Free Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This by Blue Sullivan

by rushing him to the hospital before his heart stopped. He never did drugs in front of her, but he always seemed to show up in time to make sure she shared in every nightmare.
    Every time Beth tried to break off the relationship, Tom threatened suicide, and Beth’s (irrational) guilt brought her back. Finally, while Tom was off on a six-day bender, Beth packed up a truck full of her things and moved two thousand miles away to live with her parents. Despite his many attempts to bring her back with initial pleading and eventual threats, Tom never saw Beth again.
    This relationship took six years of Beth life—most of them a feedback loop of lies, tears, stalled hopes, and broken dreams. She’s now better five years later, but she still has trouble trusting others and overcoming the residual grime of cynicism (manufactured in abundance during her six years with Tom) that still coats every new relationship.
    I described addiction earlier as one of the two “Evil A’s,” but that doesn’t mean every Addict is evil. To the contrary, the thing that often compels women to stay with the Addict is his bruised humanity, the sense that there is goodness and maybe even greatness to salvage. By “evil,” I mean evil for you. Regardless of the Addict’s intent—and his intentions toward you may be entirely noble—the intentions just don’t matter when the result is always destruction.
    This brings us to the other Evil A: the Abuser. So many women make the same mistake with the Abuser that they make with the Addict. They give so much time and energy to intentions that the results are obscured.
    “Does he mean to hurt me?”
    “Does he not love me?”
    “What am I doing wrong?”
    “What happened to him that made him this way?”
    “Am I not understanding enough?”
    “What can I do to make him stop, so we can go back to the good times we once shared?”
    There may seem to be legitimate answers to some of these questions, but none of them matter. What’s left is you , your suffering, your self-doubt, and your heartbreak—over and over and over again. As Lundy Bancroft demonstrates brilliantly in her book about domestic abuse, Why Does He Do That? , at the core of every abuser is a selfish sense of entitlement. Regardless of what caused it, the abuser has fostered a sense that it his anger that matters, his pain, and his feelings. Yours are little more than a footnote to his story. This is what makes it easier for him to hurt you repeatedly without any real sense of regret. His words may express recrimination that seems convincing, but his actions certainly don’t.
    In the next chapter, we will analyze the Abuser more closely and glean some lessons to keep you away from terrible men of all stripes.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Ten
     
     
    Fighting the Unfair Fight
     
    Among its very helpful pages and links regarding domestic abuse, Helpguide.org offers two sentences that crystallize the problem:
    “Domestic abuse, also known as spousal abuse, occurs when one person in an intimate relationship or marriage tries to dominate and control the other person. Domestic abuse that includes physical violence is called domestic violence.” [xxiii]
    Many women may not be aware of this important distinction. Actual physical violence isn’t a prerequisite for abuse. One can be a survivor of sustained, repugnant abuse without the abuser ever lifting a hand.
    In the introduction of Lundy Bancroft’s superlative book on domestic abuse, Why Does He Do That? , she describes “abusers” in a similar way:
    “I have chosen to use the term abusers to refer to men who use a wide range of controlling, devaluing, or intimidating behaviors. In some cases I’m talking about physical batterers and other times men who use or insult their partners, but never frighten or intimidate them.” [xxiv]
    Think about that definition in terms of your own past relationships. How well does it describe some, or maybe all, of them? You may never