The First question That Doesn't Make Sense

The question that is at the heart of the sordid relationship between Sean Diddy Combs and Cassie Ventura Fine regarding their abusive relationship is “Why didn’t she just leave him? It doesn’t make sense.” There is much to be learned about why she stayed in that relationship as spousal abuse is prevalent in our culture. One in four women and one in seven men are in abusive relationships. First, there is a low percentage of the abuser changing his/her behavior so couples counseling rarely works.

One of the highly regarded theories about why the abused don’t leave the relationship is the Stockholm Syndrome which is the psychological theory that the victim makes a connection with the abuser wherein the victim has feelings of sympathy for their abuser. This explanation dominated the research for many years, but it is more complex than that explanation.

One of my mentors, Dr. Marty Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology did research on depression. The research led to his theory of learned helplessness. In essence, he put rats on one side of a boundary where if they crossed it, they would receive food for their hunger. However, when that boundary contained electric shocks, they refused to cross the boundary to the point that they became helpless and would not cross that boundary even if it meant that they would starve to death. If there is enough abuse, psychological or physical, in a relationship it produces the same result. Learned helplessness was a revolutionary thought in psychology.

I see this every day with Sadie as we have an electric fence around our property. I tested it before I bought it as I didn’t want the shock to hurt Sadie. It doesn’t. It’s more of a surprise. It becomes a memory after she is trained to the fence. I really didn’t think it would work for her as she is food centric and very active. But I could put a steak on the other side of the electric fence, and she would not touch it. The same is true for women victims of abuse. They have learned helplessness.

But there are other dynamics occurring. The victim sometimes fears that the abuser will hurt their children or other family members. I was talking with a woman who I knew was in an abusive relationship and left it. So, I asked her what happened that enabled her to leave? She told me that when her husband put a gun to her head, she knew that her protection of her family could only occur in leaving him. I knew the husband. He had a suspected history of bad behavior, but she decided to marry him anyway creating what Lederer describes in his book on the Mirages of Marriage. She thought she could change him. He was charming until he married her and exhibited narcissist characteristics which is often present in abusers. The irony was that this woman was powerful and authentic in all other areas of her life so no one would ever guess that she was in an abusive relationship.

Control is present in abusive relationships. The abuser feels that he should have control over his/her spouse. This control gets them want they want in the relationship. They believe that their needs come before their spouse's.

There are times when the victim will opt for control, but it takes a different form. Every relationship has covert and overt rules. Victims will focus on the covert rules, the unstated rules, which they will avoid breaking at all costs knowing that it will make matters worse for them or their children. Their only control in the relationship is to manipulate the relationship so there isn’t any confrontation. Peace is at any cost! They follow the “silence is golden” approach to surviving it.

One of the goals of a therapist is discovering the covert rules which at times can be more powerful than the overt rules.

Fear and power are the currencies of abuse. Relationships are political in the same way that countries are political. Abuse occurs when one person has the power over the other in a relationship. It is an identical dynamic to bullying. The bully has low self-esteem and feels as though they don’t belong.  The soil in which abuse occurs is when the victim feels that they are on the ground of isolation.

It stands to reason that the longer a person remains in an abusive relationship, the more difficult it will be for the individual to extricate themselves from the trauma. Time creates a sense of normalcy. People will choose the known over the unknown. They choose to stay with the devil that they do know which prevents a realistic appraisal of their lives.

Although we usually think of abuse as something a man does to a woman, keep in mind the statistic that one out of seven men are abused. This abuse is normally emotional as opposed to physical abuse, but the abuse follows the same kind of pattern that has been outlined above. Recall that it is human nature not to admit that we made a big mistake no matter what is happening. “I made my bed, so I have to sleep in it.”

Time is not on the side of therapist helping the abuse situation. In one situation where the husband was threatening the whole family with the guns that he possessed, the best that I could do was to have an overt rule that the guns would always be under lock and key and would never be taken from where they were stored. This doesn’t seem like much, but it was all I could get for the family to feel safe.

One woman who asked me to help her agreed to see one of my friends who is a terrific litigator and lawyer. This person was desperate so as we sat there, my friend, the lawyer, described what he would do to demonstrate the criminal nature of her years of abuse by her husband. She stopped the lawyer mid-sentence, “I don’t want to hurt him.” My friend just looked at her and said, “If you don’t want to hurt him (the only solution left and the reason she came to see me), you are in the wrong place.” In ethics, we refer to that attitude as the hard right versus the easy wrong. She took the action that was needed and is now enjoying a better life. The worst words to hear from those being abused are: “I have to stay together for the children.” Research indicates that keeping in an abusive relationship harms the children more than severing the relationship.

Sometimes we need an extreme situation such as Combs and Ventura to be helped to see the dynamics of abuse. Existentialism is an ethical system which declares that hell is being in a relationship where nothing changes for the good.  This raises the question, “Why don’t you leave an abusive relationship?”  It doesn’t make sense.