The Broken Compass — How do abuse survivors know we deserve love?
Everything felt wrong for as long as you could remember. You’d been searching for answers for months, or maybe for years. Then one day something occurred to you. Was this abuse?
So you found a test online and took it.
It said you were likely being abused.
Suddenly everything that had been tearing your insides apart for ages clicked into place. Everything made sense to you. Finally.
But it fell on deaf ears. No one wanted to hear your bullshit. It wasn’t any of their business. They couldn’t choose sides. Maybe, like with one of my abuser’s enablers, you confided your plans to confront your abuser in them, and the only response they could be bothered to send you was a single thumbs up emoji, one that radiated contempt and disinterest.
No acknowledgment. Complete refusal to engage your suffering. Person after person, that’s the same response you got. Sometimes the character of the response was a bit different, but it all followed the same theme—your suffering is not important enough for them to consider making any kind of difficult decision.
You aren’t important. You don’t matter. Your feelings don’t matter. No one cares.
You are not deserving of love.
That’s the lesson you take away from the enablers of abuse. That you are wrong to attempt to value your own feelings above the abuser’s control of you. You are wrong to seek support. You are wrong to attempt to protect yourself.
If you’re brave, you’ll still find a way out. But all of those enablers, people you thought you could trust, will go with the abuser. Your support network will be entirely shattered by the realization that none of these people are the safe havens you thought they were. In fact, they never were safe.
Once you’re out, you may start to rebuild. You may find people who do care, people who don’t shut you down the moment things become difficult. You find the people that actually give a damn about the abuse you were put through, the people who reach out and ask how you’re doing on difficult days. People who get genuinely angry when they see who your abuser put you through. People who empower you to fight for yourself.
Yet, despite being surrounded by support, surrounded by people who say that they love you, that they support you, that they believe you… That lesson may still suffocate you, month after month.
You are not deserving of love.
How do we, as survivors of psychological abuse, find relief from this suffocation?
Think back, if you can bear to, to the bright parts of your relationship with your abuser. What were they like?
Maybe you can recall times where your abuser made love to you, or where she called you beautiful. For me, I remember a number of times that my abuser laid her head on my stomach and, with an enamored tone of voice, declared how soft I was.
Maybe you remember the sheer excitement of beginning the relationship. Passionate words, gnawing anticipation, soaring emotions. I remember a friend at the time telling us that it was only a matter of time until the two of us got together. She said that “the countdown had started” the day we met, or something to that effect. I remember how shocked and surprised I was at the statement.
I remember, drunk and with a pounding heart, asking my abuser out a few nights later. I remember her saying we ought to wait for a little while, only to say fuck it and accept before I’d even sobered up. My heart soared with elation.
You know what I bet you don’t recall?
The times where you solved problems together.
I don’t recall her ever apologizing for the times she hurt my feelings, not of her own volition. I don’t recall her ever seeing me upset and offering me a bit of wisdom or comfort. I don’t remember her ever affirming me for my own sake.
What I do remember is being forced to argue for hours and hours to wring a scrap of acknowledgment out of her. I remember her flying into hysterics the moment I told her I was going to make any serious change to my life for my own sake. I remember being forced to comfort her when I confided my struggles in her, and when that didn’t work, I remember being badgered into going to bed rather than allowed to discuss my well-being. When that, too, didn’t work, I remember her initiating intimate roleplay in order to distract me from the struggles I wanted to hash out.
I think back to the time she called me soft and realize that she didn’t care about how I felt about it, only that she got pleasure out of my body. I realize I felt disgusting when she called me that. Like an object. Yet I didn’t resist her. I felt obligated to be an object for her.
The thing about abusers is that they’re very good at tricking their victims into thinking they feel loved. They stir up excitement. Hearts fluttering, butterflies in our stomachs, that kind of thing. But the moment things become difficult for them, they bully us into the dirt.
When you attempt to confide your feelings in her, she tells you that she’s not your therapist, or that you need to understand boundaries better. When you ask her to apologize, she complains about you dragging her over the coals, forcing her to grovel for forgiveness. She complains about how demeaning it is, being forced to repent. She convinces you that you’re in the wrong, actually, for daring to hurt. Somehow, you end up apologizing to her.
Maybe she even attempts to convince you something is wrong with you. She convinces you that you’re an emotional vampire, sucking people dry for affirmation while providing nothing in return. For a few days, my abuser convinced me I had Borderline Personality Disorder just so that I would feel crazy for being upset with her.
Do you see how this is not love?
We often find ourselves drawn to return to our abusers, thinking that maybe this time it will be more loving. And they often feed into this feeling. Abusers are very good at sensing when the line is about to snap. They know when it’s time to let go just a little bit in order to keep us on the hook. They’ll tell us that they understand now, that they see how their behavior is wrong, that they’re going to finally change. They convince us that, yes, this is love. The way they treat us is love. They’re just a little bit flawed.
But it’s not love.
It’s a game.
And, in fact, when you examine everything you once found loving about an abusive relationship, you’ll quickly find that none of it was really love. They were attempts to maximize the abuser’s control.
That heart-fluttering excitement? That wasn’t love. It was love-bombing. She suffocated us with faux positivity in the hopes that we would be drawn in by it, and in the hopes that we’d become too attached to consider leaving.
The love we made? She didn’t care how we felt about it. She got pleasure out of it. That’s all it was. The fact that it made us feel excited, at least at first, was just a nice side effect that she could use to reel us in.
The compliments? Think about what she really complimented us for. She complimented us for giving her pleasure. She complimented our bodies, our voices, our appearance. She didn’t compliment our character. Our bravery, our empathy, our creativity, all of the things that might have served to navigate us away from her abuse, she kept silent on. That wasn’t an accident.
Put simply, she rewarded behavior that kept us attached to her, and she punished behavior that might serve to bolster our independence, or to empower us to leave her.
That isn’t love. That’s control.
When we remember that, it becomes a lot harder to crave it. We turn our attention back to the hole she left behind in our hearts, the severing of our souls, and wonder what the hell it might feel like if that hole wasn’t there.
That’s the missing piece here. We come out of abuse completely lacking in one of the most important tools a person can have. Perspective.
Our perspective on what love is has become so completely twisted and warped by her abuse that we have no idea how to orient ourselves moving forward. We carry with us the beliefs she drilled into our psyche. The blame she shifted onto us, the fears of both abandonment and engulfment, the crippling loneliness and the belief that we deserve every second of it.
We may remember how she hurt us, how fake her love was, but there’s still one more piece to the puzzle. We need to find a compass.
We need to remember what real love feels like.
Not our abuser’s fake love, which drew our compasses into an abyss in the middle of the ocean. We need to find true north again so that we may navigate our way back to land.
There’s a Jeff Rosenstock song I’ve thought about a lot lately. The song, entitled “...While You’re Alive,” comes from his 2016 record, WORRY.
In the song, Rosenstock remarks on how easy it is to say you love someone when they’ve passed, but how rare it is that people actually say they love a person while they’re still alive.
To me, this gets at something particularly true about abuse. When a person is dead, there are no real stakes to loving them or not. There are no sacrifices to make when you love a corpse. There’s nothing to lose when they’re already dead. So you say you love them, because why wouldn’t you? They died.
It’s different when someone’s alive. It’s a lot harder to say you love someone when they can talk back. They can have flaws when they’re alive. They can have problems you need to work around together.
When you tell someone alive that you love them, that person can believe you. And then they can expect you to act like it.
To this, the abuser says, “No thanks. I’ll take the corpse. The corpse won’t talk back.”
People talk a lot about how love shouldn’t be a burden. Love should be freeing, it should be liberating, it should be empowering.
The problem with this is that, while yes, love should be all of those things, love is a burden. When you love someone, you care about their well-being. You want to understand them. You want to hear how they’re doing. You do things for each other. You work through your problems for the people that you love, you provide comfort when they’re struggling. You want them to know that they can rely on you. It comes naturally to you, because you realize that in loving each other, you ease each other’s burdens.
Deep down, we all know this. Love is struggling together, taking turns lifting each other up as best as we can because we know the person we love would do the same for us. Everyone on Earth deserves to be loved in this way. Including me. Including you.
To love a corpse, but not the person who died, is to admit on some level that you’re happy to burden others, but that you refuse to carry their burdens in return. It is to admit this and be perfectly content with it.
That is what abuse is all about. An abuser can get along perfectly fine with a corpse, but the second that corpse reveals itself to be a living, breathing person with needs and worries all their own, she can’t handle it.
That’s why she tries to turn us into a corpse.
It’s easier to love a corpse than a person.
Rosenstock shares a similar sentiment at various points on his album, reminding us that the people who hold power over us “want [us] to be a ghost.” On the album, he’s talking about the people with systemic power—capitalists, governments, landlords. But I think it’s true of abusers, too. She denies us of our humanity in order to stop us from seeking love from her. She wants to stop us from demanding better, because that would require her to be burdened.
Fundamentally, she is a coward. She is pathetic. She cannot carry the burden of love, and so she lies down and refuses to, insisting the entire time that it is our fault for believing that she loves us.
Later in “...While You’re Alive,” Rosenstock remarks something that I find rather succinctly captures what love really looks like. In a sweeping build up to the final track on the album, he sings that “Love is worry.”
When I try to picture the people in my life who really, genuinely love me, that picture has one thing in common. Every single one of those people worries about me constantly.
They worry about my self-esteem, about my self-loathing. They worry about how hard I push myself, about how much I resent myself for being abused. They worry about how deeply I struggle to allow myself to cry. They worry when I hide myself in my room for weeks at a time without speaking to anyone. They worry when I eat one meal a day for a week straight, or when I don’t shower for a month. They worry when I push myself to engage with things that trigger my trauma. They worry. They worry. They worry.
They all worry. Constantly.
Why do they worry?
They worry because they love me. Worry is what love is.
When you see someone you love suffering, you worry about them. It’s that simple. And, frankly, whenever I see someone who doesn’t seem to understand this—someone like my abuser, or any of her enablers—I have to wonder to myself how stupid they are.
How broken do you have to be not to be able to see that love is worry? How miserable of a person must you be to completely shut out love just to avoid having to feel concerned for someone?
How selfish must you be to only love a corpse?
Our abusers are fundamentally selfish people. So are their enablers. They shut out worry because they think love should only serve them, and that any kind of burden is too difficult for them. They refuse to let us speak on our abuse, on our suffering, on our pain, because they know that should we speak, they will be forced to worry. They will be burdened by love. To them, that is unacceptable.
That’s how we know they don’t love us. They love a corpse.
The people who love us want us to speak. They choose to worry about us. They want to see us happy and free of burden. Not because it is more convenient for them, but because they love us. They are overjoyed to see us progress because they love us, and they feel what we feel through that love.
Love is the people who choose to hear us. Love is the people who open their arms and tell us to let it all out. Those are the people who really, truly love us.
These two pieces are, in my estimation, how we as abuse survivors have the power to remember we deserve love.
First, we remember what our abuser’s fake love looked like. We remember the damage she did to us, the tools she used to control us, the lies she told to keep us on the hook and the beliefs she drilled into our skulls to stop us from seeking better.
Second, we remember what real love looks like. We remember what it’s like to worry about someone. We remember what it’s like to be worried about. We remember what it’s like to comfort someone, and remember what it’s like to be comforted. We remember that love is a burden, and that everyone who chooses to love us chooses that burden because they know that it is through said burden that they will find intimacy, trust, and togetherness.
Remembering these fundamental truths allows us to keep our compasses aligned. The fog seems to drift away when we think about love in this way. It allows us to see ourselves from the perspective of the people who care, and to disregard the perspectives of those who would rather we be a living corpse.
We stop seeing ourselves as pathetic, vampiric leeches and instead see ourselves as close friends who have suffered far too much. We see our reflection in the eyes of our loved ones. That alone is incredibly powerful.
In order to escape the emotional grasp of our trauma, we must navigate by the eyes of our loved ones. Navigate by the eyes of the people around us who care about our feelings, who wish they could take away our incredible burdens, who simply want to give us a hug and tell us that everything will be okay.
For now, our compasses are broken. That was the cruelest trick our abusers played on us.
But the abuser doesn’t expect us to double check. Other people have compasses, too. They can see the world as it is, and they can give us directions. Through them, we can see our way out.
We can also finally see the truth—it was never our fault that she broke our compass.
She chose to do that. She broke our compass and watched us flounder, studying our failing navigation for ammo to break our compass further, and maybe to break the compasses of others. Those are her actions, and they are entirely her burden to carry. Do not confuse the burden of guilt with the burden of love.
There are people in our lives who understand on a fundamental level that we deserve a working compass. Until the day we have one, we can borrow theirs.
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