Have you ever considered the acceptable abuses you are willing to live with in your life? We accept the verbal abuse of our siblings. We accept the emotional abuse of our parents. We accept the physical abuse of a lover, and we accept the abuse of our adult children who leave, won't talk, and who use silence as a form of abuse.
We even abuse ourselves.
We abuse our bodies with drugs and alcohol. We abuse our character with lies, cheating, and stealing. We abuse our minds with exhausting ruminating thoughts that we don't know how to control. We beat ourselves up with self-criticism, condemnation, and believe the negative lies that others put into our heads. We cut our arms, we beat our chests, and we even pull the trigger on the ultimate self-abuse-suicide.
We accept all this abuse because we don't know what else to do. We think, "If I don't accept this abuse from others I'll be alone and that is worse than the abuse." We abuse ourselves because we want things to change and since the only one we can change is ourselves, we make change happen in unhealthy ways. It's all we know because we learned these ways of coping from our partners, society, and our families. Left to our own inabilities we can destroy marriages, relationships, and hope for our future when in reality, all we need is to learn a new way.
You are only responsible for the abuses you accept and refuse to learn how to change.
We are not born "knowing." We do however have a capacity for learning. We are like an empty cup at birth and everyday we gain knowledge (good and bad) and that knowledge fills our cup. If the cup is filled with examples of abuse, abuse will be all we know. In order to change we must EMPTY the cup of those perceptions, those pains, and those unhealthy coping mechanisms. Once the cup has some room, we can begin to replace the abuse with healthy concepts, tools, and paradigms. Improving our life is as easy at that, and it's only as hard as we make it.
Stop the abuse and get some help today. You'll thank yourself for doing it.