I saw a meme recently on “dangerous freedom or peaceful slavery” and my reaction was: if you think those are the choices, then you don't know slavery.

I've seen what I think is a similar idea on the FDS forum – the statement that “abuse always escalates”, which is certainly true, and I wanted to reinforce that point from my experience, so that hopefully some other women can get to learn in theory rather than in practice.

I remember the moment I understood it – it was more than ten years ago, I was in my twenties, and at this point I had spent at least 70% of my life in abusive situations of various kinds. It hit me all at once, and the way it came to me was:

It doesn't matter what someone threatens to you if you don't obey – if you do obey, they'll do it anyway.

To give an overly simplified example: if a guy says: “do ______ or I'll beat you up”, then he's going to beat you up no matter what you do. The difference is that if you refuse, he'll beat you up now, but if you obey, then he'll beat you up later – after having harassed and terrorized you, and when he does, then you'll hate yourself, because you helped him abuse you.

This might not seem like a big difference to someone who's never been in these kinds of situations, but my own experience was: abuse when you trust yourself and stand your ground is stressful and damaging, but nothing close to abuse you allow. Abuse you allow – by participating in in any way, including trying to placate the abuser – will suck your soul and the taste for life out of you. Abuse you resist will make a nervous wreck out of you, but abuse you allow will make you into an empty shell of a person.

Obviously, all abuse is bad, and of course there are situations where resisting might cost you your life, but I think that you can spare yourself the worst by drawing an internal one, if not an external one – like keeping in mind that this isn't normal, that they are lying, that what they're doing to you is wrong no matter whit bullshit they say or force you to do. For some reason, I've found that abusers always try to convince you that their actions are your fault, and it makes a huge difference whether they succeed or not.

Anyway be safe, sisters. I do think that the world is changing, but the old power structures are flailing before they die, and we might not have seen the worst of it yet; that doesn't mean that things aren't going to get better over the long run. I think that within two or three generations, we're probably going to see a world that is very different, where women might not even be able to imagine our situation now. I hope so anyway.