When your friend is in an abusive relationship...
There's no simple or easy answer
by Jessica Martin-Weber
This topic came up in the private We're All Human Here Community Group and I shared my story. The question was about not wanting to put distance there but also having boundaries about keeping their own children safe and how to explain this to the friend that is in the abusive relationship.
OOOOOOOOOOF.
People, this is so incredibly hard.
I was a child in an abusive home, and I knew how deeply I was impacted by that. When I realized my best friend was in an abusive marriage, though very different from what I had experienced in terms of the type of abuse, everything in me screamed to get her and her children out and to also be sure my children weren't exposed.
It isn't so simple though.
Leaving an abusive environment is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which are that it becomes more dangerous for the victims when they try to leave and how complicit our society often is in enabling abusers.
In my case, my friend wasn't sure she was being abused. And she felt it was a sin to divorce. And she wasn't sure what to do. And she was terrified of losing her kids. And so much more.
I still felt I had to protect my children from my friend's abuser and from having abuse normalized for them.
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At first I avoided it as much as possible, coming up with excuses to not go to her house or making sure get togethers happened at mine or some place public.
Eventually, I couldn't avoid it any more. I had to tell her.
I decided to just tell my best friend the truth.
Our kids would not be going over to their house without us because we did not trust her then husband and we did not want our children to be put in the position of seeing someone treat others badly.
We also told her that we would limit how often they could come to our home if he was going to come with (he didn’t want to be around us either though so that wasn’t much an issue).
My friend cried. I assured her it wasn’t that I didn’t trust her to try to keep my kids safe, it was that it wasn’t safe for anyone, including her.
It sucked. A lot. I was afraid of her being socially isolated. I was afraid for our friendship. I was afraid for her safety. And I couldn’t risk my kids safety or well being. They saw how he treated her and we’d had a few interactions between our children that was evidence of abuse being normalized in their home in the behaviors of their children and her now ex saw nothing wrong with it.
It was hard, it really sucked. She cried. She was hurt. And in the end she understood. By that point we had tried everything to support her and their family including addressing her ex directly about his problematic behavior which… didn’t go well or change anything.
In my friend’s case our boundary here contributed to her really seeing how bad things were. She was able to safely get away from him after that and her life drastically improved. But at the time I was really worried about us holding that boundary as being yet another way he had control.
We’re still best friends. It has been a long time and her kids are mostly grown now. She is free of her abuser and thriving. She was able to leave safely and her kids too.
There's no simple solution to this (well, there is: STOP ABUSING PEOPLE!) but I know for us that it was important that I was honest with her. She had to know what was going on for us and why we were making the choices we made. Our friendship was strong enough for that.
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