Boundaries & abuse.

As you can imagine, many people ask me what to do when enduring abuse in their intimate relationships friendships, a workplace or family situation. Examples abound.

Rarely however, do people realise that if one is the victim of abuse, very often (but not 100% always) one is also likely acting out of an abuse space too … without even realising it.

The two are actually locked together. On the majority of occasions, it is impossible to be abused unless you are engaged in some type of abusive behaviour yourself. And the opposite is also true. If you abuse, albeit innocently and unconsciously, more likely than not, you are also the victim of abuse – past, present or future.

In the therapy world, there are many excellent models and approaches for how to combat abuse with stronger boundaries; the recovery of self esteem; specialised emotional support; and behaviour remodelling. The key in general, usually involves changing behaviour and facing fear / the reasons for the resistance around doing so.

But there has to be something else for these strategies to sustain. Abuse and being a victim of it both exist at a certain frequency. One must operate out of a completely different space to that frequency in the first place for any strategies to succeed. Otherwise any changes will not hold power or even worse, the person will free themselves from one form of abuse, then simply re-entangle with another.

Abuse is so deeply intertwined with modern living, it can be very hard to tell the two apart. Of course, it is easy to say that an abuse-free existence is where one feels no pressure to be a certain way; where one never screams at someone else to get their point across; or where there is an absence of physical intimidation. We all know how abuse looks. But these days, what is abuse is often schmoozed as being cool or celebrated and marketed in the media. And what is not abuse is mistaken for being controversial, troublemaking, and even illegal.

The definitions have become very blurred, because of course, they are merely definitions. The vocabulary is not inclusive of the actual vibration of what it is addressing.