Maybe someone with experience can answer this for me.
1) First date - everything is wonderful
2) Battered woman is isolated and abused
Here's what I don't get. Somewhere between #1 and #3, BEFORE this person is a victim, why not leave? I agree by the time they get to the very end, they are too involved and enmeshed to have the will to leave. But SOMEWHERE between there, when they notice things aren't going good, why not leave THEN?
In other words - where is the point of no return? Why not leave at the first hint of trouble?
Great questions. First off let me say that obviously you are a very emotionally/spiritually healthy person.
Those of us who can answer this question (with some shame might I add) will likely all concur that at the time we were in these abusive relationships, we were *not* healthy, not spiritually fit. And many of us either were active substance abuses or recovering substance abuses as an emotional escape, like myself, which complicates the situation and prolongs the denial of the severity of things.
I can't speak for everyone but I can list a grocery list of symptoms that made me a prime candidate:
-Traumatic childhood - divorced parents - abandonned by a father (hence abandonned by a man)
-Chaos was my "comfort zone" because that was the environment in which my childhood was molded
-turned to alcohol for escape to avoid feeling "feelings..emotions" ie, it hurt to feel.
-insecurity out the wazoo, often a product of our own divorce, not just our parents's
-lack of self-love
-lack of proper counseling
-lack of training on how to properly grieve. Grieve the loss of family (when parents divorce), loss of loved ones or former spouses, loss of children, innocence etc and then learn to move to closure (this is more important than I first understood)
When I started counseling, we started unraveling all those nooses and I was able to break free of the bonds. But honestly I don't know how any vulnerable woman with the traits i listed above, in the hands of a very gifted manipulator, ever finds the confidence to leave without a great counselor.
When we are spiritually sick, we lack the inner voice that you are gifted with. We may see the lips moving (the red flags), but the voice is on mute. Only through a new set of "glasses" can we see the world outside our warped perception and take those baby steps to recovery.
The first very very hard step is to learn to be validated as a human WITHOUT being validated by a man. The rest follows... When we become healthy and when we don't NEED a man, that's when we're ready to actually be open to attracting a HEALTHY undamaged man.