How To Get A Friend Out Of An Abusive Relationship
How do you get a friend out of an abusive relationship? If you talk to people who work at women's shelters, they will tell you, but there is something resigned about the way they do it: they know that it's too difficult an ask. Those who can do it reliably are often people who are unlucky enough to have had first-hand experience as victims.
The instructions have anti-memetic properties: no one is thrilled by them, so you can't really propagate them without killing the vibe. If that wasn't enough, if you convey it with insufficient skill it is easy to come across as victim-blaming battered women1, so it is wiser to avoid the subject matter altogether.
If you are interested, though, here's what they'll tell you:
You make it known to your friend early on that you dislike some aspects of the relationship, of their abuser. After that, you support them and all their choices without reservation. You make it clear that you care about them no matter what, and you will be there for them whenever they need you to be. You do not antagonize or bad-mouth their abuser.
This is what your friend is experiencing, while being in an abusive relationship:
They value the relationship that they have with their abuser. They may be in deep, deep love with their abuser. Their abuser may be giving them something that they cannot access otherwise (or believe that they cannot access otherwise), that they find precious.
They will know that elements of their relationship with the abuser are shameful. They will instinctively take pains to hide the worst of it from people; they know that there are some things that happen inside the relationship that they can't disclose to anyone else. But because their relationship is such a big part of their life, this cashes out to not being able to talk about a large portion of their life to anyone.
Many of their loved ones are going to repeatedly and loudly express concern about their well-being. The strident objections to a relationship that is so important and meaningful to your friend is going to make them feel tense and guarded and defensive, and they might choose to start freezing out those relationships rather than trying to manage them.
The abuser might also discourage them from seeing the people who disapprove, but the above dynamics will have already done much of the work. Their relationships with other people will fray, and they will become increasingly isolated.
Your friend will make choices that don't make a lot of sense to you. They will make poor choices. Some frame this as the victim being in "survival mode"; the need to do things that only make sense in the context of surviving one more day, one more hour. They might be scared, stressed, sleep-deprived, in an actively adversarial information environment. When you are being supportive, you will often feel like an enabler. You will feel deeply shitty about this.
If you are lucky, at some point they will realize that their relationship is untenable, and then you can begin the process of helping them leave. This process is going to be equally frustrating, or perhaps more so. They are going to have the weirdest hangups and priorities. You will help them get everything in place, and then they will lose their nerve and cancel on you once, twice, multiple times, lose you the rent deposit you fronted; tell you that they changed their mind, things aren't actually that bad, leaving is too complicated, they'll never find anyone else as good. You can't get mad at them when they do that. You have to let them go back to their abuser after getting so so close to being free, and say "okie that's totally fine, are we still on for brunch next week? <3"
By this point it might have been years, or decades. You might be the only person in their life not in the abuser's sphere of influence at that point. And even if you do all of this, they still might never leave. The person you love (because you must love them, don't you, in order to do all this?) is going through a very difficult thing, a thing that many people do not manage to successfully escape. To give them more of a fighting chance, you will need: all of your love, all of your effort, the suppression of your worst instincts, and also your best ones.
Corroborating sources:
- the hotline on supporting someone who keeps returning to an abusive relationship
- loveisrespect on helping a friend
- woman's trust uk on what to do if you're worried about someone
- the network/la red on how to help a friend
- safelives on supporting friends and family
- stop relationship abuse on how to help a friend
It is not the case that only women are victims to domestic abuse, but this is the image that comes to mind for most.↩