Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life by Edith Eger

Author:Edith Eger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Joy is a wonderful role model for how to dissolve rigid thinking. For many years, she was married to an abusive man. He treated her with disdain and contempt, hurting her verbally and financially, regularly threatening her with a gun to her head. She survived by keeping journals, meticulously cataloguing their interactions, what each of them said and did. It was a bid for sanity—keeping track of the truth day by day.

When I work with a patient who is in an abusive relationship, I always say: If your partner ever hits you, leave right away. Go to a transitional living center. Stay with a friend or relative. Take the kids, ask for help, and get out.

If you don’t leave the first time, the abuser isn’t going to take you seriously. And each instance of abuse will make it harder and harder to leave. The violence will usually get worse the longer you stay. And it will get more difficult to reverse the psychological aspects of the abuse, the things the abuser wants you to believe—that you’re nothing without him, that when he hits you, it’s your fault. Every minute you stay, you’re putting yourself in harm’s way. You are much too precious for that!

When someone hits you, it’s an instant wake-up call. You know what you’re dealing with. It isn’t easy to leave, but once you have the awareness of your partner’s capacity and tendency for violence, the problem is 50 percent solved. When the abuse is more covert and psychological, you may doubt what you see. You may ask, “Is this really happening to me?” If someone physically harms you, you know. Yes, it’s happening. Yes, I’ve got to go.

Without the physical scars of abuse, it was difficult for Joy to leave the relationship. (This is another common experience for people trapped in an abusive dynamic—the fear, and too often the reality, that we won’t be believed.) Eventually, realizing it was only a matter of time before her husband acted on his threats, Joy divorced him, and he slowly drank himself to death.

After he died, anger boiled through her. She had been clinging to the hope that one day he might apologize for the years of unkindness—recognize his mistakes, admit she was right to have left him. When he died, she had to accept that she’d never get an apology. She’d never get to win the fight. In an effort to make peace with the past, she went back to the journals she’d kept. What she read shocked her—not how cruel her husband had been, but how cruel she had been to him.

“I bullied my husband,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘He’s abusing me,’ but I was doing it right back to him. Keeping the kids from him, denying him things, using the kids as tools to get to him, just because I wanted to hurt him. I was so desperate. I thought there was no other way out. I couldn’t see beyond the terrible situation. But he wasn’t the only one making trouble in our marriage.

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