Abuse doesn’t stop when you leave an abuser. No one really talks about that.

The idea is that if you just get the courage to leave, you’ll be free. Free to live your life. Free from hurt, anger, hateful words and deeds. Free from the weight of guilt and doubt.

But that is a fantasy. You suppose that eventually that can be a reality, but you have still not gotten there.

The truth is that when you leave an abuser the abuse intensifies.

The guilt trips intensify.

The anger intensifies.

And, yes, the hateful words and deeds intensify.

If you cut off access to yourself with “no contact” the abuser will simply get really creative with ways to get to you.

Smear campaigns, rumors, lies, alienation from friends and family. Even your own children become a weapon in the hand of an emotional assassin.

You are the enemy and must be destroyed for their own survival.

You are forced from your home, as well as your town and community for the sake of safety.

Some take sides with the abuser and friends can be lost to you.

Your children will be manipulated and twisted in an excruciating process of blame and alienation.

Your identity as a parent, spouse, homemaker, loving and caring person are stripped from you.

Even your humanity is brought into question. You are called the abuser, the narcissist, the evil home wrecker. Everyone’s hurt is placed squarely on the shoulders of the person that broke themselves trying to keep everyone happy and peaceful.

The legal system, which has attempted to give abused women protection is strangely twisted and used to continue the abuse.

You are held in financial and ethical limbo. Until your limited resources are bled dry and even though there are laws to ensure fairness, you cannot afford to access those laws.

So then, there you are. Homeless, childless, identity gone. Financial security gone. Years spent investing time and energy into a safe family, and it crashes like it’s 1929 and your entire life savings is gone.

Metaphorically, you are standing on the ledge of a burning high rise contemplating the jump. What could possibly exist for you after this? You no longer belong there but you don’t see yourself anywhere else. It was either off the ledge into the abyss of the unknown or back into the fire. An impossible choice.

That is why so many women go back. Over and over, thinking, I can handle the heat. The heat I know, the heat I understand.

Until one day you make a different choice. You step off the ledge into the dark abyss of the unknown. Free falling. No one feels like they belong in a free fall!

When you finally land it’s with a thud, but you are mostly on your feet. Certainly battered and bruised but able to move forward. Is this where you belong? When you decided that this is not the life you wanted you step off the ledge again. And then again. But these times it is different.

Instead of finding where you belong you begin finding things and people and places that belong to you. The next time you step off a ledge into the unknown you take those things with you. Painfully slow you start to gather what could belong to you.

Even when you have traveled a long way from the burning building you will still feel the heat on your neck. Every once in a while you will look back and see the destruction and be filled with an intense sadness. There were many parts of that life you dearly loved but had to abandon to keep from being burned alive.

Your abusers hate for you will burn like an all consuming bonfire that they continue to fuel. But you must realize that even though it looks scary, you can only really be burned if you put yourself in the fire. So you must stay away from the place where you once belonged.

Are you somewhere that you belong now? I suppose that if you could feel like you belonged in an abusive relationship, you could feel like you belong just about anywhere, if you stay long enough.

Perhaps the trick is to keep jumping off of ledges into the unknown, while gathering to yourself the things you want to belong to you. Then when you’ve gathered many lovely things, you decide to stay in one place for awhile and enjoy them.

Then you will belong where you have gathered the things that belong to you.