Are You Lost In the Abuse? How You Can Tell - and Why it Happens
Have you wondered why you put up with toxic behaviors and patterns in your relationship? Have your friends and/or family asked you why you didn’t just leave, or even worse, what’s wrong with you for putting up with the abuse. Although at some point in your healing process, it is helpful to self-reflect so you can gain awareness about your responses to the abuse, it is harmful when we or others add shame and blame on top of the abuse we have experienced. A better question we can ask ourselves or someone else who has experienced abuse is “What happened to you?”. Can you hear the shift in perspective and the care that it delivers to the receiver?
When I heard the words ‘lost in the abuse’, that was my answer to this last question. I was lost in the incremental, insidious abuse because I was holding up a house of cards. I was trying to keep my family intact. It wasn’t until I was able to get out of the toxic cycle that I began to see things more clearly. So what does getting lost in the abuse look like, and why does it happen?
How to Tell if You’re Lost
You give into the abuser’s demands.
Your goals and dreams have disappeared.
You don’t remember or even bring up your own likes/dislikes, opinions and values.
You’re unhappy but afraid to say so.
You manage the abusive person’s response by taking responsibility and blaming yourself when things go wrong.
You downplay the abuse or make excuses about your abuser’s behaviors to friends and family.
You continuously doubt and ask yourself questions like “Am I going crazy?”, “Am I the one to blame?”, “Am I overreacting?”, “Am I being too sensitive?”
I remember a time when something abusive happened in front of my mother and children. I was scared and shocked, but instead of calling that out, I excused what he had done by blaming the stress in his life. I just made up the stress, and everyone went back to what they were doing. I knew my mother was shocked, but she didn’t want to get involved. When we were alone, she just said “well that’s him”. I was clearly lost in the abuse and needed a lifeline which I didn’t get.
So Why Does this Happen?
One reason is our brain chemistry. There are brain chemicals involved when our bodies feel, pleasure and stress. When we are in the love bombing or hoovering phase of a narcissistic relationship, for instance, higher levels of Oxytocin and Dopamine are released making us feel bonded to a person and we can experience a craving to be with them. And when we are in extreme stress, Cortisol and Adrenaline hormones are released which helps protect us when we’re in danger. This is what we have come to know as our “flight or fight” response. When we are in a constant cycle of hypervigilance, we are in a heightened state of sensory sensitivity and extreme alertness and our brains’s threat-detection system goes into overdrive. In other words, our bodies are doing exactly what they are designed to do in survival mode — it just wasn't designed for a cycle that never ends.
Another reason we can get lost in the abuse is if we have children and want to protect them. We can’t imagine being separate from our children in a custody arrangement. We are rightly concerned that the abuser will try to alienate our children from us; and we keep trying to be a buffer so they don't have to solely experience the toxic behaviors in a narcissistic or toxic family system.
A third reason is our conditioning and indoctrination into thinking we can’t make it on our own financially, professionally or emotionally. Or we’ve been conditioned to think this is the way it is because of how we were raised and how our parents interacted. These are all normal, valid and understandable reasons.
Can you relate to this powerful cycle of getting lost in abuse? Naming this pattern is often the first step toward reclaiming yourself.
Becoming aware of behaviors and patterns is the gateway to sustainable change and that’s where the coaching process can be so powerful. Please reach out to talk to one of our coaches about how and why you feel lost in the abuse.
I one was lost and now am found - Amazing Grace
