I should clarify about the love part.
I would equate it to Stockholm Syndrome. I guess its like pets. They don’t have anywhere else to turn :(
Edit: fawning is probably the closest to the answer I was looking for
I think it’s because we are designed with a somewhat blank idea of what love is. We are born with a system that will become love, but we are born with it undefined. It’s similar to how we are born with a need for food, but not our culinary culture. It is during our formative years that we learn what love is just like we learn what delicious food is. Btw, in Spanish, when a kid doesn’t like to eat a specific food, it’s said that they haven’t learned to eat it yet. Back to the topic, the part that does come predefined is that we are to attach to our caregivers. Thus, we don’t leave them because we are designed to not leave them and have them teach us love.
Another issue is that as children, we don’t know we are being abused. What we’ve experienced in our families is all we know. From the perspective at this age, that’s just how life is. There’s no reason to leave.
Once we start realizing that not everyone goes through our experiences and that there are much nicer ways of relating to family, we can start recognizing that our familial situation is terrible and we want it to be different. The issue here is that there are only two options. Either you suffer the bad parts of the abuse while surviving on the breadcrumbs, or you lose any possibility of ever having a childhood family. The person basically has to decide to lose a major part of life. That is an immense amount of grief to endure, and they have to do it without the support of family. In these situations, the victim usually just kind of learns to manage the relationship unless there is a major catastrophic event that forces a decision. Otherwise, they’re learning how to overcome the frequent but comparatively tolerable difficulties. You’ll hear them say things like, “My dad is cool as long as you don’t expect him to…” or, “I love my mom, but I know not to…” They’re consolations to salvage their one opportunity. The decision is then to either (a) take a humongous hit by losing childhood family or (b) learn to deal with the most recent difficulty. The latter is much easier to brunt.
tl;dr: We don’t know it’s abuse. Instead, we are taught abuse is love. We are designed by birth to attach to our parents. And once we figure out it’s abuse, it’s a terribly difficult lose-lose decision to make where one option is addressing a recent issue and the other is nuclear.
There is no requirement that you do. I’m completely unsure why people believe that you must allow shitty human beings in your life because they are family. Fuck that! Allow people in your life who make your life better. If that’s family, that’s great, if it’s not family that’s completely ok also.
Sooooo, I have a ton of info here, but I’ll keep my point short and sweet.
Depending on the age, we HAVE to.
Because rejecting a parent is death. You’ll find that 7 year olds will make excuses for and defend abusive parents, because rejecting a parent is rejecting safety, housing, food etc….
And while that may be less true when you’re 18, some of that programming never leaves you, even if it should.
… so it just becomes a personal tragedy.
I’d argue that your mind is learning what love it at that age. However you are treated by your caretakers is what you believe is love because we are born with no definition so that we can adapt to whatever circumstances. Adopting your family’s schema on love, when you age out of that family, you’ll find yourself in a similar situation.
As evidence, most adults in abusive relationships were abused as children. People often ask why adults stay in abusive relationships that are clearly terrible from the outside expecting practical reasons, like finances or kids. In reality, the victim will likely fall into another abusive relationship if they left because that’s what they think love is. Adults that were raised in non-abusive households would have left at the first red flags, whereas the adults raised in abusive households would find those red flags as signs they are loved. To them, they’re not red flags; they’re green flags. It isn’t after a string of these relationships or a really bad one that they seek help to change this pattern. The path is hard and burdensome because they have to tear down what they unconsciously learned and re-raise themselves without the guidance of a parent.
Same thing happens with the abusers, but they took on the identity of the abusive parent. They feel that love is allowing them to control and devalue their partner by whatever means. These people have much less chance of recovery because they don’t see a reason to change. If their relationships fail, then in their mind, it’s the victim’s fault. The abuser’s only lessons are how to change their abuse strategies so that victims don’t leave.
In conclusion, it’s not only that the child can’t leave. It’s that they’re completing a major developmental stage: learning what love is. They have no other options because we are designed that way.
Also entirely valid.
we don’t. well i don’t. it’s individual, but you loaded the question, so it’s hard to answer it correctly
Truth.
