“Many women take a “wait and see”attitude when signs of abuse appear in a partner’s behavior. They tell themselves: “It’s so hard to leave him right now because I still love him. But if he gets worse, that will lessen my feelings for him, and then breaking up will be easier.” This is a dangerous trap. The longer you are with an abuser, and the more destructive he becomes, the harder it can be to extricate yourself, for the following reasons: The more time he has to tear down your self-opinion, the more difficult it will be for you to believe that you deserve better treatment. The more time he has to hurt you emotionally, the more likely your energy and initiative are to diminish, so that it gets harder to muster the strength to get out. The more damage he does to your relationships with friends and family, the less support you will have for the difficult process of ending the relationship. The longer you have been living with his cycles of intermittent abuse and kind, loving treatment, the more attached you are likely to feel to him, through a process known as traumatic bonding. For all of these reasons, act sooner rather than later. At the same time, if you have already been in a relationship with an abuser for five years, or ten, or thirty, it is never too late to recover your rights and to get free.”
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Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That.
(via marxferatu)
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