Therapist said I Played A Part In Being Abused By STBXH

[scotgal2017]

Hi all, I have posted on other thread so just basic background: STBXH left me and 2 DCs July last year, he moved out September last year. Told me end of Dec last year he had met someone new recently and they had only met a few times (Don't believe this but not point of thread). We had been together 20 years, 17 married from when i was 17 and he was 20.

From pretty much the start he was abusive but I married him anyway. (later have found I out have issues from childhood that i didn;t realise I needed to deal with). For a while it was physical as well as verbal/emotional. The last 10 years or so there was no physical but the verbal/emotional intensified (perhaps to compensate for trying to supress the physical?). he would throw things, call me names, swear etc and do this as other stuff even in front of the kids. To my surprise he left me and DCs last year, didn't want to try counselling as pointless (which makes me think OW already on scene).

As hindsight is wonderful I now realise me and DCs are so much better off without him. I only contact him if about kids/bills, nothing more. I feel i am very much on my way to feeling very indifferent about him and looking forward to having a new life.

Anyway to the point! Since October last year, I have been seeing a therapist. We have discussed all sorts of things and in the last few sessions she has said although he has been abusive I have "ratchedted up" the situation when he has been angry and so therefore i have contributed to the cause of him being angry. I like this therapist a lot and I have clicked with her on all the other work she has done with me but I find this information a hard pill to swallow.

having been part of the abuse cycle for 20 years I know that the victim blames themselves and thinks it is their fault, so why is the therapist saying this too? Surely she should not advocate this line of thinking??

Opinions and thoughts welcome please. Am i being sensitive and have to accept that i played a big part of him being abusive to me or is her thinking off the mark?? Do you think victims of abuse from a partner "aggravate" the situation???

I disagree with her blaming you in this way.

Could she have been attempting to say that subconsciously your behaviour with your exh was trapped in an unhealthy cycle, and his was with you? or something like that?

I'd definitely challenge her on this or ask her to explain herself better?

No way!!!
He was an abuser from the start and that is who he is!!!
NONE of it - and I sincerely mean, NONE OF IT, was your fault.
You might like her but that is not a good thing she did.
Victim blaming is awful by anyone and by a specialist - NO!!!
Please contact Womens Aid.
They can help you with a good local therapist/counsellor in your area who can help with this and who specialise in this area.
Don't let her un-nerve you on this.
Tell her than you won't be 'victim blamed'

Tell her than you did nothing wrong other than marry him and stay for too long. But then you had your reasons for that too.
Abuse cycles continue, that is why they are called that!
It's hard to break.
But you are doing it now so get Womens Aid to help you.
Have you done their Freedom Programme yet?
If not then talk to them about that as well.

You need to talk to her about exactly what she said. Because I suspect she was trying to say something different from what you heard (and I'm not suggesting that's your fault).

I do think there's something useful in looking at your own reactions to things but only for its own sake - not in relation to someone else's subsequent behaviour.

If she was in fact suggesting that you made the abuse worse with your behaviour - which I think is what you mean, then you need to stop seeing her and report he to her professional body. That is NOT TRUE.

She may have meant that you have to accept responsibility for your part in it in terms of choosing to stay and or whether to leave.

I don't think it is victim blaming but if nothing is your responsibility then how will you stop yourself being a victim again?

You may have misinterpreted her or she may not have put it properly.

I too would say that it is possible that her mouth and your ears were not quite aligned and that she didn't mean to say what you heard!

Ask her, very bluntly, if she meant to say what you heard. Write down exactly what you think she said, word for word, and how you heard/understood it. Show it to her... and ask her to expand upon it.

Good luck.

I have "ratchedted up" the situation when he has been angry
What, by crying? Not crying? Talking back? Not talking back?
I'd be deeply suspicious of this therapist. Have you checked her qualifications?

Maybe she meant you were in a co-dependent relationship, where your previous issues and emotional damage meant that you sought out an abuser, as that was what you were familiar with? I'm sure she wouldn't have meant that in a judgmental or "victim blaming" way, she might have been simply trying to get you to look at why you chose the bloke and why you stayed with him, and whether you subconsciously encouraged the abuse, because you felt that you somehow "deserved" it. Victims can repeat this cycle as well as abusers can - it's down to early conditioning. I hope she helps you to shed that mindset, and boosts your self esteem and confidence, so you can choose a more loving partner next time, and recognise that you deserve so much better.
It would be useful to work through that with the therapist, to reduce your risk of going straight into another abusive relationship.

Your therapist is a twat. Yes she is possibly trying some sort of technique to help you deal with it but it has obviously come across as victim blaming and you should say so.

Possibly this is the aim - to get you to justify and question the situation / get you to 'take ownership' or some tripe but they always think they're helping and it should be pointed out in no uncertain terms that this is well out of order.

Do it by email if necessary and you have control over what you say. Then you decide whether to go and chat about it with her or not.

Totally fine imo to say that you refuse to pay to tell her how shit she has made you feel.

You need to clarify what she said, and what she meant.

There's a common theme on threads like this, and it's generally the poster attaching a certain meaning to what their therapist has said, paraphrasing when posting on here, lots of people saying they're a terrible therapist, and in fact the therapist didn't say what has been posted at all.

I'm so sorry you went through all that. You didn't deserve it. Of course you didn't. You didn't make it happen.
Could she have meant that (as a result the childhood issues) that you behaved in a certain way to get him to fit into patterns you were familiar with? If that makes sense.
You're not to blame for his behaviour though. Not at all.

Your therapist is likely trying to explain codependency to you. Probably in an effort to protect you against getting stuck in the same dynamic again.

Every relationship includes cycles of behaviour and communication. Therapist may be trying to help you see what your bits of the cycle included. So that you can adjust course if you enter a new relationship.

Ask your therapist to clarify. Explain how you feel, what you heard them say x

I'm also wondering if what she meant is by not leaving, you made his behaviour acceptable.

So for example ... if someone gives you a slap... you do nothing. Next time they take it up a notch and give you 2 slaps... as one slap wasn't a dealbreaker.

although he has been abusive I have "ratcheted up" the situation when he has been angry and so therefore i have contributed to the cause of him being angry
Doesn't sound like a description of codependency, more like the wrong-headed idea of the victim bringing on the abuse through her behaviour.

I think the counsellor meant exactly what she said.

That a person who is accustomed to abuse sometimes deliberately/unconsciously deliberately winds the other person up sometimes because it gives them a misguided sense of control over the abuse or because they have "adopted" the feeling that abuse=love and therefore it's a way of feeling more "loved". And yes if it's something you do its a bitter pill to swallow. No that doesn't mean to are to blame or are responsible for his behaviour, he would have been abusive whether you did it or not.

And yes it is definitely something you should be talking about in therapy.

Good post Toffeelatte.

The thing is it doesn’t matter what she was getting at because she didn’t make herself clear enough or explain we’ll enough for the OP to understand what she was getting at.

If a therapist has a client leaving the end of a session feeling the are in anyway to blame for domestic abuse then they are a VERY POOR therapist!

If it was me I wouldn’t be going back to her but if you feel you want to then next session you could explain the way her comments made you feel and ask her to clarify what she actually meant by them so that hopefully she would learn to communicate better with her other clients. For me the trust would be broken and I would be forever questioning what she was saying.

Thanks all so much for your replies. I am confused about what she meant, and as some of you have said I may not have fully understood exactly what she has meant but as others have said i don't think she has fully explained exactly what she means, and so due to this it does feel like she is trying to put an element of blame on me.

I think Toffeelatteplease may be on to something, although i never (conciosuly anyway) had the feeling of abuse=love, perhaps after 20 years of it though I maybe behaved in a way could be perceived as "winding him up" - he certainly used this as a reason for his anger at me many times through the years. But then it didn't matter what response I gave him, i was always "winding him up" so I gave up trying to find different ways to "not wind him up".

It is something that we are going to discuss in my next sessions, up until now we have concentrated on my childhood and how i am "fixing" me so that i can be all that i can be - which is my main aim of the therapy as it is pretty apparent that this is something that I should have done for myself many, many years ago, even before I met STBXH.

I will perhaps post again after I have got more of a concrete idea of therapists view on DA. Thanks again for all your reponses. xxx

We aren't in the therapy sessions, we don't know the OP, we don't know therapist. What we have is a highly loaded interpretation, inviting a highly loaded interpretation in return.

I'm not sure that's a good basis to judge the merit of either the therapist or the therapy sessions.

Apologies op. Good update

this is a thing that happens. It's a thing I used to do. I had an explosive father and then had an abusive relationship. I used to subconsciously ratchet up the emotional heat so he would hurry up and hit me and we could go back to the honeymoon phase in the abuse cycle.

It's part of a pattern in abusive relationships and doesn't mean she is blaming you. She's trying to explain your own behaviour to you.

OP your therapist shouldn't be making you feel responsible for the abuse you suffered. Either she actually does believe that, in which case, she is wrong, or she meant something else but she's not explained it in a way you can understand.

In an abusive relationship, there's usually a cycle of abuse, and part of that is the wind-up phase when the abuser is getting himself sufficiently riled-up to excuse the abuse he's planning. It's not pleasant: it's often the door-slamming, name-calling, seething, critical stage. It can last for hours, or days (sometimes even longer). You can try and avert it, but if you've been together long enough you know how likely that is. You might know how that feels: knowing the explosion is coming but not knowing when. So it's not uncommon in an abusive relationship to speed things along a bit and bring on the inevitable explosion to you at least shorten that stomach-churning wind-up period. Do you think that's what's maybe been happening? If so, it's a fairly common and logical reaction to abuse. Doesn't mean you want the abuse.

Xpost - Colditz put it a lot more succinctly.