What helped me when I felt like the terror and guilt and grief of trying to leave was going to kill me - and I mean on the day I left, as I was leaving and suddenly felt it was too unbearable to go through with it - was to imagine my life if I stayed forever.
And that felt so horrific and made me feel so desperately hopeless and suicidal that I realised I had to leave and that none of my emotions about the temporary experience of leaving were as bad as staying forever would be.
Afterwards it was a case of reminding myself that the difficulty and pain of those early days, weeks and months was a) changing all the time and b) temporary. Whereas staying would feel horrific forever.
You also need to be aware that leaving doesn't bring an immediate sense of relief because you're hurting and you're in an unfamiliar environment. All the things you had to push down to survive the abuse pop up needing to be processed before they can be archived. You'll be a bit battered and bruised from what you've been through, you'll need to grieve the life you'd dreamed you'd have, and you'll need a bit of time to heal.
So there is an adjustment period to get through and part of your planning should be for how you will take care of yourself, how you'll comfort yourself, who can support you when you feel uncertain or wobbling etc etc.
Once you've had a chance to settle the sense of relief arrives and it is worth the heartache and struggle to get there.
Each time I try to go I know it’s the right thing but become overwhelmed and become suicidal and then feel a relief when I decide to stay.
The trouble with that is it becomes self reinforcing. You're effectively training yourself to stay.
I do understand that those feelings are intense and it is a scary leap to take. I know leaving is a process and you're not the first woman to take several attempts, so I'm not judging you.
I do want to highlight to you - in the hopes it will help you cope with these feelings and make it to freedom - that the more times you respond to your tough emotions about leaving by staying and taking that sense of relief in return then the more you reinforce to your brain and body that the feelings are unmanageable and teach your brain that leaving is impossible - whereas you need to have belief it is possible. In a simplistic way, that sense of relief is a chemical process rewarding you for staying and that's going to become difficult to overcome if it gets too embedded. Instead of looking for a way to manage the temporary feelings your brain will be demanding its reward for retreating.
So that's where the knowledge about trauma bonding a pp mentioned, where the knowledge from the Freedom Programme course about how the abuse has affected you, by having tools and strategies to manage your feelings and put them in their temporary context all become important.
You're unlikely to reach a point where it feels a-ok to leave and you can breeze out the door; if you're waiting/hoping for that and retreat every time it's not there then there's a huge risk of getting caught in this cycle of enforcing that the only way to get relief from your feelings is to stay (e.g. if you keep testing the water and retreating because the tough emotions are still there).
I want to emphasise - because you can't hear my tone - I am not criticising you or judging you. I am concerned for you and trying to give you tools and ideas that might help you approach things differently and break free of this.
Leaving an abusive relationship - especially when it's been all you've ever known as an adult - is like being trapped upstairs in a burning building, flames all around you, people on the ground below the windows calling for you to jump to safety.
Except your brain is seeing that you need to run through flames first, which it definitely doesn't approve of, and it really doesn't think jumping out of a window is compatible with its priority of keeping you alive.
But staying in the burning building means being consumed by the fire. So you're in a terrifying, hopeless bind where your brain is assessing all options as a threat to your life.
Leaping through the flames and jumping out the window means overriding your instincts and having faith that this is the only way for life to be possible. It does mean having faith in something you can't see and can't yet imagine either.
And yeh, you'll probably have burns and scrapes and smoke inhalation and a broken bone or two to heal from afterwards. So even once you hit the ground you won't have the immediate sense of relief you hoped for at being safe because actually you need to recover from the experience first before you'll have space for that.
Once you do, then you get the sense of relief. Then things get better. Then you can feel glad you escaped.
Going back to your life, the fact you got as far as you did previously shows how capable, strong and determined you are. You got things in place before, you can do it again. Those weren't failures, they were important steps towards your freedom.
Knowledge is power. Use what you're learning and your past experiences to enable yourself to succeed.
And be kind to yourself. I know it feels crap not having anyone there at times like this to step in and do that, but your body reacts the same way to kindness from yourself as from others. It is effective as a way to soothe your nervous system when you feel overwhelmed and hopeless.
Good luck. I really hope you'll be here one day celebrating your first year of freedom.
as a starting point I contacted gp and had a few sessions of therapy which I stopped once I had made the decision to leave mostly because I had run out of money. I also had 6 free sessions on the nhs but that was CBT therapy. 