Why You Won’t Leave An Abusive Situation

Samantha Nate Collins Barker did a vulnerable share and it was so relevant and important I wanted to share my response to her in a separate post.

With the Pandemic, everyone’s collective nervous systems have been in turmoil and relationships have been tested and “toxic” dynamics are at play.

Without the right tools and guidance we are stuck in patterns trying to talk our way out of situations that require more than talking.

This is why I created our various offerings in this community — from free videos and podcasts to our monthly Breathwork and Overview Experience events and advanced programs — to teach tools we can all learn to self regulate and co-regulate (because we aren’t meant to do it alone).

Please read her post (shared above). As she shares her abusive dynamics she seems to have no solution to get out of. Many people will obviously tell her to leave — but unless you’ve been there and have actually done your own deep inner trauma work you can’t really understand why it’s almost impossible to unpack all of it without making the right transitions.

I wanted to post my response and a video training I created in case you found yourself there and wanted to empower yourself to solve this riddle.

Let me know what comes up for you….

Samantha…..

I’m sorry you’re going through this.

Unfortunately all advice to leave him now will fall on deaf ears.

This is waaaay more common than you think. We are all at the effect of our traumas — including both you and your husband.

In an ideal world, most of us would have done our trauma work before we got married and had kids — that way we won’t pass it on to them. But your parents nor your husbands parents did their trauma work — so lucky you guys — here you both are.

Congratulations for starting with abuse counselling and you’ve come a long way.

Talk therapy is a good start but most people end up discovering that all the talking and explaining doesn’t get to the root cause of why we end up exactly where we are.

The truth is, you are being treated exactly the degree of how you feel about yourself deep down. And when I say this many people get confused into thinking I’m saying it’s your FAULT.

To heal from this we need to throw the word blame and fault out the window and begin by taking responsibility for healing what this is about.

When people don’t do their trauma healing work, they leave an abusive situation and guess what?

They find the same thing in a different partner.

One of our students/clients in our program who is a male — Who is a Doctor found himself being abused in his last 4 relationships culminating with his wife.

After doing his healing work (which was all about being abused by his father) his energy shifted internally in his body and he no longer tolerated it and no longer got hit. There was a shift.
Also he learned about trauma responses and learned how to dismantle triggers within himself and self regulate so that conflict no longer went from 0 to 100 in 2 seconds.

These are skills never taught — we are conditioned from childhood to react, so no counselling or anger management cognitive work addresses it.

To answer your questions: no, you are not being emotionally immature by this hurting.

You have every right to feel how you’re feeling.

You have unresolved attachment trauma that words and talking can’t fix, and they are being repeated again and again until you finally take a stand and get angry and say “enough”.

Unfortunately if your anger was suppressed as a child by your caregivers, you, like most people in your situation, won’t have access to your anger, and you’ll fawn, and accommodate, and go inside and beat yourself up over it.

There’s a wounded inner child waiting for you to rescue her.

Until you do, you will choose the pain of staying with him instead of the pain of leaving, because at least staying involves the familiar, and familiar represents “safety” to you.

“What can I do to change this dynamic?”

I’m so glad you asked because it shows you genuinely want to change. You’ll notice most people who post don’t actually have a question. I like these.

To answer this — No talk therapy, no video, no podcast can do the work you must do to rescue your wounded younger parts that are being re-lived and re-hashed through the conflicts you and your husband keep going through.

Anyone with a secure upbringing, with parents that gave them emotional support wouldn’t tolerate one minute in a relationship where they weren’t honoured in the same way, but most of us didn’t have that upbringing, so we tolerate abusive behavior because it’s what we feel we deserve deep down.

to change the dynamic, you MUST address that (which is what we help our clients with).

Let me say that again.

We CAN NOT change a dynamic with our partners by talking about our partners and their shitty behavior. We must address the dynamic at its root:

Unresolved attachment trauma that is stored in your body.

It’s not cognitive. It’s not rational. To prove this, just imagine your daughter in the same situation. What would you tell her?

Pretty obvious right?
It’s clear as day!
GET THE FUCK OUT BECAUSE YOU DESERVE MORE!

It’s obvious to everyone reading this too.
But what’s going on IN YOUR BODY is a different story.
When triggered, rationality gets thrown out the window and we regress to the wounded little 5 year old who was treated like crap and abused and felt it was because she was a bad person.

This is the insidious nature of trauma.

If you are serious about solving this (which you will resist because deep down it’s so familiar you won’t want it to) watch this training I did about attracting abusive partners and then reach out.

9/10 people in your situation who reach out are so disempowered they’re can’t find the inner resources to take a stand and truly heal what didn’t start with them. The fact that you have already invested in counselling gives me hope that you MIGHT be the 1/10 who take action.

I want to tell you how strong and brave you are.
You’re not weak. You’re not immature.
You’re wounded and you deserve the very best training and support to help break the cycle so that your kids don’t end up re-living what you observed growing up and re-lived in your family dynamic.

Let us know when you’re ready to solve this riddle.