battered women

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...are not easy to deal with. You have to remember that they are women. Adults. They don't, but you have to. They're going to go through a stultifyingly-complex galaxy of rationalizations and conflicts over bits of existential trivia until you think your head will explode. They're attached to everything, EVERYTHING and their own personality disorders are on full blast in response to the abuse they are suffering. They do need help, but NOBODY can keep them safe until they are ready to be kept safe.

If you keep falling for their harrowing pleas or even just their harrowing situations seeming like pleas to you, you are NOT helping them! You are becoming company in their self-imposed abjection.

There is almost nowhere left in America where one is too far from real help when one wants it and is determined to have it.

If you've clicked the link above, you have a great portal into the nuances of every aspect of domestic violence, but I don't know if even this gives an idea of the tenacity with which a battered woman will cling to her abuse. A major aspect of it is that abusive men tend to be highly jealous lovers, which is a BIG turn on to insecure women... which would be at least half of us... or more. A jealous man makes a woman with no self-esteem feel like a goddess, a real woman, a wife, a desirable, normal woman. It is utter barnswoggle, but this is a FACT of the psychology of really low self-esteem. Anyone who will pay enough attention to you to boss you around or fly into jealous rages feels like your girlhood fantasies of being swept off your feet by Prince Charming. I am telling you flat out that not even being used as a punching bag will jog many people from ego trips that intoxicating... sick as they unquestionably are.

Even seeing the cold facts cannot topple this subconscious association of the batterer's obsessive behaviors with "love", and friends and family will have their hearts and guts yanked out of their throats a thousand times by the woman who is the victim of domestic violence. Not the batterer. The victim will do that yanking, and it can persist for decades, for a lifetime... and a great many families of such women end up numb to it, dazed, removed... unable to care for their fucked-up daughters and sisters anymore. I've seen it happen many times.

That's why I feel it is essential to point out that the victim is an adult and CAN see to her own safety. I know plenty of women who left their men the first time a hand was raised against them and never looked back. There are a million excuses and even some of them very good ones -- unable to move her stuff is not one of them -- but the bottom line is:

THE WOMAN MUST GET HERSELF OUT OF IT.

Even if she does, the odds are heavy that she will find another relationship just as bad. No amount of big-heartedness for her benefit will end up counting for anything more than satisfying the big-hearted about their own superior big-heartedness, and these women can sound 100% solidly sensible, and make heroic escapes, swear on stacks of bibles, stake money on it, any of a vast array of assurances that they will leave their persecutors... and return to them in a heartbeat nonetheless.

That's when the big-hearted resort to holding festivals for their own wonderfulness. I guess if they're addicts it might turn out to be a good scene... never-ending cycles of opportunity to crank out more giving to secretly reinforce the I'm-a-big-old-sweetie-pie self-image gig. And, lort only knows, the tendency to party in these quicksand bogs of the ego definitely is getting stronger the worse things get in the world. Is it really better than making a better world though? Up to you.

JUST KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN!