Emotional Abuse

Imagine coming home and never being able to please your significant other.
- Perhaps you wore the wrong outfit and it makes you look unattractive. 
- Perhaps you didn't curl your hair the right way and it is frizzy. 
- Perhaps you were 5 minutes late and you didn't call to let that be known. 
- Perhaps you did call during lunch, and are now reminded not to call during the day.
- Perhaps you didn't pack your sig other's lunch the right way, or you forgot to put in a dollar for the soda. 
- Perhaps you didn't bring dinner home with you. 
- Perhaps you put your car keys on the glass end table and not on the hook. 
- Perhaps you forgot to take your shoes off outside of the door.

Just walking through the door now carries the emotional load of a ten ton elephant.  Do you even want to go there?  Say you do go and you survive all of those initial blows... you still have the rest of the night.

- Perhaps you cooked the noodles too long and now they are too soft so dinner is ruined.
- Perhaps you didn't put enough sugar in the kool aid because you just don't know how to do things right
- Perhaps you mention that there is a big project at work and they want you to lead it and you get yelled at for being away from the home and eventually a ceramic plate is laying in pieces on the floor.
- Perhaps there are dishes at the sink from the last week because no one else will attend to them.
- Perhaps you turn a show on the TV and are told that it is stupid and the channel gets changed without your consent.
- Perhaps you go to the bedroom to go to bed early and you get the light turned on and a laundry basket of clothes thrown on you for trying to ignore the situation.

If you can manage to go to sleep, you have survived another day.  You go to sleep hoping that tomorrow will be different.  Tomorrow you will do your hair right, you will call if you are going to be late, you will cook dinner perfectly.  You will do everything right.  Because if you do everything right, everything will be okay.

Tomorrow comes, you do everything right that you did wrong yesterday.  However,
- Today, you packed peanut butter instead of tuna salad
- Today, you didn't have money to go grocery shopping and the house is empty of milk
- Today, you should have called at lunch to find out he wouldn't be home for dinner
- Today, you didn't have the laundry done.
- Today, you curled your hair and it would've looked better straight.
- Today, you wore those sassy clothes, but are told they really don't look good on you anymore.
- Today, you stayed up to interact, but are given the silent treatment for all that you did wrong.

You go to sleep and wonder where you went wrong.  How can you make it different.  Why can't you keep up your end of the relationship?  What are you not getting?

I know what you are thinking.... LEAVE.  But it is not that simple.  For the past two days you have been told that it is YOU that is WRONG.  You are not performing correctly, you are deficient, you are different and no one else in the world acts like you do.  You don't know what you are doing.  Your mind is all twisted in to thinking that you are to blame for everything.  And you have been told that if you leave, everyone will be told how you were the one to blame.

No one will believe you, you can't do anything right!