Love til it doesn't hurt

A loving person that has endured abuse and mistreatment perhaps due to what we thought was "naivete" was really because we "loved til it hurt". You will find yourself BEYOND hurt and into a place of REAL LOVE in your life; no matter who has hurt you or how badly life has treated you...
when WE LOVE, we win. 

Many of us who have suffered abuse in our lives. We have endured the horrible disrespectful speech and behavior of another person have loved until it HURT and we continued to love through the hurt because either we held a religious belief that "we had to love the unloving" or because we might have thought less of ourselves for not forgiving them for their behavior toward us. We suffered in loving them, not as much for them as we need to "love until it hurt and then some" to prove something to ourselves.  Once we realize that love is NOT intended to hurt and that we don't have to be hurt to love or be loved; then we will be just beginning our healing journey of "finding ourselves, healing from abuse and learning to dream again". 

Are you willing to keep loving even if it keeps hurting? We all have that choice to make. No one is making us take the abuse from another person for the "sake of love" but ourselves. I see it this way...I loved a mentally ill man...very much, but I chose, over time with the help of his abusive behavior to stop loving him and stop wanting to be with him.

Abuse doesn't deserve our understanding; it deserves our absence.

We are worth it!!! 

Do you love someone with mental illness?

I find "word clouds" to be a fun visual way of learning about a topic without actually studying it. Take Mental Illness for instance. Even the term "mental illness" is laden with feelings of foreboding and hesitation.

WHY are we allowing the stigma of mental illness to control our education about it???

I guess we really never learn about something until we have to learn it in order to survive through it. I had never understood that a person could be "mentally ill", and setting aside all the childish classroom humor of other students being "crazy", "retards" or "weird", I always saw people as "people" and believed that everyone was different and that difference was what made the world an interesting place to live. Little did I understand that there is ACTUALLY an illness of the mind. 

The body has illness. We can see when we have a runny nose. We hear that we have a cough or strained voice. We FEEL the pain of overexertion and carry in the way we walk for others to see that "we don't feel well" for whatever reason. We can see the cast on someone's arm or scar which was wrought by a tragic injury. We even sympathize with ourselves and others when we "don't feel good". 

But what about a "mental illness"? It can be an invisible barrier between people; dividing families and binding up the minds of wonderful people who are in constant struggle and pain with an invisible enemy; their own mind. They may try to hide it from themselves within addictions; they are the most common with alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders and addictions to nearly everything from smoking, video gaming and even something that may seem more accepted by society and even looked at as being positive traits like obsessive compulsive disorder, perfectionism and compulsive cleaning.  

I began to understand that I did not understand that MENTAL ILLNESS is real when I began to see OCD traits in my ex husband. When I mentioned his anger at me for not doing things as he did and that "I was ok just the way that I am" he would retort with hurtful and very extrapolated reasons as to how my behavior was not right and that his demands and anger over the salt and pepper shakers being set back into the cupboard where he found them was really a character flaw and evidence of my weakness as a person. 

I quickly realized that in some ways, he was not like me and the ways that he behaved seem unrational, unkind and very unloving but the purpose was for him to "feel good about himself". I realized this and began to explore the reasons WHY a person behaves this way. I started to learn about Obsessive Compulsive disorders that lead me into studying about Personality Disorders. I must have been on every website and forum and read nearly every book on these subjects in order to educate myself on "what had come into my home" under the guise of something lovingly accepted as "being his own person". We can "make allowances" for quirky behavior but when it crossed the line from quirky to abusive, THAT is when I started to listen to my heart and mind and start learning about mental illness...it is real. Sometimes we don't believe something exists until we "see it with our own eyes" and even then, we must brace against the tendency to deny it and delude ourselves into writing it off as "quirky behavior".

You have heard the saying "hurt people HURT people". I believe that this is true and probably truer for a mentally ill person than about anyone. They suffer daily. They may not realize at all that their behavior; their thoughts, their expectations and demands are putting a strain on their close relationships. They may have so much pain that they do not realize that they are "not emotionally connecting" to others as healthy people. 

If you are wondering why a loved one is miserable all the time, blames you for his/her problems, even says that YOU are "the problem" or that you are "mentally ill"...you can be sure that you love a very mentally ill person. Though they do not really intend to be so abusive, the unrequited love and lack of reciprocity in a relationship with a mentally ill person can suck the life right out of us if we allow it. Seriously, how can they have a relationship with us when all they find in us is fault (projection) and spending time with their addictions in order to cope? I have read about instances of severely addicted video gamers who admitted that their games were "the only joy they had". They hid the real reason for their misery in an addiction. This is a denial so great; that unless a mentally healthy person has direct contact in close relationship with a mentally ill person; we may not even give it another thought. It is "just the way he/she is" and since we don't have to deal with them all the time, we can "just live and let live". But for the person who is married to or in family relationship with a mentally ill person; the picture changes.

Educating ourselves about mental health and mental illness will help us recognize these traits in ourselves and others and enable us to live our lives to the fullest.

Authenticity

original quote by Newsong4him.blogspot.com

Authenticity truly is a "higher level" aspiration in our lives and even more so after our self-esteem has been damaged by abuse. I have found that DECLARING who I am and even stating that "and I don't care who likes it" has been like a machete in a jungle bringing clarity to my path and safety along my way. I have the right to respect myself. To love myself and to BE REAL. I have the right as a human to "be who I am" with no apologies. As the above quote says: I may reflect you but I am STILL ME...

My path of healing from abuse

So many days I had moaned at the alarmed clock; covered my head with my pillow and screamed,
"I don't want to get up". Depression, indecisiveness, confusion and hopelessness, lack of self-esteem and constant "second guessing" of myself only added to the burden of the crumbled life that I was trying to live. It seemed so futile to even thing that the nightmare would ever end.


 Add to this, a Narcissistic mentally and emotionally wounded man who constantly criticised my every move, accused me of unthinkable behavior in his projection of his image upon me and then stood in judgement of me rather than showing compassion or any kindness. I learned early in my almost 12 year marriage to him that life is really hard when you don't feel loved and cared for and even harder to accept with no hope to the abuse ceasing. I lived that way for many years. Oh, at first, when the mask of the "good guy" was on and I was not aware of the covert abuse of sabotaging of the step-mother relationship with his daughter and seemingly appearing that I was the one who had a problem "accepting" who he was. Where was the acceptance that I "am who I am?" When I said that I "was hurting" by his words; he could only respond defensively and rather confidently; "You are just too sensitive". It was about that time in my life that I found Verbalabuse.com and Patricia Evans and her wonderful resourceful books on the topic of verbal abuse. In the tumultuous seas of abuse, she and her books and forum became the anchor that gave me the stability and "clarity" that any victim/survivor of abuse really needs.

Death and divorce; they are very similiar and that is why I will borrow the Five Stages of Grief by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in an attempt to retrace my steps that led to healing, extricating myself from abuse and divorce from a verbally abusive and controlling man.

The stages, popularly known by the acronym DABDA, include:

1. Denial — "I feel fine."; "This can't be happening, not to me."  Denial is usually only a temporary defense for the individual. This feeling is generally replaced with heightened awareness of possessions and individuals that will be left behind after death.
2. Anger — "Why me? It's not fair!"; "How can this happen to me?"; '"Who is to blame?" Once in the second stage, the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue. Because of anger, the person is very difficult to care for due to misplaced feelings of rage and envy.
3. Bargaining — "I'll do anything for a few more years."; "I will give my life savings if..." The third stage involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, "I understand I will die, but if I could just do something to buy more time..."
4. Depression — "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"; "I'm going to die soon so whats the point... What's the point?"; "I miss my loved one, why go on?" During the fourth stage, the dying person begins to understand the certainty of death. Because of this, the individual may become silent, refuse visitors and spend much of the time crying and grieving. This process allows the dying person to disconnect from things of love and affection. It is not recommended to attempt to cheer up an individual who is in this stage. It is an important time for grieving that must be processed.
5. Acceptance — "It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it." In this last stage, the individual begins to come to terms with her/his mortality or that of a loved one or tragic event.

Applying my life to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief covered the years from 2002-2010.

I married my ex-husband in 1999. I was beginning to become aware of how verbally and emotionally abusive and controlling he behaved toward me in 2002. I remained in DENIAL that the abuse would stop and that even I must "be seeing this wrong" or that "he is physically ill and it affects him emotionally"; finding any excuse to try to understand and live with his behavior even with one attempt at leaving him and taking our son with me in 2003. Being a Christian, I was apt to believe that he could not possibly BE abusive as he stated that he also believed as I did. I have come to learn thta this was the biggest deception and barrier to breaking of the denial that I had to overcome in order to live a life without abuse.

In November 2007, after reading Patricia Evan's book "The Verbally Abusive Man", I created "The Agreement" as prescribed in her book and presented it to a man who was in denial. His total disregard to "hear me" angered me and that ANGER stayed with me; forcing me to truly look at and accept the truth of our "marriage". This anger stayed with me and took on many forms; none that I allowed to become either self-inflicting or retaliatory. My anger became a power that helped me to be strong in the face of the FOG (Frustration, obligation and guilt) of living with and being married to what I understood finally to be a mentally ill spouse; a personality disordered individual.

The "BARGAINING phase" seemed to wrap itself around the many years but finally came to a close in late 2009. And until my mother had moved out of our home; I continued to hope that I could somehow resolve; notice that I said that "I COULD SOMEHOW RESOLVE" this "miscommunication". I "knew" that it was NOT going to happen. ALL attempts at all counseling and "talking" had only circularly come back to "his innocence" of all that I had "accused him of". The years of 2008-2009 brought more detachment as I STOPPED trying to bargain and began to accept that I was in an abusive marriage.

When I finally accepted the fact that there "was nothing that I could do to positively affect my situation", I fell into DEPRESSION. Of course, losing a son to stillbirth( April 2007), taking my parents into my home (August 2007) and having the betrayal and disconnect with my "then" stepdaughter through sabotage of her father (began 2001), I allowed him to continue to isolate, devalue and demean me, use me and my money and hoard it away from me. At one time I found 11K dollars in cash in our apartment (half of which he claimed belonged to his daughter for back child support from her mother). All attempts at "healing the marriage" was gone. I was now focusing on "me" and my survival. My depression was deep and lasting, it would not "let up".

Finally, in July 2009, I started taking the antidepressants that had been waiting on my amoire shelf for over 8 months. This came with strong insistence of a controlling husband who to try to dissuade me from taking them by saying that I "was not depressed"; possibly to "keep me debilitated" so that I would "not think of " leaving him. The process ended in ACCEPTANCE of the "death of the marriage" instead of continuing through the grief stages. No more "going around in circles". In November 2009 after an "act of fate" in October, I was able to take my son; less than half of our liquid assets (much more I believe that he STILL has hidden in savings bonds that he bought for his daughter) and LEFT his household with NO intention to return to an abusive marriage. It would require an ACT OF GOD, a MIRACLE greater than I had ever seen or even heard of to change the course that I had chosen to take.

Escaping an abusive relationship takes all that WE have to understand WHY we had continued in it so long, what our rewards were from being in it and facing the fear of the unknown outside of it. But it is REALLY worth it!

The Abuse cycle explained by Livestrong