Why is it so hard to leave?
Anyone who’s ever been in an abusive relationship has probably heard someone say “well, why didn’t you just leave?”
The people who say this aren’t intending to be cruel, I don’t think. They’re simply unaware of the dynamics that make leaving an abusive relationship incredibly difficult—and often, dangerous. Simply walking away from an abusive relationship isn’t always easy; sometimes, it’s almost impossible.
The event horizon effect
Abusers don’t start out abusing you. Abuse typically develops slowly and escalated over time. It starts with small boundary violations, each one in isolation not that big a deal, each one easy on its own to overlook or rationalize or justify.
Abuse is fundamentally about power and control. Small boundary violations become small acts of control become larger acts of control, but each step can be quite tiny. By the time they add together, you’ve invested a lot, maybe years, in the relationship and are you really going to throw that away over this one small thing?
If only dangerous situations were always so obvious (image: BoliviaInteligente)
I call this the “event horizon effect” because in the vicinity of a sufficiently large black hole with a sufficiently quiet accretion disk, an infalling observer might cross the point of no return without being aware of it. There’s not a sudden violent event at the moment you’ve crossed that horizon.
You can look back and realize that somehow you’ve ended up in a place where the other person is controlling what you wear and what you eat and who you spend time with, without seeing the exact moment that happened.
And speaking of controlling who you spend time with…
Limited Social Environments
One of the hallmarks of abuse, almost a defining element of abuse, is the abuser controls the abuse survivor’s social circle. The abuser says who, where, and when the survivor spends time with. The abuser controls the victim’s social circle, isolating the victim from sources of support. It becomes much harder to leave when you have nobody to turn to outside the abuser’s social circle, and nowhere to go.
In fact, if you ever see a situation where two people point fingers at each other and accuse one another of abuse, a very handy tool you can use to find the truth is this: Which of the two has attempted to tell the other who they should or should not date, socialize with, or be friends with?
I cannot stress this enough: Control over another person’s social circle is one of the defining elements of abuse.
In extreme cases, the victim has no other social support whatsoever; the only people the victim socializes with, if they socialize with anyone at all, are people in the abuser’s orbit.
Image: Annie Spratt
Humans are a social species. There’s a reason solitary confinement is a punishment in every human society. Cutting a person off from their social circle is an extraordinarily effective—and vicious, and ugly—form of control.
Gaslighting
On top of that, there’s a pernicious thing about abuse: it makes you doubt yourself. It makes you question your own reality. An abuser can often make you distrust your own perspectives, make you think that you’re the problem, not them.
This has a term—gaslighting—and a lot of people have talked quite a bit about how abusers gaslight their victims, but less often about how abusers gaslight the victim’s social circle. This is part of the alienation and isolation: the abuser creates a narrative that the victim accepts as true, but can also create a narrative that the people around the victim accept as true, for the purpose of further isolating the victim.
So slowly, step by step, you end up in a space where:
- You have gradually yielded more and more control to the abuser;
- You have gradually lost your social circle, and become increasingly dependent on the abuser for your social needs;
- You have developed, without noticing it, the habit of accepting the abuser’s worldview even over your own memories and perceptions;
- You have started reflexively assuming that the problems you notice in the relationship are your fault; and
- When you do notice there’s something wrong, you may have passed the point where it’s easy to get back out.
But wait! There’s more!
Financial Dependence
As if that’s not enough, you may, as all of this has been happening, have entangled yourself financially and practically with your abuser to the point that the abuser is controlling your finances, or your living space, or both. So you end up not only stripped of your social circle, but also financially dependent on your abuser. That makes it incredibly difficult to leave.
And ironically, some people will make a partner financially dependent on them, which gives them a tremendous amount of power and control, and then...say “see, my partner is abusing me, look how I pay for everything!”
All of this means that leaving an abusive relationship is no easy thing to do, which is why “but why didn’t you just leave?” is such a thoughtless, insensitive thing to say.
There are some resources for people in an abusive situation, if it gets bad enough, but those resources are often (a) overburdened, (b) not available to men, and/or (c) not available to people with children or pets. And leaving your child or your pet in the hands of the abuser may not be an option you’re willing to take.