VI.

Why Women Stay

Why is it that many women dont leave their abusive

partners? Once the reasons they dont are understood, it becomes
clear why battered women so often react with shame and confusion
when asked to explain their behavior and why it is so inappropriate
to conclude that if they were up against real abuse they would
leave. Actually, the opposite is true.

One of the ways psychologists study behavior is by setting up

problems for laboratory rats used as experimental subjects; consider
one of those experiments. A rat is put in to a small enclosure. His
food and water dishes are in one corner placed on an electric grid.
When the rat goes to his dishes sometimes he is allowed to eat and
drink. At other times he gets a shock. There is no way for him to
prevent the shock because it is administered entirely at random. No
matter how he tries to approach his dishes sometimes he is shocked
and sometimes he isnt. The rat has no control over the shock in this
situation because getting the shock has nothing what so ever to do
with the rats behavior. If the gate to his enclosure is open, studies
have shown that the rat usually doesnt leave. Instead he cowers,
positioned somewhere between the food and water he needs to
sustain his life and the gate through which he could leave.
Essentially he is frozen, unable to approach or leave his source of
sustenance.

Another way to understand this phenomenon is to consider a

common brain washing technique used by cults to take away normal
independent volition. In this system a person is treated with
alternately positive and then negative regard and behavior for no
reliably ascertainable reason. People treated this way fall into
pleasing behavior, trying to get the positive response.
The historical record of the behavior of guards and inmates in
prison camps offers another analogy that can also fit the battered
womans

situation.

Guards

often

treated

inmates

erratically

sometimes offering kindness (food, shelter, relief from labor) and

sometimes meting out sadistic cruelty (beatings, starvation, and
random shooting). Again, there was no way to prevent the cruelty or
to earn the more humane treatment. This resulted in many prisoners
giving up and becoming indifferent to beatings and self care. They
stopped washing or feeding themselves and didnt move to shelter
to avoid the cold winds. People reduced to this state died rapidly.
I think this is much the same state battered women speak of
as a fog they existed in while living with their abusers.
Psychologists recognize this dangerous state of apathy in domestic
abuse victims. It can signal the time just before their perpetrator
finally kills these women.
So why would anyone get caught up in this terrible situation in
the first place? Why wouldnt they get out at the very first sign of
mistreatment? Let me offer a quick, and to that end incomplete,

explanation: A major reason we all pick the partners we do is in

hopes of getting the love we longed for (and didnt fully get) from
our parents. The problem is that in our unconscious cleverness we
pick psychologically reasonable facsimiles of our parents and
therefore we wind up with a partner who in many ways acts like our
mother or father. So if our parents mistreated us as kids, we will
likely pick partners capable of similar abuse. Since we still need love
and approval, we still continue to try, fruitlessly, to get their love
and approval just as we tried with our parents.
Women that stay with abusive partners very often have had
abusive parents. To them its normal to get hurt by the people you
love. Their self-esteem is very low from childhood mistreatment and
is further undermined by violence from their partners. No wonder
women cant give a good reason for why they stay: It would take
therapy (and education) to understand it themselves. If they had
good therapy, they could learn that they didnt cause or deserve the
abuse. Then they would leave.