Abuse and Our Limits

“The limit of your self abuse is the limit you will tolerate from other people. If someone abuses you more than you abuse yourself, you walk away, you run, you escape”

Don Miguel Ruiz

Why do we allow ourselves to be abused by other people? Could it be that on some level we feel that we deserve to be abused? Could it be that over the years we have allowed ourselves to believe that we deserve to be abused? Could it be that our own internal self talk has become abusive and it has driven what we perceive to be our self worth down to a level to where we look for abuse to justify what we tell our self about our self?

The above quote is disturbing, yet in a way I believe is very true. This quote is not saying that we deserve all the abuse we get; it is talking about what we allow, what we tolerate in regards to abuse. We are talking about people who are staying in a situation where they are being abused and not walking away from it, or taking some action to eliminate this abuse. As a caveat, let me state that we are talking about adults here. We all understand that there are many children who are in abusive relationships that do not have the option or knowledge on how to extract their selves from an abusive relationship.

For many people abuse can become such a norm, that on the surface they do not recognize that they are being abused.

So why do we tolerate abuse? We tolerate abuse because we abuse our self to some degree and therefore subconsciously tolerate abuse from another person because in some way we do feel that we deserve the abuse. When we feel that we deserve abuse, what do you think we attract? We attract someone who will give us what we feel we deserve and in this case that would be abuse.

Of course on a conscious level, no one, short of masochist would seek out someone to abuse them, however for many people this is exactly what they do. I recently observed a person who was so use to being verbally and emotionally abused that one day when all was going well in her life, she turned to a person she was in a relationship with and out of the blue said “You are mad at me”, the other person was surprised by this accusation and said, “I am not mad at you, why would I be mad at you”, the response was “I just know your mad at me”, now this went on for a few minutes to the point where the person being accused of being mad said “Look, I wasn’t mad at you, however now I am getting mad, is that what you want”.  What happened here was that the abused person did not know how to handle life without abuse and needed some abuse to normalize her day. Sad isn’t it? People in abusive relationships often pick fights when things are calm, because they feel uncomfortable when they are not being abused in some manner.

If we are open to be abused to the level that we abuse ourselves, then what can we do to eliminate our tolerance of abuse from our life? The answer lies within our self, (which is no surprise, because that is where all of the answers reside), we must re-learn to love our self and that love must be unconditional. We must reach deep inside our self and determine what we really feel about our self, why we feel the way we do, and take that discovery of the abuse that we place upon our self and replace that with our authentic self, which is love. We must let go of any unworthiness we are holding on to, we must not punish ourselves for past mistakes, we must let go of guilt, we must let go of expectations and accept who we truly are and that is a spirit of love, an eternal spirit which is the persona of love and therefore deserving only of love. When we believe that we are worthy of love, because we are love, than we will no longer tolerate any abuse. We will no longer live in ego based fear, for you see, our spirit is much stronger than our fragile ego and we will understand that when we live in love that we have no fear of losing the abusive people in our life. Once we have this knowing, we then experience a great freedom in knowing that we do not fear the loss of abuse or the person who is abusing us. Therefore the abuse will be eliminated because the abuser will change his/her behavior towards you or you will no longer permit them to be a part of your life.

One may say, this is much easier to talk about than it is to do and I would agree, at first re-learning to love yourself may seem complex, however once you let go of what the ego wants to you so desperately to cling to because the ego has constructed an illusion of who you are, you will be able to see how simple it is to love yourself.

Loving yourself is your true, natural state of being.

Don’t believe that, try to find a child under the age of three who doesn’t love themselves fully.