What do you hear most people saying when they come to know about someone's abusive relationship or past? It must be "Why didn't you just leave?, Why were you putting up with that?, Didn't you ask for help from your parents? Did you do something wrong?, Was it a love marriage?"
This is how people have been talking with the survivors of an abusive relationship. Well, it's time we learn about the dynamics of an abuse cycle, which is the Tension-Building Phase, Acute or Crisis Phase, and Calm or Honeymoon Phase.
In this pattern of behavior, we see how a survivor chooses to stay in or out but could never reach a final decision. Like in the first phase the survivor tries to hide the abuse from family, or friends to make everything look perfect, the tension-building phase. The next level explains how suffocating it becomes for the survivor to put up and carry on, abuser starts to threaten in the name of child safety, public reputation, or the most commonly used; the survivor's mental instability. As the frequency of abuse increases, the next level takes place in which as the tension begins to fade the abuser might try to reconcile using gifts and plan trips to cover up the past. The abuser starts emotionally controlling by saying, It will never happen again, "I love you and I can't live without you, I want to change myself, We will start afresh."
Why can't people help themselves from leaving the abuser:
Your family has left you on your own.
This is also a socially-build norm that once you are married there's no way to crawl back or leave. You got to find a way out of it and the abuser's family is only your family now.
The abuser is threatening you.
One of the common reasons for staying in an abusive relationship is that sometimes when the abuser fails to stop the survivor from leaving, they try to scare the victim so that it never reaches the people out of the room.
Threats include child safety, Divorce, killing, suicide, etc.
Societal pressure
Since society has normalized such behavior, the victim feels a constant dilemma to step out of the abusive relationship. Once the cycle of violence starts running the victims find it struggling to make a decision when they are made to feel responsible for what's happening.
Gaslighting and victim blaming
A very frequent reason for staying in an abusive relationship. When the abuser starts to manipulate the victim by making them question their own sanity. By undermining the victim's confidence they become easier to control and forcing them into self-doubt they successfully stop the survivor from leaving.
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