Why Do I Need My Abuser to Understand? (Craving Closure from Abusers)

Quick favor before we start: These are the last two weeks for filling in my survey on waiting in relationships. I’d love your input and after I analyze all responses I will publish the results in an article here. You can fill it in here. Thank you!

There is an analogy that I know therapists sometimes use when talking to women who are struggling to leave abusive relationships because they keep trying to get closure and understanding from their abuser: if you were bitten by a snake, would you chase after the snake to explain to it how much the bite hurt?

Would you run after it demanding an explanation? Would you sit it down and say, ‘I need you to understand that what you did was wrong’? Would you prepare a detailed account of the incident, complete with timestamps and supporting documentation, and then patiently explain why you didn’t deserve to be bitten?

Would you spend hours researching snake psychology to figure out whether the snake’s childhood might explain its behavior? And would you postpone getting away from the snake until it finally acknowledged that, yes, biting you was wrong?

Probably not. You would get away from the snake.

Obviously, an abusive man isn’t literally a snake, and human relationships are infinitely more complicated than this analogy suggests. But I am a self-labeled bad woman and a scary mean feminist (according to some) and I’m choosing this metaphor because I don’t want to empathize with the feelings of abusive men. I don’t care why they do what they do, because caring is just another trap that keeps us centered on them. I want more women to stop caring about the feelings of abusers. :)

People can have remorse, change, develop insight, and take responsibility for their actions. But the analogy is useful because it exposes something that can become almost invisible from inside an abusive relationship: sometimes you are spending enormous amounts of energy trying to obtain something from the person who hurt you that he has repeatedly demonstrated he is unwilling to give you.

You want him to understand how you feel. You want him to understand why the cheating hurt. Why the screaming frightened you. Why the humiliation stayed with you. Why the sexual coercion mattered. Why you stopped trusting him. Why the constant criticism changed how you saw yourself. Why you cannot simply ‘get over it’.

Why you didn’t deserve it. Why you weren’t being dramatic. Why you weren’t too sensitive. Why you didn’t ‘make’ him behave that way.

And so you explain, and explain again. Then you find better words. Then you give examples and explain how it made you feel. Then you explain what you needed instead and what could be a better strategy for expressing his displeasure next time. Then you send him an article, and another one. Then you try to explain the psychology. Then you try to explain the pattern and encourage him to go to therapy. But therapy can’t help him even if he does go.

And somehow, after all of that, you are still waiting for him to understand. Here is why and how to free yourself from craving closure from abusers...