How abusive childhood teaches you to stay in abusive relationships:
- you have to be obedient and submissive in your childhood if you don’t want to get beaten, you’re taught this is normal in life, so why should you doubt it when it happens in your relationship?
- you’re supposed to care about everyone else more than yourself, you’re taught to provide comfort and be minimally or completely non-demanding of other family members, always put yourself last, and this is exactly what abusive partner will demand of you as well, how would you fight it if you’re taught this is just your place in life?
- your appearance, interests, skills, achievements, and faults are constantly exposed to criticism, insults, humiliation and ridicule in abusive childhood, and you’re taught it’s normal, how are you supposed to fight it when it happens in a relationship?
- you’re humiliated and ridiculed for seeking intimacy or try to express yourself in your childhood, how would you know it’s okay for you to desire understanding, consideration, reassurance and intimacy in your relationship?
- if you’re used to being hit, humiliated, and having your objections to it ignored, or even worse, minimized and punished by even worse violence, how are you supposed to defend yourself when it happens in a sexual situation? how would you be able to know it’s wrong for another person to harm you if your parents have been doing it, and they supposedly love you?
- if you’re taught to always be grateful that things aren’t worse, always compare yourself to someone who is tortured worse, how are you ever supposed to reach out and get help for being abused? how are you supposed to know when your situation is really, really bad? There’s always going to be someone somewhere in the world tortured worse, and this becomes a reason for you to suffer in silence.
Abusive parents are direct cause of abusive relationships, if your boundaries aren’t destroyed and your sense of what’s acceptable and to be tolerated in your close relationships skewed to allow abuse, you have much easier time rejecting abusive relationships later in life.