Hello! Seiiti Arata. Today we will continue last week’s video and provide you with an escape route from a relationship prison.
In order to get out of an abusive relationship you will need to survey the situation, accepting reality, knowing what is important to yourself, developing a strategy that will give you confidence and getting ready for the break up. That’s what we will see in this video.
1. Accept reality
When things are not good, you must realise that. Only after you accept reality you can do something about it. If you made the decision to watch this video because of its title, let’s be honest: something is not well in your relationship, right?
It doesn’t matter if sometimes the relationship improves. Of course it improves: if the relationship is terrible to the point that you find it a prison, it’s hard to get any worse. Therefore, it’s normal that from time to time it will improve for a while.
Even if you say that the good times are wonderful, what you really need is to understand the relationship as a whole and especially the limits that you cannot tolerate being violated.
2. Identify what you are earning with it
You are obviously getting something from staying in the relationship. What are you getting? Take a break to reflect.
Now that you know what you’re getting, you know what you need to replace in order to feel good. You need to find other ways to fulfil your needs.
Try to hang out more often with non-toxic people, who allow you to be yourself. That connection will provide you with the emotional strength required to escape from the relationship prison.
3. Be careful and prioritise your safety
Unfortunately, in some cases, when people try to protect their limits, they may be faced with a violent resistance. Some people are dangerous. The most basic limit of all is the physical limit.
If at any time you have reasons to be afraid of a violent or abusive reaction, you must have a proper plan to protect yourself, your children, your personal items or anything that might be at risk. Seek help from people you trust or even the police, if necessary.
Always assess the risk you are facing first. If you realise that it isn’t safe to communicate honestly with someone, you will hardly be able to improve the relationship with that person.
4. Prepare for the discomfort of breaking up
Accept the pain. If you are looking for a way to end the relationship without feeling sorrow, without ending up with a broken heart or without crying, you’ll be stalling forever.
It’s not easy to leave a person with whom you can have an addictive relationship. You will cry, you will feel a lot of pain and disappointment. But all that will go away eventually. And you will be fine. Watch our video “How to Stop Suffering” on http://arata.se/hello43 [thumb]
People who are well are those who have had the courage to get out of relationships that didn’t work and went after the best for themselves.
5. Don’t wear the rescuer mask
Once again we will refer to the important video “Relationships Without Drama”, on http://arata.se/withoutdrama
Sometimes you may have a tendency to put another person on a pedestal and prioritise them above yourself. It seems to be very noble to sacrifice yourself. It seems that you’re are acting as a super-hero, a martyr.
That’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for you or the relationship. You must appreciate yourself first. Be aware of the times when it’s necessary to sacrifice your relationship with that person to save your own life.
6. Give up the illusion that you have created in your mind
You know when ALL your friends and family keep on saying that you are in an abusive relationship, that the other person doesn’t deserve to be with you, that you must value yourself? Anyway, people insist so much that you need to end the relationship that this ends up making you not to want to be around them anymore.
What’s going on here? It seems that you are the only one who knows the story of the two of you. You try to believe that you love that person, even though you know that you are not being treated with respect.
[tapanacara] That is, you are living the fantasy of a love that is mostly in your head, based on stories from the past that no longer exist or on expectations of the future that doesn’t exist now and will probably never exist.
It’s a distortion of reality perception. That’s why the first tip of today’s video was “accept reality”. This is basically what we did in the first seconds of the video You need to learn how to say no at http://arata.se/hello63
Pay close attention now, since it’s quite likely that you are only seeing what you want to see. Instead of actually seeing what is happening and accepting the sad fact that you are in an abusive relationship, there is a risk of you only managing to look at the potential for change or the dreams of the past.
As you have also spent a lot of time investing in the relationship, you may feel like you don’t want to lose it. That’s the fallacy of sunk costs. You have invested a lot of effort, but all these years cannot be recovered. If you stay in the relationship, you will just keep on wasting more time. In order to stop wasting time, you must accept it, take in the loss and change your strategy.
Here’s a message for those who think that their partner is irreplaceable and that they will probably never find someone who will love them the same way. Consider this: what do they see in you that you cannot see yourself? Why are they with you? Obviously that, in addition to you being an easy target, who cannot say no, you also have qualities. What are your unique attributes? And a final question: If you have all those attributes, why don’t you realize that person does not deserve to be with you?
This is the classic situation of oxygen masks on a plane. If you are flying and a problem happens, you must secure your oxygen mask on first and then assist those who are next to you. The reason is obvious: if you try and help others first, you may end up passing out and then you won’t be able to help anyone.
The same goes for relationships. Don’t be bound to prison relationships for wanting to save someone else, while sacrificing what is essential for you.
In order to take care of yourself first, you will need to develop your ability of saying no and of setting healthy limits. To do so, visit http://arata.se/howtosayno and you will have a complete training with guaranteed results.