Getting out of abusive relationship will always leave you with scars. Sometimes the scars are caused by physical abuse. Luckily, with time, the physical pain that caused those scars tends to fade from your memory (the human body has the wonderful healing ability that tries to prevent you from filing physical pain into long term memory, unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen for some).
Sometimes the scars can also be emotional. Unlike a broken bone, which your body will repair over time, an emotional scar can last a long long time, and in some cases may not ever really heal. These emotional scars have an impact on you, your view of the world, and your future relationships.
One of the things I battle in my new life is guilt. I carry a tremendous amount of guilt. There’s a cycle of guilt that I get on some times and it can take serious work to get off that wheel. That cycle of guilt is a Catch-22, if ever there was one, an emotional prison where no matter what you do, you end up feeling bad.
The cycle is straight forward and consists of three components:
- Should
- Action/Inaction
- Guilt
If doesn’t matter where you get on the cycle, as these things influence and feed off each other. In my case, let’s talk about a “should”, as in “I should have gotten my kids out with me.” This “should” stems from my desire to protect my children and save them from any abuse that I went through. For many years, I remained in my abusive relationship because I felt as long as I was there to be the target, I could shield my children, by bearing the brunt of it.
Out of this “should” came an opportunity for my action or inaction. When action is taken, it involves you doing what you think you, or maybe the other person, or some group, wants you to do. In this case, the action of taking my children would have been my attempt to sidestep the guilt that I bore. In contrast to action, inaction means shutting down, holding back, or staying suck, also in an attempt to avoid guilt. In my case, I stayed, being abused, all because I thought I was doing what was in the best interest of the kids.
And now, here’s the rub. No matter what you do, the guilt is unavoidable. The whole point about the cycle of guilt is that you aren’t living life in your own best interest anymore. You’re running on a wheel, and you’re letting someone else spin it. In my case, the guilt that I couldn’t take the kids with me, while I was able to escape my abuser, gnaws at me. On the flip side, had I been able to successfully take them with me, I would have felt guilty for not taking them sooner. As long as your in the guilt cycle, there is no escape. All decisions lead to the same conclusion in this hamster wheel: you are going to feel guilt.
At its core, guilt is an issue with our own self-acceptance. What happens in some relationships is that we are loved conditionally. If you do what the other person wants you to do, then their love is granted. However, if you don’t give in to the other person’s desires/demands, then their love is withheld, and you don’t gain their approval.
If this pattern of performing another’s wishes to gain acceptance and/or love is repeated over and over again, then we can, unfortunately and mistakenly, take this to heart and begin to love ourselves conditionally. Does, “If I do this, only then am I worth of love and self-respect” sound familiar?
Often times, you might even start having to rely on other people for approval and acceptance, looking to fulfill their wishes over your own. So much so that you might even begin believing that you don’t have needs at all, or worse yet, that you’re not even allowed to have needs of your own. And with that, BAMM! you’ve entered the guilt cycle once again.
The way to get off the cycle is self-acceptance. You need to being to understand your guilt cycle. Unfortunately, the process to self-acceptance is a journey, and is not something you can just flip a switch on and make it happen. It will take some time, but identifying the guilt, and the person (or persons) you are carrying it for, will come. Recognizing the nature of your guilt cycle is a tremendous step forward in gaining self-acceptance, and ultimately a way to get off this hamster wheel of guilt.
In my case, I know now that I was in no position to help the children while I was in a constant state of heightened fight or flight. How could someone be expected to help others when they couldn’t even help them self? In the end, I had to leave, so that I could get the help that I needed.
In time, as the children get older, they will begin to understand what happened and why I had to escape. Even though they don’t know what was causing the old me to never smile or be happy back then, they do see the new, happy, smiling me, and they love the new dad. And these days, together with my wife (my friend, my partner, my rock, and my love), we get the chance to show them how a real loving relationship/partnership works. That’s the best way I can help my children to understand.
//twd