Looking Back on Abuse

You only notice the severity and the impact an abusive situation had on you after you've left it.

When you experience an abusive situation, you may be able to tell something isn't right. Your gut feeling will speak to you. You will feel like something isn't normal and you get urges to leave or to talk to someone, and in some extreme cases, you might get suicidal thoughts. The reason is that your mind is looking for an escape.

When you feel those feelings or get those thoughts, these are signs that you need to seek help or get out. Don't ignore those feelings.

Once you're out of the situation, you might think it's over. However there is another part that is not commonly spoken about. After you've left, people will wonder and ask you how you ever got yourself in that situation or why you didn't leave sooner. Hearing these things discourage and hurt people who have been abused, emotionally/mentally or physically, because it's much easier said than done. Easy for someone to tell you after the fact that it looks obvious that you should've left, however, for someone going through it, you do not have the mental clarity of what is right and wrong anymore, especially if you've been in the situation for some time. Enough time to distort your perception of reality and the difference between what is right and wrong, even if you have a gut feeling. To recognize the gut feeling and to take action on it is a skill that people also do not speak about enough.

Once you're out, you may experience people undermining what you went through. You feel the need to explain the entire situation, or you retreat completely and decide you do not what to talk about it at all.

You need to find the balance between speaking and expressing, because unexpressed emotions never die, and between choosing who to tell and who to trust with your vulnerability (another ability that is distorted after you've been abused, but it improves with time).

After you pass that phase, there will be another phase that is unexpected. The part where life starts to become normal again, and you start experiencing what being in healthy situations feels like. The more time that passes, the more you start to realise the effects the abuse had on you. And this is something you only realise as time passes. The more you learn, and research and talk about what has happened to you, the more you start to also understand yourself and the more you can label the experiences that took place and find words that express the emotions you felt that were not normal. It is essential that you do go through a research phase and understand what happened, understand yourself, and why you experienced this. This will not only enable you to recognize any new potentially abusive situation, but also increase your strength, character, and self confidence. This is the healing phase.

Know that you are not alone. The more you search the more you will find that others have gone through similar situations, no matter what the case is, and this will give you reassurance and validation that your feelings were real, what you went through was real, and you have every right to feel the way you do right now. However, the goal is to heal and grow so that experience don't repeat.

Good luck!