser. If someone’s first reaction to a survivor disclosing abuse is to push for forgiveness and reconciliation, they have an unresolved issue within themselves. If they do not know your story, are unwilling to support you while you process your pain, and choose not to acknowledge the gravity of what was done to you, their input is irrelevant. This is an issue especially predominant in Christian circles and institutions where we fail time and time again to show survivors God’s heart for the abused and His desire to bring them justice. Instead, what these religious circles and institutions do is rally around and protect the interests of the abuser, especially if that abuser is a pillar of the community or is the survivor’s parent. When a survivor discloses abuse and the listener’s knee-jerk reaction is to pressure immediate, unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation, it’s not the survivor’s best interests that are being prioritized. It’s their own-and the abuser’s. This reaction conveys the message that the survivor’s pain and safety does not matter-and that appeasing others and the abuser by upholding a false image of wholeness matters more. It also discourages the survivor from disclosing the reality of what is being done to them again and increases their anxiety around seeking the support they need to actually leave the abusive relationship and heal in the aftermath. Shame Dies in The Light of The TruthSafe, healthy, loving people will listen to the survivor’s story. They will be less concerned with rationalizing the abuser’s motives and reconciling the abusive relationship, and more concerned about the survivor’s well-being.
They will listen with the intent to understand FIRST and foremost, without attempting to interject with what they think the survivor “should” and “shouldn’t” do, without accusing the survivor of attempting to create unnecessary drama and hardship for the abuser, and without offering pat responses and religious platitudes. Safe people have the capacity to sit with the survivor in pain. They can put their own discomfort on the backburner and create a space for the survivor to share the reality of the abuse and express the burdens they’ve been carrying. The more we can interact with safe people, the more our internalized shame from the abuse dies. Abuse flourishes in the dark and in secrecy-when our pain is brought out into the light of day and validated by people who have the desire to show us the love and care we deserved but didn’t receive in the past, we heal.
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Hi, I'm Hazel!I'm an Associate Licensed Counselor in Birmingham, Alabama and provide Trauma Recovery Coaching worldwide!
I earned my M.Ed. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Montevallo. My special interests include trauma healing, abuse recovery, and attachment work. Archives
October 2024
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Disclaimer: All content is for informational and educational purposes only. The opinions stated within my content are mine and they do not represent the ACA, APA, any other individual, therapist, institution, or organization.