Trigger Warning
This post is about Domestic Abuse. It focuses on reactions to women who stay in abusive relationships. If you have been impacted by an abusive relationship, you may find this post triggering. Please consider whether you continue reading. If you feel safe and happy to do, please scroll down….
I am a Psychotherapist, Hypnotherapist and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. I have over 17 years’ experience working with clients, and prior to that I worked with Social Care, Connexions and the Probation Service.
In my career, I have lost count of the number of women I have worked with around their experiences of Domestic Abuse. In the interests of balance, I have also worked with men and same-sex couples who have experienced Domestic Abuse, but that’s for another article.
Women and abusive relaionships
Why am I writing this now? I am currently working with a lovely woman who recently left an extremely abusive marriage. Like countless women before her, she sat before me with her inner turmoil laid bare, teetering between shame, guilt and anger. These emotional states were heightened by just one question, posed to my client (and many of my previous clients) by several of those in the community around her:
“But why did you stay?”
This woman was forced to leave the life she thought would be hers for the foreseeable future. She was courageous enough to leave behind a man she loved and thought she would grow old with. Terrified and traumatised enough to remove her children from their father and break the silence around the truth of her marriage, she placed herself at risk of death. And then only to be filled with shame and fear about what people may say when they find out what happened to her and her children. Given all of this, what screams at me is the lack of empathy and injustice in this question.
What the question really seems to be saying is this: “What’s wrong with you? Why did you allow a man to do this to you?” It is often accompanied with a tone of condescension; a moral outrage that spells out clearly: “There’s no way that I’d let a man do that to me!” If you’re reading this article and you believe that you’d never, ever be a victim of Domestic Abuse, let me tell you from my experience – you don’t know that. Truly, you don’t.
I’m not going to give an explanation as to why women stay because that would be buying into this narrative. Nevertheless, even if you’re a woman who has experienced abuse, you can’t know what you would do because each set of circumstances, each abusive man, is different.
Reframing the narrative
Let’s reframe the narrative by turning the tables and ask instead “Why did he stay?”.
Why did he stay and act out ever worsening patterns of behaviour?
Why didn’t he take accountability?
Why didn’t he seek help?
Why didn’t he feel shame and guilt deeply enough to leave?
Let’s start asking “But why did he stay?”
I don’t think there is enough dialogue about why men stay where they are. This needs to change. And quickly. There needs to be a reframing so that men feel safe enough to no longer stay, seek help and take accountability for their actions, without being judged or vilified by society – “cancelled” in today’s parlance. There needs to be much more dialogue about why those who abuse stay in the psychological state they’re in.
If you were someone who once asked, “Why did she stay?” I invite you to ask yourself – softly and without self-recrimination – “Why did I focus on her behaviour in staying, rather than on him staying in his abusive behaviour?”
Why do we continue to condemn women who try so hard to keep their family together; who try so hard to be loved and to love?
Why do we continue to judge them from a (largely uninformed) position of moral superiority?
We can be and must be better. All of us. We can offer support to everyone affected by domestic abuse and recognise that our own actions and attitudes also play a role.
What do you think?
With warmth,
Samantha
