Thread: Ever break it off with someone because....

A lot of this goes back to childhood and seeing where it all began can help but you can still easily slip back into old patterns. I was raised being told I was "selfish" and "mean", I had several younger siblings and was not permitted to have anything was "mine". I had to share everything but they didn't. That isn't just me, one of my sisters brought it up to me a few years ago, commenting that it was very wrong. Looking back my mom had some real issues with a more than 10 yr older sister who died while mom was still a kid, they never worked past it. (Yet mom's scrapbooks are filled with lovely cards and notes from this horrible sister.) I was told that I was "just like" this sister. This was unreasonable and silly but I was branded with it. Combined with being trained to accept unpredictable violent outbursts from men, a first love who participated in my being gang raped, followed up by being stalked by a stranger later - it's no wonder I've had several emotionally abusive relationships. I did learn early not to tollerate the physical abuse.

Many abusers start off really nice. They've learned how to cover up what they are until they've gotten someone connected. They are also expert at finding people who are conditoned to that kind of behavior. It's a hard cycle to break out of and when you've been pulled into it a few times, you can get really skittish about anyone who seems too good. After all it would be easy to get really emotionally pulled in and then it's going to hurt at another level all together - or so it seems. Learning to see what would be warning signs to someone raised with high esteem, who had not been conditioned to accept abuse, is a tricky business. This can have to do with response that function at a deep and subtle level. When you are trying to correct it and break out of the pattern, you know that what seems comfortable may be really unhealthy but you don't have the skills to always distinguish unhealthy comfortable from healthy comfortable.

This is apparently what I'm dealing with. We are both trying to break these patterns. I think I'm trying to stay very open and have accepted the risk of getting hurt, he's fighting being open, trying to protect himself, unwilling to risk too much. I think we both know we could have something very powerful but we have work it out, get through our obsticle course. Frustrating as it is, I don't know if it would work for either of us to be with someone who hasn't dealt with this, they might be loving, patient and try to be understanding but they wouldn't really know what was going on. I suspect a lot of people feel this.