[RecoveredOptimist]

Dear April,

I am not sure if this is the right place to post my comment, but I haven’t been able to find anywhere else to respond. I have generally found most of your dating tips and overall advice on relationships issues very helpful and spot on and it’s a great site to check up on for what me and my girl friends call “a reality check” when going through dating and relationships in general. I very much appreciate all your insights.

But I really did take issue with your article “How Do I Help Someone In An Abusive Relationship?” because despite a couple of good pieces of advice I found it shortsighted and narrowminded in understanding the situation the woman in question was going through. And to make matters worse, in several places your comments are just outright insulting, allegding exactly the kind of scenarios that make it all the harder to get out of a relationship for women who have fallen victim for a pattern of domestic violence. This goes especially when you say “I’m not sure what led you to be in an abusive situation, but that’s what’s happened.”

Well, April, excuse me to be so blunt, but in this particularly case it doesn’t appear that you really do understand what is going on. The sad true is that sometimes simply nothing particularly happens for a woman to end up in such a situation and believe me, I speak from personal experience and that is why I feel so strongly about your choice of words here. But the very fear and embarrassment at the heart of our situation make this all the more difficult to move on, the very fact that we know that we are constantly faced with the question “but how did you end up in this situation to start with”, or “what happened for you to end up with this,”… these are SOOO judgemental comments because it so inclines that we women somehow ourselves were to blame for the outcome, WE let something happen to end up in this. Belive me, we KNOW that at some point we obviously made a bad judgement, but that is not helping us to build strength to get out of a situation when we constantly are being confronted with questions of that sort when we at the moment are frightened and sometimes threatened with our lives. It is not helping that the overall society, with questions like yours, somehow already have judged us and already are making us in to sad hopeless cases of women – and I am sure that this may not be the way you were intending this to sound but that is how any woman who like “Confused” and myself have been through such an ordeal hear it.

And faced with the constant judgement, or fear of being thrown such questions or comments in our face, from anyone, even from those among our closest circles, in the end brings about the undesirable result that to most women it will even more embarrassing and almost overwhelmingly difficult to try to confront the situation and so instead of loading even more embarrasment down on our already battered ego with a complete lack of confidence, we instead find excuses to stay on, like Confused dis.

The other sad facts that you completely ignore in your response is the basics of understanding the psychology behind how women in this situation rationalize their behaviour in order to tolerate it and stay on:

When Confused tells of “how sweet” and “funny and loving” the abuser is, she resorts to the number one theory of not just explaining but accepting the situation by creating “the good person” vs “the bad person”. The problem with that rationalization is that abusers are very much aware that what they are doing is NOT correct – the husband himself shows us all that by being “always on his best behavior” with her daughter, it would be a strange coincidence that if his attacks really were because of his disease then the daughter always managed to escape unharmed, but not the wife, over and over and over again – but the abusers use the “good person” to reason that we should still stay on in the relationship because when they are good, they are oh so good, and when they are sweet then they are oh so sweet… There is no such thing as a good and bad split personality, the abuser uses the continuing dimishing good side as an excuse to get away with all the bad he is doing, its one and the same person and it’s pure phycological manipulation!

Yes, women like us who have ended up in this situation do know what we have to do, but it’s not that easy as you make it sound. When the abuse and fear and threats have been build gradually up for years, it takes one thing to finally accept that this is happening, and something else to realise it will never change before you finally leave. And it takes a third process in itself that is all the more harder because of the overwhelming fear that accompanies such an act as leaving the man, and not being entirely sure of just how far he is willing and capable to go with his threats, is outright terrifying. Add a child to the process and you can multiply the fear factor with ten.

I have, just like Confused, been graphically described how my abuser wanted to beat me to death, and that was the final chilling effect that made me realise that I had to get out because it wouldn’t ever change. But it still took me another 6 months before I build up the courgage to do that and the only reason I did was because a close family member happened to come around unplanned a day and I seized that as the opportunity to move on, knowing that he didn’t wanted to risk getting the whole family reconsidering “the good person” they had come to know him to be. And it still took me years after that, and years of therapy, to finally be able to put the endemic feeling of fear behind me.

There is no “black and white” situation here, and it’s not that easy to call the police on a whim just because you are afraid, because in most cases the fear for what he will do AFTER the police has gone, or when he is out from jail, tracking you down wherever you are and making reality of his threats, is a fear all the bigger than what you face in the moment when you consider calling the police.

Telling Confused to “stop being a victim. You need to be a hero” quite frankly is naive and useless – there is a long way to go before she can undertake that part of the road toward recovery, and certainly that is not what you think of when you are fearing for your life, because at that time you are very much a victim.

But what women in this situation CAN do is starting to call a hotline for domestic violence victims and start building evidence of the case, and start getting the councelling from the domestic violence hotline that will help her build up the sufficient courage to leave the man> Once she has that, in the first instance is is recommended she goes to a domestic violence center where she will be able to give the police reports in safety, and get the social councelling and legal advice until she can get a restraining order for the man. It serves no good her being out and about on the streets until the abuser has been either arrested or served with the restraining order. And even then it’s going to be a long while of terrifying months walking about the streets, just going to the supermarket, and fearing at every turn of a corner whether the abuser suddenly will turn up to make more of his threats.

And what women in this situation also should do is trying to is finding a few hours where she knows she will be on her own at home to pack a few bags with the most necessary things ACOMPANIED by at least one or two close relatives that the abuser don’t want to have a fall out with – male relatives, or male family friends, will for pure physical reasons be best. If there are weapons in the house, make sure all weapons are hidden from there normal place in case the abuser comes home unexpectedlty early. That should allow for a safe exit into an asylum, possible timing it so she can pick up the daughter or child on the way from school so there is no interference to her packing at home.

Once the victim starts taking control of the situation the abuser will normally very quickly see his power fade because it was out of weakness to start with that got him to act the way he did. But that while this, and many other issues can explain his behavior, there is NO excuse for that to happen in the first place.
That still won’t remove the very real fear a woman in such a situation will continue to feel for a long time after, and with time, once on a safe distance, most women also realises that the love they thought they felt for the man, never was there, because if so, the situation never would have emerged in the first place.

The fear does eventually start to fade. We women are strong and capable to deal with this and hence most of us do manage to recover and come back up again. But easy, it has never been, and the best support anyone can give a woman in such a situation is her unconditional, unquestioned and unjudged support in the process.

Best regards,

The Recovered Optimist

[jgullet]

it seems like you were expecting someone to make excuses and to feel sorry for the woman, but that wouldn’t have helped her. i think that the advice given was very appropriate and told her what she needed to hear, as well as provided some good suggestions on actions she needed to take.

[RecoveredOptimist]

Hi Jgullet, no, I don’t talk about making excuses, nor that she doesn’t need to hear some of the things said. But the advice given was not practical, neither realistic, in the circumstances the woman was living in at the time. And posing the questions as to “how” she got into that and “what happened” are judgemental, and not what give a woman courage when fearing for her life.

[skyler]

i didn’t like the article about nice guys finishing last, but as much as i didn’t like it [u]i did find it to be accurate[/u]. where is the article in question? i want to see what all of the fuss is about

[RecoveredOptimist]

The article is entitled “How Do I Help Someone In An Abusive Relationship?”, it was under the advice section for dating and relationships, not sure if there is a link…

[skyler]

i checked it out and really think it’s pretty good advice.

i do feel badly for the woman though, it’s a terrible situation.

i also think that if she didn’t want april’s straight forward opinion she shouldn’t have asked for it. as i mentioned, i’ve been in those shoes. her advice really pissed me off at the time and i thought she was almost too direct, but i must admit it has helped me. however, that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to agree with it and needless to say, you’re entitled to your opinion, just like i’m entitled to mine, etc.. 🙂

[April Masini, your AskApril]

Happy New Year! Let me know how things are going for you.

[Natalie Noah]

The internal reality of being in an abusive relationship the fear, the shame, the self-blame, and the psychological traps that keep someone stuck long after outsiders think the solution is “obvious.” The writer isn’t excusing abuse at all; they are challenging language and framing that unintentionally reinforces the very barriers that keep victims from leaving. That distinction matters, and it’s something many advice columns miss.

The strongest critique here is about judgment disguised as clarity. Questions like “how did you end up here?” may seem logical or even motivating from the outside, but for someone already terrified and stripped of confidence, they land as blame. The letter explains this beautifully: victims already know a bad judgment was made what they need is safety, validation, and a path forward that doesn’t require emotional strength they simply don’t yet have. Courage comes after safety, not before it.

The explanation of the “good person vs bad person” split is especially important. That rationalization is one of the most common psychological survival mechanisms in abusive relationships, and the letter does an excellent job exposing how intentional and manipulative that dynamic often is. Abuse isn’t accidental, and it isn’t caused by illness alone the selective control the abuser shows proves awareness and choice. Naming that clearly helps victims stop blaming themselves for “provoking” the abuse.

Where this response truly excels is in offering practical, trauma-informed guidance. It doesn’t romanticize strength or demand heroism; it acknowledges fear as rational and survival-based. The emphasis on hotlines, shelters, evidence-building, timing exits carefully, and prioritizing safety over confrontation reflects real-world expertise. This is advice rooted in reality, not ideals and for someone in danger, that difference can be life-saving.

Overall, this letter adds a crucial missing layer to the conversation: compassion without condescension, realism without cruelty, and empowerment without pressure. Direct advice can be helpful, but only when it’s paired with understanding of trauma psychology. This response doesn’t reject accountability or action it simply insists that support must meet victims where they actually are, not where outsiders think they should be.

[Member]

Posts