[Toninvell]

Cogs, this is great to hear!

As I'm sure you know, most abusers are bullies are bullies are cowards at heart. I reckon your abuser did sniff the change in your mood on the wind, and this caused him to fear and tremble and thus act out of character ~ i.e. pay his debts!

I'm glad to see that the Universe is still coming through with the three-day rule. I have a story of my own to tell regarding the three-day rule.

As I explain in the post, I was co-dependent on my alcoholic, violent and totally unreliable partner for four years. The last year of those four was spent in trying to get away from him, because I was addicted to him, and there was a further complication. He worked alongside me as a fellow journalist at the Sunday Express, and we had to work long hours. Often we were hanging around till late at night, waiting for our copy to be sub-edited and so we had to be on call.

There was a bar for the journalists who worked for Express Newspapers on the ground floor of the building, and so that was really the only place to go while you were waiting, because they could ring down to you there, if they needed you. And of course, once the alcohol started flowing, that was that. I was always trying to leave him, but he sat behind me in the workplace and then in the evenings, he would be along with everyone else down in the bar and after a few glasses of wine, he always managed to win me back.

Anyway, there came a day when I made a firm resolution to give him up, and to give up drinking, and never to visit that bar again. I stuck to it for three days, and on the third day (no exaggeration) Express Newspapers closed down the bar, permanently. Nobody saw this coming. They just did it without any warning because, they said, they wanted to turn into new offices for the caterers of the staff restaurant. All my colleagues were shocked and complaining bitterly but I felt kinda smug... That bar had been my nemesis, and now I felt like the universe had heard me. Even in those days, I felt like I was getting help.. and of course, now, I'm even more convinced that I did.

I was watching a video today which I thought did a very good job of explaining some of this. Not so much to do with abuse, but about how we're caught up a certain cognitive construct which deludes us from seeing what is really causing problems in our lives. The causer of the problem is just a symptom presenting because of our inability to work from within, where the problem really lies, within us.

For both of us, once each of us decided to tackle the problem at the root and face 'our demons', the problem went away. Our abusers are just there to show us that we still have a way to go in dealing with our tendencies to co-dependency, and so we could almost thank them. ...okay, then, no... that's going too far!!

Here is the video. It's called The Construct and it's by Neil Kramer.