I had this insight a while ago while talking to my therapist and I thought sharing might help some people out. My story is not terribly uncommon, several years ago I had a child with a man who thought that my pregnancy was his chance to implement a regime of control and escalating physical abuse against me while I was trying to navigate first time motherhood. The resolution was not so common. I bided my time and was able to use the legal process to banhammer that fool out of my life and negotiate a divorce settlement to protect my child and my assets.

Though the initial stages of retaining a lawyer and making an exit plan, while I was still living with my ex-husband, I felt a lot of guilt related to our relationship-- I was planning on throwing him out in the literal cold with a RO with a kickout order attached-- even though the man was essentially engaging in criminal acts that are considered crimes against humanity in any context besides when a man chooses to commit them against his own wife and children. Coercive control, using fear and intimidation, assault, manipulation, battery and property destruction.

I persisted despite the guilt I felt and I have to say that after everything was resolved, I no longer feel any guilt related to our relationship or how it ended. That dude got what he deserved. Probably less, because he really deserved a real prison sentence for his behavior. This essay isn't a comment on how the law coddles domestic abusers, but that certainly factored into this whole period where he was choosing to victimize me. There was no chance that any criminal court was going to give him anything but a slap on the wrist for how he was choosing to behave, and I believe that type of handling definitely emboldened him to double down on his abusive behavior over time.

On Guilt.

One feeling that is very common among victims of abuse, is an extreme sense of guilt. Abusers are very adept of using this sense of guilt to control the actions of their victims, to keep them from breaking away or making the abuser deal with the consequences of his own actions. They do this by using the reversal method to cast themselves as victims themselves. Calling himself a victim isn't just a way to avoid detection from the outside, when he constantly talks about his victimhood, he is reinforcing the mental image of him as victim to his own victim. By repeating it over and over, even though you know that his behavior is assaultive and dangerous, he can still persuade you to subconsciously see him as a victim and have pity for him.

This creates a feedback loop, he acts out, you feel guilt, and then you rationalize that feeling of guilt as being caused by something that you did wrong against him, because you are already primed to see him as a victim by his constant repetition. But this does not reflect reality.

The thing about feeling is that they just happen, and we, as humans have to figure out what is causing those feelings. Some people are better at this than others, American's are notoriously poor at reflecting on their own emotional states because it takes a lot of guidance and practice to effectively identify the source of an emotion. You have to be present enough to notice *when* an emotion occurs so you can connect it to it's origination, otherwise you are left with a lot of unresolved feelings and no context by which to judge them. Abusers take advantage of those unresolved guilty feelings by getting their victims to rationalize them into the context of their choosing.

He acts out, you feel guilty, he's always going on about how he is the victim so you rationalize that you feel guilty because you're not treating him fairly.

What is guilt?

If you want to read more about guilt and shame, I recommend Brene Brown's book *The Power of Vulnerability*, which does a good job of explaining those concepts in detail.

Guilt is a subcategory of the feeling of shame, shame is a sense that your actions are not aligning with what is right and true. When I was being abused, I noticed that the thing that made me feel most guilty/shameful was having to act 'normal' in situations outside of the home after my ex-husband would go on an abusive rampage. He could rage and destroy things, scare the crap out of me and our newborn for hours and then after it all, I would have to go to work, go shopping, hang out with friends, basically carry on to keep our life going because there's not a lot of material benefit to bringing the abuse of the home into those scenarios.

I think a lot of abused women have common experiences of having to put on a 'normal' face when her partner at home is behaving in a way that is anything but normal. I would wager that for most, that is the real cause of the excess guilty feelings that come with those relationships.

While talking to my therapist, I came to the insight that when I felt most guilty was when I was out doing those normal things-- ironically when I was seeking resources from domestic violence organizations or visiting with my lawyer I felt totally fine because my actions were aligning properly with my lived reality-- and the guilt that I was feeling had to do with me not being true to myself by constantly having to put on the 'normal' face and act like everything was fine when it really was not.

Once I realized where my feeling of guilt were arising, I was able to end the relationship without having to put myself in danger by catering to his sense of victimhood. Many victims of abuse make the mistake of giving their abuser some kind of heads up when they plan to leave, most likely out of that sense of guilt and wanting to behave fairly towards a person who couldn't give a shit about treating her fairly or with respect.

Being able to take a step back and understand that the source of my guilt was from NOT BEING TRUE TO MYSELF was what made it possible to persevere and succeed. And that's it. I hope anyone lurking or reading can use this insight for themselves.