Heartbroken Over Dirt

-By Annie Kaszina

“I’m heartbroken at the thought of losing somebody who treats me like dirt.”

“Why am I heartbroken at the thought of losing somebody who treats me like dirt?”

Why indeed? How is it that you know something with your head and yet your heart drowns it out? And is it really your heart?

Or if it is, what is that really about?

If I had a dollar for every time a woman has told me how wonderful her lover is, even with his hurtful, punitive behaviours, I’d be writing this in my very own palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal.

The fact is you love your investment. Once you start to invest your time – and quite possibly money – your heart, your trust, and your future in a dream, it’s hard to let it go.

One of my constant rants is that people aren’t terribly good at ‘joined up’ thinking, or ‘joined up’ living. We’re forever compartmentalizing our life. We do it in all sorts of ways, but for now, let’s just look at how we do it in relationships.

There’s this thing called “The Love Conquers All” button that we all have, which, once pressed, short-circuits logic, common sense, friendship even family values.

Sometimes, it’s known as the “Throw Everything Over For The Man You Love” button.

Either way, it tends to be a pretty dangerous process. Not least because as well as throwing caution to the wind, you cast aside all previous criteria and points of reference.

“The heart has its reasons,” allegedly, “of which reason knows nothing”. Quite. But is this a good thing?

Just suppose that instead of arguing that ‘falling in love is like nothing else’, you compared it to the selling process. After all, most of us are guilty of falling in love with things that we buy; like shoes and clothes etc. You buy, because people sell to you.

Ideally, in the sales environment, there is the ‘upsell’. Either you’ve bought a small thing, or you’ve agreed to listen to someone’s pitch and they use that as a foundation to sell you a much higher ticket item. Do you notice any similarity with relationships?

An abusive man will, consciously or unconsciously, ‘sell’ you on his charm, his vulnerable side, his fast-track wooing. That’s actually the low ticket item. Sadly, the high ticket item is not more of the same. It’s his dark side, the return he expects from your investment – as well as the investment of his time and trouble.

The high ticket item is this: making him feel good becomes your responsibility. And if you fall down on the job – and why wouldn’t you? – he’ll make himself feel good by making you feel bad, by treating you like dirt. That’s the contract as he sees it.

But you don’t ‘get’ it. You still believe that the contract is based on the low ticket deal. And every so often, when he needs to, he’ll give you some of the low ticket sweet-talking. Just enough to get you to buy into him all over again.

Because there is another important factor in all of this: and that’s the power of words. Whether or not abusive men are educated or in any way sophisticated, they all have a great intuitive grasp of the manipulative power of words.

My ex-husband used to deny the power of his words, because it was convenient to do so. It was another denial of responsibility. But the truth is that manipulative words work. They work every time, unless you consciously challenge them.

They work because they send you into a sort of waking trance. You only have to think of the way a partner’s words can send you spiralling into despair, or more rarely, relief and joy, to see the way it works in action.

Add into the trance, the immortal words that every abuser utters with monotonous regularity: “You’re lucky to have me. You’ll never have another man as wonderful as me” and you begin to see it. He says it and, even as you gaze on the tormentor whose face is contorted with fury, it sinks in and you believe it.

You believe what he says, rather than what he does. So he acts like he hates you, but tells you some involved story about how you’ve hurt him and you believe it.

You believe his story rather than your own. Incredible as it may sound, it happens all the time.

But now you know how the mechanism works. Now you’ll catch yourself having the old buttons pressed and you’ll start to say “No”. Knowledge isn’t foolproof, but awareness and practice will neutralize the old hooks and protect you in the future.

As you become more aware of the mechanisms and learn to love yourself, the less the less likely it becomes that anyone will ever treat you like dirt again.