Sample Chapter

Chapter 10

Part of the impetus for writing about domestic violence is not just my own psychological trauma resulting from six years of terror as a child, it is also about the question of why women put up with abuse. Why do they stay in a relationship year after year and suffer in silence? I found a partial answer in my mother’s diary.

I knew that my mother had kept a diary because over the years when she was showing me a new dress or suit in her closet, or a quilt she was working on, she would take the diary off the shelf and say something like, “This is my diary.” I never asked to read it and she never offered. After she died and I was packing up her things, I ran across the diary. It was locked. I debated with myself whether I should now force the book open and read it. Certainly I was curious, especially about the details of my early childhood of which I had only selected memories. But it was locked, after all, and I could not bring myself to break into it. I put it away in my cedar chest with some of her other belongings.

A year later I was looking in the chest for something and picked up the diary to move it out of the way. As I picked it up, the key fell out. “Thanks Mom,” I said, and opened it. As I read it I noticed that it only covered the four years prior to her marriage to Pop. I expected to find out what her life was like as a housekeeper, what she thought of me, what other jobs she had during that period (I knew she had been a hotel maid for awhile), things about her life in general. I learned nothing of those things. I was mentioned twice in the book, once when Aunty took me shopping and again when she said (before I came to live with her), “I miss my kid.” The rest of the book was about Pop.

It was clear that she had thought of nothing else during those four years. “We had a date tonight but he showed up drunk and I wouldn’t go.” Or, ”He didn’t show up for our date—he is probably drunk somewhere.” At one point his drinking became such a problem that she threatened not to see him again. But he came to apologize and make some lame excuse for his bad behavior and she recanted. The handwriting was clearly on the wall, but her devotion to him was so deep that she couldn’t see the danger that lay ahead for her. In retrospect, I believe she would have married him anyway, even if she had known.

So one of the things that keeps a woman in an abusive relationship is a kind of blind devotion to a man whom she is certain is going to change his ways and become what she wants him to be. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “people continue to do the same thing, while expecting the outcome to be different.” It doesn’t work that way. If you want to change the final result, you have to change your behavior. In this case, she should have changed her behavior and walked away because it was certain that he was not going to change his.

I think the other reason she stayed with him was because she was sure in her own mind that no other man would want to marry a woman with a small child born under dubious circumstances. Her self-esteem was nearly non-existent. This appears to be true of most women and girls in abusive relationships. Abuse itself breeds self-contempt. Nathaniel Branden, a well known writer on the issue of self-esteem, said he couldn’t think of a single psychological difficulty that is not traceable to poor self-esteem, including anxiety, depression, fear of intimacy or success, alcohol or drug abuse, underachievement at school and work, spousal abuse, child molestation, emotional immaturity, suicide, and crimes of violence.

Still, the anti-intellectual snobs continue to deride the notion that we need to work at developing self-esteem in our young people. To any thinking person it is clearly a matter that begs for a major effort to try and correct this problem in our youth population. It was important enough to me to sit down and think through what kinds of actions might help kids and to write “The Ten Commandments of Self Esteem” for them. Here they are:

01. Recognize that you are unique. You can’t be exactly like anyone else, and on one else can be exactly like you. Honor that uniqueness. Most of us go through life trying to be just like everyone else. When we can’t be, we think there is something wrong with us instead of remembering that we are not supposed to be just like anyone else. Each of us is unique.
02. Accept the fact that you aren’t perfect, and neither is anyone else. But focus on those parts of you that are your strengths, and develop them to the fullest extent possible. Work on your less than perfect areas too, but don’t dwell on them. View them as just something to work on.
03. Establish your values early in your life, and live by them. Begin with a deep respect for life, and for everything that God created—for the animals, for the world around you, and especially for people. Respect God’s creations as you would respect God.
04. Keep the Bible’s Ten Commandments by your bedside and read them each night before you go to sleep. These are universal values that will serve you well throughout your lifetime. “Don’t kill anyone, don’t steal, don’t lie, love your neighbors and don’t judge them, and honor your parents.” These are basic values that are required for self-esteem.
05. Never do something just because everyone else is doing it. Self-esteem is simply knowing that you have done your very best to keep your actions consistent with your values—to walk away from pressures applied by others to get you to abandon your own values and accept theirs. People want others to accept their values because it validates them. Don’t pursue values that are contrary to your own.
06. Respect yourself. It is tempting to believe that you get respect from others by doing what they want you to do. They might pretend to like you if you do what they want you to do, but they won’t respect you. And they won’t like you for very long either, because we can’t really like someone we don’t respect. So, if you want respect from others, you must respect yourself.
07. Use your talents. Every person comes into the world with a talent for something. We are not all destined to compose great symphonies, or to write a bestseller, or to invent the world’s greatest bread slicer. But if we listen to our inner voices, we will be guided to excel at something. And if we pursue that direction vigorously, our self-esteem will soar.
08. Create beauty in your life in every way possible. If you are familiar with the Bible’s Old Testament, you will remember that God created a beautiful Garden of Eden for humans. Somehow, we lost track of the importance of beauty in our lives. We need to try and recreate the beauty represented by the Garden of Eden—in our music, our literature, our relationships, our environment, in every aspect of our lives. These are the kinds of things that make us feel good about our lives, and therefore about ourselves.
09. Develop your mind. Learn about other people of the world who live with different customs and beliefs, and treat those who are different from you with respect. Make lifelong learning an integral part of your life, for the more you know the less likely you are to abandon your humility. People with a healthy self-esteem are humble. People with low self-esteem are often arrogant and disrespectful of others.
10. See yourself as part of a greater whole. You live in a vast universe, filled with beautiful and wonderful things. And you are part of the beauty and the wonder of it all. You are significant because you are part of something awesome and grand.
 

So remember that you are unique. Build on your strengths, establish your values early on and live by them; use the Ten Commandments as a base; never do something just because everyone else is doing it; respect yourself and use your talents; create beauty in your life; develop your mind, and see yourself as part of a greater whole. This is a positive recipe for the development of self-esteem.

While these Ten Commandments were written for young people, there are a lot of adults who could use a good dose of self-esteem, and these Ten Commandments will work for anyone of any age. I think my mother followed all of these rules except for number 6 “respect yourself.” That one might have kept her from an abusive relationship, but maybe it wouldn’t have been enough. Her devotion to him was so overwhelming that even a good dose of self-respect might not have saved her. After he died she became very ill. The doctor told her there was nothing physically wrong with her, that she was dying of a broken heart. He advised her to come to California to visit me for awhile. She took his advice and eventually she overcame her grief at losing him. We became acquainted for the first time, and found that we really liked each other. After he was gone, my mother and I became very close friends. When she died, I was the one with a broken heart.