Comment on Learned Helplessness.....

I had an opportunity to look backwards the other day--and left a comment that I want to remember. (which is why it's being put here for safe keeping)

Long ago....and so strangely far away.
Feels pretty surreal to look back to what I allowed (may be a wrong choice of word) myself to mutate into.......and then to look at where my feet are today--makes me enormously grateful for the journey to 'here'.

Thank you Bill.....for all that you are and for 'not understanding'.
It really does speak to the wonderfulness of YOU.

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What a powerful post. Or maybe it’s the closeness of the topic?
Learned helplessness was the end result of very subtle, very calculated manipulations…bit by bit by bit.Like ___, I had that eroding away of ‘all that I AM’ in my abusive relationship with an ex-spouse.

It started out a fairy tale romance—and ended only when he left ME.


It really was an erosion…..a subtle eroding away of bits and pieces of your soul, your confidence, your sense of ‘rightness’.
And in my case, it was all about ‘how it looked’ to the world around me.
I protected his integrity and honour because he was ‘a good man’, because I knew the man I married was in there somewhere.
And I’d made a vow to him and to G-d.
And everyone can have a moment of losing their temper……..and really, he was sorry…..
I could get him help.
I could help him myself.
I shouldn’t have done a, b and c…really, I knew it’d upset him…
He really IS a good man……that good man is still in there, somewhere.
He’s right–I needed to try harder, do different…


In between explosive moments he was all that I loved.

And it became obvious, that if I just tried for more of THAT–the other would take care of itself.

Periods of ‘loving’ became less and less, dependence through manipulations over a period of time—all done for ’seemingly right reasons’ at the time, later recognized for the manipulations that they were.
I became isolated, removed from the witnesses that threatened his ‘entitlement’.
The tables that had been being turned ever so slowly and ever so subtly awakened me to the truth that I REALLY WAS THE PROBLEM.
It escalated into relentless abuse far away from the eyes of outside help.

The end result was total annilation of a human being’s BEING.
The claiming of a human being as ‘yours to do with as you will’.

I unknowingly manipulated the manipulator.

Call it the will/instinct to surviveI became highly visable when I became ‘crazy’……so heavily visable, such a liability to his repetoire of abuse– he became the ‘poor man with a crazy wife’– that he took the circumstances to make himself the ‘victim’ and moved on to create his next repetiore’ with a new victim all of his own……..again…..

It’s an erosion. In my case, a slow, methodical, manipulative erosion–a twisting of all that one IS to keep one in the role of whatever he wanted me to be. And it worked…..for a good chunk of time.

And today I’m graced to be loved like crazy by a gentle soul.
One who honours all that I AM without entitlements attached….
…as it should be, eh?