What can a victim of abuse do about it? This is what I discern from the literature on emotional abuse:
- Recognize it is happening. Realize what it is costing you. Commit to rebuilding your self-esteem, regaining power over your life, and attending to your own well-being.
- Expel the negative concept of who you are that’s been laid on you. Quit buying the story about you. Stop blaming yourself for things you personally didn’t do. Start acknowledging the good things about yourself (and, with race as the referent, about your people: such as what whites have accomplished historically in the fields of architecture, philosophy, physics, math, chemistry, medicine, biology, the arts, and technology). Reject the idea that you deserve to be put down, punished, get to the back of the line, or suck up to and serve someone who resents and despises you and interjects himself into your life.
- Realize that abuse is not about rationality, reality, and accepted tenets of morality. Don’t try to argue, beseech, or explain. Long talks aren’t going to do it. He may say he wants a conversation, but he won’t engage in one. Give up hope that the relationship with him is ever going to work out. The abuser is going to keep doing it to you as long as he receives the benefits from it.
- Set personal boundaries. Announce to him (and to yourself) that you’ve had enough of it. That’s terse, brief, it’s not a speech; no elaborations, no discussions. More, it is your personal bearing, a foundation from which you conduct your life. Perhaps you don’t say anything; you just start doing it and let him figure out what’s going on. To the extent you can, stop playing your part in the demeaning and self-destructive “movie” you’ve been in. Wipe the obsequious smile off your face, cut the self-deprecation and deference, and discontinue the servant’s work for him you’ve been doing. Disengage, back off.
- Break the isolation, the atomization. Seek out support, connect with others; in person, online, however, wherever. Understanding and support are out there even if right now you don’t think they are.
- Take care of your personal integrity and safety. You aren’t getting admonished, yelled at, assaulted, raped, none of that, zero. Your being is inviolate. Whatever you have to do to get that done, do it.
- Develop an exit plan. You aren’t going to be around anything or anybody that brings you down, exploits you, hurts you. Out.
