Abusive Relationships

We really are very shallow as a human race a lot of the time. We go on externals far too much, to how we make choices or decisions. How someone looks, fat or not fat, colour of skin, visible disability or deformity, and many other things in life, we make judgments, as much as we fight against doing so, as much as we may outwardly deny it, in some area of life, we probably all do this with something or other. A thing that to us personally is the thing that gets to use like any of the other similar things in that kind of scenario may not do.

If we see a woman, a wife, with a black eye or two, a few weeks later, she has broken ribs, or a cut lip, all her friends, family and rest, will be so outraged on her behalf and want to protect her and get her to a place of safety. Yet in mentally abusive relationships, the same is often not true.

I watched something recently on TV, about the mind games of mental abuse. And the abuser, said to someone who confronted him about his actions, (it was not to his spouse in this case but someone he felt he had a score to settle with) after the guy he was playing mind games with, snapped and busted his lip and gave him also a black eye, he said to the medical person treating him, who confronted him about his mind games, and said he was sick to play such vicious games: he said pointing to his battered and bruised face, "This will fade, in a week, but he (the person he had played mental mind games with) mental abuse, doesn't fade. It's there every day, living with him, and it will drive him crazy, and plant doubts about himself, for many a long year to come."

Normally these men seem perfectly good men to the outside world, it is only within the confines of their own house that this behaviour appears, and yet to everyone else is seen as a “good man,” or “Mr respectable.” So we are loathe to believe what we are told he does within his own walls. That’s the first external appearance deception.

If we see a woman who is being physically battered by her husband, we should do all we can to get her to a place of safety or protection. But, those scars may well fade one day, when she is out of the abusive relationship; yet the woman who to appearances, has it all, a good man in other people’s eyes, and has never laid a hand on her, yet is playing mind games, and mentally abusing her, those scars and wounds will live in her mind for a very long time, they won't fade the same, and there will always be something come into her mind, that will trigger the thoughts to doubt herself, by the way her thoughts have been manipulated to believe false things about herself. We shouldn't turn away from her, or leave her to endure it, in my opinion, one iota more than the woman with the black eye who is being battered in her marriage. The ones are physical, and we can easily see, we don't need to be convinced because the evidence is before our eyes; but the game of mental abuse, means very often the protagonist of it, will make the woman seem like she is the one who is at fault in other folks eyes, and their friends all fall into his trap, one from Satan, of siding with the abuser, and thinking poorly of the person being abused, because there is no obvious wounds that we can easily see. Yet the scars of mental abuse, go right to the soul, far more than those of physical abuse in my opinion. Yet we almost always, differentiate between the two. The one her battered face immediately gains our sympathy, while the woman who is being tortured in her mind, often is condemned by us, as the one at fault, because after all, the abuser is an expert at mind games and manipulation. And we have fallen into his trap, no less than his wife has, only in our case, we then become her torturers too, and she is left helpless, and without support, to cope with wounds that will not heal for many a long time, and because we have sided with this "good man," we see in front of us, and think poorly of her because we only have her word for it, rather than a busted lip or a black eyes, we then leave her to a fate, of continued abuse, because we are deceived by external appearances. Both the man who seems a perfectly "good man," in our eyes, and the woman who looks perfectly fine and dandy without a mark on her to show abuse, but the real wounds for her, are in her mind, and heart, and penetrating through to her soul. But for our shallowness, of being deceived by externals so much, we could have helped, yet because we were deceived, we also became a part of her affliction and allows the abuse to continue.