Why are we teaching women, who have had near death experiences at the hands of intimate partners, to trust men again, so that they go on to have another intimate relationship with a man? When we know the evidence tells us that a woman is most likely to be hurt raped or killed by an intimate partner.
Who does it serve to teach traumatized women that their instincts are, in fact, wrong think, and these thoughts must be overcome ?
Thats not what anyone is saying or suggesting be taught.
There are plenty of ways to give women power back in their lives rather than pursue a separatist lifestyle.
And to be able to have a healthy relationship with a man in the future rather than avoiding men for the rest of your life. If that's what you want.
I refer to my point about avoidance behaviour.
Since when does having a traumatic life threatening relationship in the past which has destroyed trust in men and done psychological harm mean that for the rest of your life you need to be ruled by the fear of the man that did that to you rather than finding and a future with someone who genuinely makes you happy?
That seems to be what you are suggesting.
It's harm to yourself to not look at ways to relieve the trauma and develop coping strategies for the harm that you've suffered and to miss out on good things that do come in life because of the bad things that did.
That's letting the fear control you.
You are always going to have that experience stay with you and it will affect you in some ways. The point is to not let it utterly control every single part of your future either.
It's not the same as actively exposing yourself to the same issues and risks and being doomed to repeat the worst of your experiences.
Yes, learning to trust to a certain extent again is a part of that process. Its not an easy thing to do. No one says it is.
But avoiding life entirely and everything it brings is a demonstration of severe anxiety. It might come from real or imagined circumstances. A phobia can be both or either - the irrational part of it, is the treating everything as a threat rather than putting it into context and being able to assess the scale of that risk under those specific circumstances. The trauma part is where you cant separate that past knowledge or experience from current or future situations.
Nothing will help you heal completely or free you from it completely. It will always be there. But I do think you can make a conscious decision to choose what type of future you can have and to what degree your past inhibits the choices you make in relation to a traumatic experience and that is connected to recognising mental health issues that result from that experience and finding treatments to relieve that.