Are You Having Trouble Leaving An Abusive Relationship?
Try this mindset hack to reduce the emotions and turn your thoughts into action steps.
It’s seemingly impossible to detach emotionally from an abusive relationship when you’re racking your brain trying to decide whether to stay, leave, or go back. How can you compartmentalize long enough to provide some pressure relief and feel okay about your decision?
Abuse has a way of clouding your thinking and limiting your options. Or at least, it makes you feel like your options are limited. This is why the average number of times it takes to leave these kinds of relationships is 7.
Seven is the middle ground.
Some people leave on the first attempt, and some leave closer to the 14th. I was in the 14x camp. I spent over a decade trying to leave, but feeling as if it wasn’t a real option that truly existed. Until the day it did. I did it the hard way. Don’t do that. Use this much easier method.
The one way that I have found the most success with clients is to make it tangible. It’s easier to bring what is happening into reality when you can touch it, see it, and physically move things around.
I refer to this method as Retirement Planning.
Retirement Planning — for relationships
Retirement planning is more than just assets and money. What body do you want to have? What health? What location? What friendships? What relationships?
The things you do now are what set you up for the future. Wishes and hopes will never create those outcomes. Manifestation requires action.
There are only 3 big steps in this plan. (with a bunch of small steps in between them)
1. LTG’s- Long Term Goals
The first step in relationship retirement planning is to set long-term goals. Vague goals get vague results.
You do this by answering a few questions about relationships:
How do you want to be treated by a partner?
What would an average day/week/year look like for you?
How do you want to feel about your relationship choices?
What does respect mean to you?
What do loving actions look like to you?
How do you want to show love and respect?
What kind of support would you expect to give and receive in hard times?
What kind of partner do I envision myself to be?
What kind of partner do I want to have in my life?
The answers to these questions are the long-term goals because this is what you are trying to achieve in a relationship for the rest of your life.
Life happens. Disease, accidents, and regular aging come with the territory if you live long enough. Can you reasonably depend on this person? Reasonably is the key word here.
In abusive relationships, we spend a lot of time doing creative reasoning to justify staying. Creativity in the moment will bite you in the future because fantasy and reality don’t line up. If you have to spend extra time and energy convincing yourself that you can depend on the person who is abusing you, then it is a waste of time.
It is a poor investment and will not have the payoff you envision.
2. Build A Budget
Using your answers to the questions above, create a tentative path to get there.
Like any other kind of budget, it is going to take some time to get it right. Give yourself plenty of grace and opportunities to get it a little bit wrong while you fine-tune the process.
A budget for a relationship will look like this: For the question- What kind of support would you expect to give and receive in hard times? The answer may be- If I were to fall ill or be in an accident, I would want my partner to help care for me and be a kind, loving support. I want them to be loyal and empathetic and consider my needs as well as their own. I want to be there for them in the same way.
The budget part would be what you would need to do to establish this kind of relationship. If this were a LEGO house, what bricks would go into building it? The budget is the itemized list of those bricks.
Friendship
Respect
Compassion
Teamwork
Future planning
Paperwork (wills, trusts, pre/post-nup, etc.)
Items like these go into your budget.
3. Actions Steps
This is where you blast out the details for the budget items.
Once you know what to work on, you can figure out how to do it.
If you want to build a relationship with respect, teamwork, and compassion, do you need to go to therapy? Do you need to work on boundaries? (Do you know how to work on boundaries?) Do you need a different partner? Do you need to be a different partner?
For future planning, what do you need? A finance manager, a lawyer, an investment property, a godparent for your kids, a 401K? What will you need in this hypothetical future that you can take a baby step toward today?
Let’s say the action step is to find a good coach or counselor to work on codependency so you can leave your abusive partner. The action plan creates the steps to get there.
Check insurance
Google local and online options
Pick dates/ times that will work
Check rates
Interview clinicians
Go to a session
Doing these steps puts you a little closer to your end goal of working on codependency so you can be free from the abuse.
Another example of a budget item could be to build a money buffer so you can leave and find a new place to live.
The steps:
Research banks
Find a safe place to have your statements sent to (like a PO box or a safe person’s home that will accept the mail)
Create a new email account that is safe from prying eyes
Open an account
Calculate how much you need to find a new place
Place money in as regularly as you can
Sometimes the goals seem unfathomable if you only look at the end. When you break it down into steps, it becomes doable.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
This is where victims of abuse fall into a trap in their minds. Exorbitant amounts of resources have been put into this relationship already. Youth, energy, love, money, children, life goals, assets, etc. The list goes on.
How do you walk away from it all when you already did so much!
You want the reward for all of your efforts. However, putting more money into a losing game doesn’t make sense. What failed before will fail again.
Flexibility
With all of this planning, remaining flexible is the key to your success.
As you grow and change over time, your long-term goals will become simpler and clearer. Your non-negotiables become explicit. Your boundaries are set firm and logical. Your wants and needs will be open and transparent. And you will have had enough time in practice to adjust them to fit whatever situation you are in while still maintaining them.
Like the Golden Gate Bridge, you rely on your flexible but strong supports to keep you from crumbling into the Bay.
This method can be applied to any relationship, not just a romantic one.
What kind of friendship, professional, familial, or community relationships do you want?
