LACK OF SLEEP

     If you go day after day, week after week, not getting enough sleep, the toll it will take on you can be greater than you realize. Lack of sleep can clog up your ability to think clearly, and can make you feel more raw and sensitive emotionally. The effects tend to be cumulative, so that the longer you've been having trouble getting enough rest, the greater the impact on your life may be. Some people report starting to have depression, hopelessness, or even a sense that they are losing their minds. You can start to just plain feel shaky, physically and mentally.

            So if you feel as though you're falling apart, one possibility is that you just need to sleep.

            Being involved in a destructive relationship can make sleep hard to come by. The stress and emotional pain of being mistreated can keep you awake. Your worries about what your partner will do next can do the same. Maybe sometimes  -- or often  --  he doesn't let you sleep, either to punish you about something he's angry about or as a way to force you to have sex with him. When a man causes sleep deprivation in his partner, he is actually committing one of the more serious forms of physical abuse -- yes, sleep deprivation is a form of physical abuse  --  but the depth of damage he can do in these ways is often not recognized. 

            If you have young children, that adds a lot of additional challenges to getting sleep, especially if your partner isn't carrying his weight about sharing the times of getting out of bed to attend to a child in need.

            Keep some notes about how much sleep you get, and track your rest patterns over a period of weeks. Putting down on paper what is going on can help you to assess whether lack of sleep is actually one of the major contributors to emotional and physical struggles you are having.

(This post is based on an entry from Lundy's forthcoming book "Daily Wisdom for Why Does He Do That?: Encouragement for Women Involved with Angry and Controlling Men", which will be released by Berkley Books (Penguin) on April 7, 2015.)

You Are Their Mother

The title of today’s second post may seem odd to you. If you have children, you’re probably thinking, “Of course I’m their mother. What’s up with that?”

In the rush of daily responsibilities and challenges—especially when you are in a relationship with someone whose behavior is a huge problem some days—it’s possible to forget just how important you are to your children.

Biology is not the issue here; in fact, some of you are raising children you didn’t give birth to. Motherhood is about so much more than giving birth or breastfeeding, as powerful and profound as those are. As your children’s mother, you are their protector, their moral compass and teacher, their key source of love and affection and nurturing, their refuge, their source of faith.

You might ask, “Isn’t their father supposed to be these things too?” Yes, although even the best father can’t be exactly what a mother is. But if your partner is struggling with addiction, is deeply selfish, or is abusive to you, he can’t even begin to be what the children need him to be. So your role as a mother grows even bigger.

The bitter irony here is that many destructive men attack a woman’s sense of her value as a mother. Your partner may say that he knows better than you do what the right way is to raise children, . He may even try to convince you that there is something toxic about you that your children are in danger of catching, and use that as an excuse to take away your parenting decisions and rights.

So when you say to yourself, “I am the children’s mother,” you are making a profound statement that is not about being their biological or legal parent. You are stating how absolutely critical your role is in who they are and who they will become, and how inalienable your right is to guide them and love them. Your children are looking to you.

(This post is based on an entry from Lundy's forthcoming book "Daily Wisdom for Why Does He Do That?: Encouragement for Women Involved with Angry and Controlling Men", which will be released by Berkley Books (Penguin) on April 7, 2015.)

THE ABUSER CRUSADE

            When a man has some unhealthy relationship patterns to begin with, the last thing he needs is to discover philosophies that actually back up the destructive aspects of how he thinks. Take a guy who is somewhat selfish and disrespectful to begin with, then add in a big dose of really negative influences, and you have a recipe for disaster. And the sad reality is that there are websites, books, and even organizations out there that encourage men to be at their worst rather than at their best when it comes to relating to women.

            Some of these groups come under the heading of what is known as “Men’s Rights” or “Father’s Rights” groups. Their writings spread the message that women are trying to control or humiliate men, or are mostly focused on taking men’s money. They also tend to promote the idea that women who want to keep primary custody of their children after divorce are evil. The irony is that we live in a country that has refused to pass an amendment to the constitution to guarantee equal rights for women; yet some men are still out there claiming that women have too many rights and that men don’t have enough.

            Other groups don’t use the language of “rights”, but promote abusive thinking by talking about the “natural” roles of men and women. These groups teach, for example, that men are biologically programmed to be the ones making the key decisions, and that women are just naturally the followers of men’s leadership. These philosophies sometimes teach that men and women are just too different to have really close relationships.

            Human personalities and preference are obviously not determined by biology. There are women who love to watch football and men who would much rather be dancing. There are women who hold in all their feelings and men who burst into tears freely. No one has the right to tell anyone what they “naturally” are or must be; one of the greatest joys of human life is having the freedom to decide for ourselves what our identities and styles will be.

            If you see your partner coming under the influence of a philosophy that is harming your relationship, take some steps to research it. Look underneath the surface of what he is telling you about his new belief system. If he starts to attend workshops or read books that seem to be worsening rather than improving how he treats you, try to use the Internet to make contact with other women who have been hurt by these philosophies. The clearer you can be about what he is getting into, the more you’ll be prepared to defend yourself.

WHO IS THE CONTROLLING ONE?

            Has your partner ever said to you, “You’re the controlling one! You are always trying to control me! You’re a controlling bitch!”

            These accusations can create confusion for the woman. So let’s clarify a few points.

            It is not control when you:

• Demand that someone treat you properly, insisting that your rights be respected (including demanding that you be spoken to with respect)
• Challenge someone about the work they are creating for you (such as by leaving messes around the house)
• Press someone to meet responsibilities that they aren’t meeting (and if you have to keep asking them over and over again, that doesn’t make you controlling, it makes them irresponsible)
• Challenge someone about behaviors of theirs that have large implications for the couple (and for the family if you have children), such as abusing alcohol, gambling, ignoring the children, or being mean to the children
• Call the police because someone is hurting you or threatening to hurt you

            It is control when you:

• Ridicule someone, make them feel stupid, or call them demeaning names, especially when you are doing so in order to force them do something or to silence them
• Physically or sexually intimidate someone
• Get revenge on someone for not doing what you told them to do or for standing up for their own opinions
• Impose double standards (make different rules for yourself than for the other person)
• Pressure or manipulate someone into sexual contact that they don’t want

            I’m willing to bet that when he calls you controlling, he is referring to things you do from the first list, and that when you call him controlling, you’re referring to things he does from the second list. He's the one getting it all backwards.

            Another useful, though tricky, concept:  It’s control when you are trying to take someone’s rights away, and it’s self-defense when you are trying to keep someone else from taking your rights away. (The reason this gets tricky is because the controlling man will often say that you are trying to take his rights away, because he thinks he has the right to abuse you.)

            And a last concept:  The abusive man will call you “controlling” for resisting his control. Noticing when this is happening will be a huge help to you.

HE WANTS SEX AT THE WRONG TIMES

            Verbal abuse is not sexy. Intimidation is not sexy. Public humiliation is not sexy. Ruining the day is not sexy. So why does he think that a short period of time – say a couple of hours -- after he’s been treating you terribly could somehow be a good time for sex? He really thinks that this is when you are going to be in the mood?

            Not exactly. The problem, as is so often true with abusive men, is that he isn’t thinking about you at all; he’s thinking only about himself. He wants sex to reassure himself that he hasn’t driven you away, and that he still has access to your body. He thinks that if he can get you to have sex, that also means he has erased from history the destructive acts he did earlier. And he wants to have sex because in some twisted way his ugly behavior made him feel close, even though it had the opposite effect on you.

            And because of the ways he’s been tearing you down, it gets hard for you to say no to sex that you don’t want; you can end up feeling like giving him what he wants is the only way to settle him down so that he doesn’t launch into more abuse, or even violence.

            He is the one whose reactions are unhealthy, not yours. The feelings you are going through are completely natural for a woman who has been demeaned and bullied. When he has sex with you following one of his incidents, that is a form of sexual abuse, even if you don’t – or can’t – fight him on it. Keep reminding yourself that the sickness is in him, not in you. Sex after abuse is just more abuse.

"HOW MUCH SHOULD I STAND UP TO HIM?"

One of the common contradictions that women hear goes like this:

“Well, it’s your own fault because you let him get away with treating you like that. You have to stand up to him.”

    while other people say

“If you’re going to get right up in his face and push his buttons like that, what do you expect? You already knew how he’d react if you said that to him, because of what has happened before, but you said it anyhow.”

            So what’s the correct way to handle him? Should you stand up to him or shouldn’t you?

            The answer is that no one has any business telling you what to do, because there are so many factors involved in the decision in each specific situation. You are the expert on your partner. You know which issues you can (usually) get away with challenging him about. And you know that there are others where he will punish you if you stand up to him. Some days you will choose to hold your ground despite the pain his retaliation will cost you; you’ll do that because the issue that you’re arguing about means that much to you, or because you can’t take being bullied anymore, or because your soul and dignity need to see you resist his dictates from time to time.

            Most people don’t understand how payback-oriented controlling and abusive men are. They don’t understand what a high price you may pay for calling him on how wrong his statements and actions are. How can someone else know when it’s worth it to you and when it isn’t?

            And as for people who are telling you not to challenge him, they too have no idea what they are talking about. While it’s true that confronting him can cost you a lot, failing to fight back eats away at your soul over time. These people are saying, in effect, that you should consent to be oppressed because it will make life look a little more peaceful, a little less overtly injurious, a little less scary. It’s the same thing as saying to someone, “You should let the invaders take your children one at a time, because otherwise they might take them all at once.”

            There are no simple solutions in dealing with a partner who bullies you, and you deserve respect and understanding about that fact from the people in your life.

WHEN YOU KNOW YOU NEED A GOOD CRY

                I wrote a previous post about the powerful healing role that crying can play, especially if you can train yourself to cry hard and long. Many women who have heard me speak about this subject have said to me, “There are times when I can tell that I need to cry, because I've built up so much pent-up emotions, but I can’t do it. How do I get that cry to come out of me when it’s stuck?”

                There are several techniques to use to get that dam to break:

•  Make a crying date with yourself, where you actually set aside time and find a way to be alone. Tears are much more likely to come when you know you won’t have to choke them right back off again.
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• Collect some of the music that has brought you to tears before. Listening to your favorite sad or touching song can be a great way to get your crying started; and once the ice breaks, you’ll move on soon to crying about issues that have been weighing on you.
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• Spend some time thinking about memories from long ago. It’s usually easier to start crying about sadnesses from far in the past. 
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• Let your crying take you where it wants to go. Sometimes you will be sad about an old loss, and suddenly you’ll find that instead you’re crying about an event from yesterday. The opposite will happen also, where tears about a recent emotional wound carry you into deep sobbing about a much earlier period in your life. Don’t fight this process; your soul knows exactly which piece it needs to grieve today. 
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• Photographs can be powerful for evoking emotion. So can certain passages from books, pieces of poetry, or scenes from movies. Draw on whatever gets you going.
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• If you have a trusted friend, see if she would sit with your or hold you while you cry. Similarly, you can imagine your best friend or closest relative sitting with you even if you are actually crying by yourself, and that image can help the tears flow.
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• Anger can help to unlock crying. Yell into a pillow or pound on couch cushions, and keep at it for a long time, ten or fifteen minutes or more. Try to make yourself feel powerful; the more your rage comes from a place of power, the more likely it is to unleash your tears.

                Almost anyone can cry (especially among women), but not many people can cry deeply and at length except by training themselves to do so. In other words, learning to cry is a skill, like studying an instrument or developing your athletic abilities. The more effort you put in the deeper the rewards.