Realization And The First Step Out

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing A Three-Stage Recovery
• 0:26 Defining The Realization Stage
• 1:57 How Control Quietly Enters
• 2:33 Cognitive Dissonance And Survival
• 3:18 Trauma Bonding Explained
• 4:03 Cracks Of Clarity And Grief
• 5:23 Validating Survivors’ Experiences
• 7:10 Preparing For The Reckoning

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist, and this is the first podcast in the series that has to do with recovery. I've broken this down into three stages because I think, or at least I hope, that will give people a sense of where they are in the process of recovery. Stage one I call the realization. It's like a kind of awakening. Women and victims who are in the process of managing, discovering, changing, and resolving abusive relationships go through a series of stages. Before the realization occurs, it's normally because the victim is trying to survive, and so very often they can't see where they are. Many people around them will, and they will even voice it. But realization is when the moment the story, the real story, breaks. This is the first stage. And it's not usually a dramatic moment. It's really loud. More often it's quite quiet. It's slow, but it's deeply psychological. And because before a victim can leave abuse, they must first see it. And that's not as simple as it sounds, because the psychology of not seeing includes questions like from the outside, why didn't she realize sooner? But the truth is the mind protects us from unbearable realities. With domestic abuse, it rarely begins as abuse. It begins quite often as a love, intensity, promise, closeness, attachment, and then slowly, almost invisibly, control enters the relationship, not necessarily as physical control. It's more like subtle criticism, emotional withdrawal, confusion, blame, isolation, and distortion of reality. And this is psychological manipulation. But over time, something powerful happens inside the mind. There's something we call cognitive dissonance, and the victim holds two conflicting realities. He loves me, he hurts me. To survive emotionally, the mind resolves this conflict by minimizing the harm rather than abandoning the attachment. So victims will tell themselves it wasn't that bad. They didn't mean it. I provoked him, all relationships are hard, it could be worse, and so on. And this isn't weakness, it's psychological survival. Now the term trauma bonding has become something which people use quite frequently, and it's not one that I'm thinking is particularly descriptive enough. However, when harm and affection alternate, the brain becomes conditioned. Kindness feels like relief, and relief feels like love, but love becomes confused with pain. So this definition of trauma bonding indicates a powerful attachment that's been formed through cycles of harm and reconciliation, and within this, reality becomes blood. So the shift is when the mind begins to see, and the realization doesn't come suddenly, it comes in fragments, moments such as this isn't normal. I feel afraid. And so this mind begins to reconnect emotion and truth. And when this happens, denial weakens, the story starts to crack, and through the crack, reality appears. And when that happens, this emotional impact of realization happens. This is often a painful stage because it brings grief, shock, shame, fear, confusion, and loss of identity. And that's necessary because it also brings something else, and that's clarity. And clarity is the beginning of freedom. Now, if you're here right now, and if you're listening and recognizing yourself, you're not weak and you're not foolish, and you're not alone. So so many times I hear this from women, and very often what I will do is point them gently to the individual evidence that what they're experiencing is not about them in isolation, it's common, and this helps them awaken, and awakening is the first step out of the abuse. Now it is painful, but at the same time, it is liberating, and I want you to try and hold those two things in mind because it's not an either-or. The two things can coexist, but when we lift the veil, then the realization occurs. Sometimes I say, Look, if your daughter or your best friend or your sister said to you, This is what I'm experiencing, what do you think you'd say? And always I hear people say it's abuse, it's wrong. And yet somehow that thought objective sense remains disconnected from the felt sense because people who are the victims of abuse normalize it, and that isn't a fault, it is a survival mechanism because the last thing you want to be doing is stamping on eggshells. In the next episode, we're going to look at something that I'm calling the reckoning. The reckoning is very, very powerful. The reckoning is when the victim is no longer a victim, she becomes a force to be reckoned with because what she realizes is that she's been listening to unnecessary noise, and she doesn't have to anymore. And what she does is to call out the noise, and she reclaims a very good deal. Now, you deserve safety, truth, and dignity. Nobody should be marginalized, nobody should be minimized. I sincerely hope that this has been helpful, and we will do some more. You will survive this, I promise.