"The
partner who fails to insist upon acknowledging/clearing the first
abusive interaction through to mutual satisfaction becomes cause
for all successive abuses." I.e. "I need to hear you say that you
know that what you just did/said didn't feel good." It's the most
important command of your relationship; not insisted upon will allow
you to later recall when you consciously intended (awarded, enabled)
the abuse.
"Virtually
all divorced couples
withheld a significant thought from each other on or
before their
very first date; both brought their addictions to deceit and blaming (to
withholding) into the
relationship." There are no exceptions to this phenomenon.
Examples of thoughts withheld on the first date: I expect to, or I definitely will not, have sex
tonight. I have
herpes but it's not active tonight. I've been in an abusive relationship. I'm enabler—my family
is abusively
dysfunctional, they refuse to
get therapy. I'm dating another. I'm just dating you for . . .
You're not at all what I'm looking for in a partner. I will
not be introducing you to my friends or parents. And, the biggie, the fact that
your parents haven't insisted on you introducing me to them before a
date
suggests that you are desperate for affection and validation.
If your date/partner does or says something that doesn't feel good it's your
responsibility to extract an acknowledgment, a communication that lets
you know, with certainty, that they know that their communication didn't feel good.
Letting
(causing) a condescending remark to slide, ostensibly so as to maintain the illusion of harmony, is
referred to as a setup.
When you non-verbally support abuse you become the
enabler, the cause, for its compounding karma; no matter what your mind believes
you'll eventually discover that it was you masterminding a divorce,
saving up enough abuses to warrant a divorce. All abusive interactions
between couples are in fact about earlier similar
(usually childhood) incompletes, abusive
communications for which neither have been acknowledged (caught).
Two examples:
1) If either parent hit you when you were a child (yes,
spanking is
abusive*) and,
the parent didn't follow up with ("I get that I was "abusive"
to you earlier today") or, you have not asked a parent to acknowledge
a specific abusive incident during childhood, then you will not have the courage to insist upon your spouse
treating you respectfully.
Wimps always magnetically attract bullies;
they control the bully by submitting to (therefore unconsciously
intending) the abuse; a "victim" compounds the effects of their
machinations with a lie, denying that they are the cause. For more read:
Newton's Third Law as applies to spousal abuse.
2) If you yelled at your child and have not followed up with ("I get
that I was abusive to you earlier today") then you are training your
child to accept bullying and to be abusive to his/her future spouse; you are teaching him/her
that abuse is acceptable from a loved one if the reason is good enough.
The Spouse Abuse Tutorial is not about stopping yourself from being
abusive, it's about agreeing to
responsibly (from cause) acknowledge
each and every abusive communication. When partners make this agreement
they both will begin to observe just how often they are abusive; these
observations eventually put one in choice. It can be said that there are
no victims
or bullies with spousal abuse, merely sparring partners, who (albeit it
unconsciously) agree to abuse and to be abused. All domestic violence
begins with one partner setting up the other to abuse them. What causes
abuse to persist is the "victim" has not accepted responsibility for
setting up (for causing) their partner to abuse them; he/she is addicted
to blaming.
Of interest:
Most couples who both have served in the military do not
tolerate physical abuse; this is partly because women who have been
through military boot camp are more physically and mentally confident, they
simply command respect non-verbally. On the other hand, girls
who have been trained by parents to submit to condescending verbal
abuse, girls who coincidentally haven't developed their upper body
strength and girls who are uncomfortable hugging their father often can't recognize when their
partner is being condescending. A submissive posture (often evidenced
by
head tilting
when speaking) guarantees an undesirable reaction from a bully
or a control freak;
it is in fact a non-verbal invitation to be taken advantage
of; men in particular look for partners they can control. Within a few
conversations a man knows whether or not a woman must be treated as an
equal.
* A parent who says they only spank
their child from love are lying. It's impossible to experience the
experience of love while hitting another. Such a parent has lost his/her
ability (perhaps never had it) to produce the desired behaviors via
verbal, non-verbal, and psychic communications.
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