The most dangerous season of any abusive relationship is the one when the person being abused decides to leave. To be more specific, it’s most dangerous when that intent is known, since a decision could be in a person’s head for a while. And to take it one step further, it’s even more dangerous once the person being abused exposes the behavior.
I have vivid memories of considering what life would look like on my own, away from my abusive marriage, months before I felt I needed to act on it. It takes a long time to consider. But once I felt I had no choice, when things were more horrible than I could have imagined, they became even worse.
And I wasn’t prepared for that.
Consider the playground. Remember being little. Recall telling a teacher about someone’s bad behavior. And what happens the next day or on the bus ride home? The person calling out the bad behavior is belittled, made fun of, called names, ostracized, maybe even beat up.
Why? Because there’s always the risk of retaliation when dealing with abusive personalities. It is one of the reasons people tolerate horrible behavior for as long as they do — and some people tolerate it forever.
They tolerate it because they know it’s better than what could be around the corner if they decide to leave. And leaving looks like a lot of things in different situations. At work, you might leave a team or a client. At school, you might leave a friend group. At home, you might leave some family members. In relationships, you leave a partnership.
The one commonality is a conscious decision to leave a toxic, mindf*cking situation — to reject the narrative you’ve previously, up until that moment, implicitly agreed to. It’s a huge decision, regardless of the environment, and it involves a recalculation of reality after willfully living in a contrived landscape.
This is true for intimate relationships, workplace situations, family dynamics and yes — our current political climate.
Just as leaving looks different, so too does retaliation. For starters, though, it looks like a conscious campaign on the part of the abuser to discredit the person being abused. It’s almost as if the abuser is taking public the gaslighting he or she has been doing in private.
The person leaving is crazy, dramatic, too sensitive, making things up, off base, not well or even doing sinister things themselves like cheating, undermining or lying — even though they aren’t. The effort to discredit the truth is a trademark move on the part of abusers.
They use it as bait to catch the person or persons they plan to abuse in the first place, by creating a grander version of themselves or implying a state of victimhood they haven’t earned. And once the bait catches, they leverage it for as long as it continues to work to cover up past or present discretions — creating more articulated stories and increasingly wilder excuses until…they just aren’t effective anymore.
When abusers need to up the ante, things get even more precarious. For me, it looked like property damage, intimidation and stalking — all as layers to the discrediting campaign. Some may be able to relate, while others may have it worse.
In intimate relationships, those leaving have to worry about their physical safety on top of their mental wellbeing. Many have to worry about staying alive. In professional settings, those leaving need to worry about their reputations, as evidenced richly, time and again by the bold reaches the former president and his supporters will go to retain control.
Willful lies. Outlandish attacks. Completely false narratives. Total annihilation of once-worthy careers, whether or not anyone agrees on a philosophical level with the work certain elected officials have done, not to mention civil servants and regular, ol’ citizens.
What has happened to anyone who has decided to leave the abusive orbit of the former president and his supporters is a robust case study — and perfect reflection — of what happens to anyone leaving an abusive situation. It’s important to remember that and apply it to other similar situations in life.
If for nothing else, the country is receiving an important education on how abusers respond to confrontation.
And the people (and candidates) who echo the abusive behavior, by perpetuating untruths, peddling manipulated information, preying on the fears of others and acting as hired guns to clean up personnel issues (those who step out of line) are just scared of ever finding themselves on the outside looking in. It takes actual valor to look in on where you used to be from the outside. And they don’t have it.
Yes, leaving any abusive relationship or situation is an act of courage. It’s also an act of self preservation, be it to protect one’s health, one’s safety or the sanctity of one’s moral compass. Is anything in life more important?
But leaving isn’t the end. Enduring the retaliation that comes with leaving is a practice in resilience and a conscious effort to give yourself back to a reality that has been intentionally blurred for far too long.
For me, leaving was worth the risk of retaliation. It was worth the broken windows, the security cameras, the insults and threats, the sleepless nights, the new locks, the code words, the explanations to clients and employers, the debt and the court cases.
It was terrifying, but worth it.