Why does she stay?

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
― C.S. Lewis

     Today out of the blue God started talking to me about a question asked by many people, "Why does she stay with somebody who beats her."   I think I have the answer.  They stay because they understand.  People who abuse have been abused and people who get into relationships with people who abuse have been abused.  They understand each other.  They understand the pain.  They understand the rage.  They understand the feelings of "being bad", or "something is wrong with me".  They are like two beaten children trying to get what they need from each other to be whole, but they can't love enough because their hearts have been broken.

     People seem to understand when abused people have a huge place in their hearts for other abused people, unless that person is their abuser.  The person who goes from being the abused to being an abuser has the hardest time accepting love because they have become the person who hurt them.  Especially if their abuser said they loved them.  This totally distorts their concept of real love.  They tend to think that God is an angry person whom they will never be able to please.

     To be an abused person who loves another victim of abuse, who happens to be abusing them, makes it very hard to leave, because you are abandoning a person who has already been hurt too deeply.  You feel like you are the only one who gets them, because you can see past the rage to the pain.  Stockholm Syndrome is a similar situation and the victims share several symptoms.  Stockholm Syndrome is when a person taken hostage begins to sympathize with their captor.  I have to wonder if it is people who have been victims of abuse earlier in their lives who develop this syndrome?

     Violent criminals and abusers hate themselves more than anyone else can.  There are people who are evil in this world and one may be the elderly woman who sits next to you on the bus every day, but some people are just hurting.  Then we lock them up together and they abuse each other.  Is this really changing anything?  I heard a group of people saying that a man who raped a young girl should be sent to prison to be raped and I wondered, what if he has already been raped?  Maybe when he was a little boy?  This world belongs to the prince of darkness and when we talk like this it is obvious he is in charge.  God intends for us to love each other into healing.  What if instead of a normal American prison these people were put someplace where they learned to be loved?  Where they were introduced to a God who loves them just as much as He loves you and me?  If there was a family program this person kids would have a chance instead of paying the price for having a criminal for a parent?  The crime rate would surely go down.

     Only one of my abusers spent any time in jail and he was the only one I truly cared about at the time.  The people who abused me in my childhood never paid legally.  If I had an opportunity today to lock them in a jail cell, I would rather lock them up tight in the arms of Jesus.  People need to be lifted up, not beaten down.

“A life lived without forgiveness is a prison.” ― William Arthur Ward