Abusive Relationships and Possible Reasons Behind Them

Going through my Twitter feed yesterday, I waded through the seemingly non-stop tweets posted by the Huffington Post and saw an article on Rihanna and Chris Brown, best summed up in its opening line, “Romance rekindled?” I don’t think I need to detail their past history as it’s already pretty well known, but their reunion brought up a question as to why many women not just stay with an abusive partner, but even return after already leaving them. While many people have discussed Brown and abusive relationships before, including Kerishma in a great post a few weeks ago, I thought I’d take a brief look at the psychology behind the decisions of the abused.

In abusive relationships, one of the primary reasons that the abuser stays is traumatic bonding, defined by “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” If media reports are to be believed, the numerous times Rihanna and Brown have supposedly tried to rekindle their romance after the incident of abuse point to strong emotional ties built between the two. Even just the one widely known incident qualifies as harassment and abuse from Brown.

One form of traumatic bonding is known as Stockholm syndrome, wherein hostages express sympathy or otherwise positive feelings for their captors. Named after a kidnapping situation where, coincidentally, three women (and one male) were the hostages, Stockholm syndrome could offer a possible explanation for remaining in abusive relationships. The abuser could be seen as a captor, forcibly maintaining control over their partner, or the hostage while at the same time creating a bond with that person.

Patty Hearst, a well-known victim of Stockholm syndrome (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Then there’s the condition known as battered person syndrome, defined by a repeated cycle of violence in which the abuser usually blames the abused for bringing the violence upon herself, causing the abused to actually believe it’s their own fault. I don’t know if there’s enough evidence (that the public knows of, at least) in Rihanna’s case to use this as a valid explanation, but it is something to consider. However, this could apply to cases similar to Hedda Nussbaum’s, especially when you consider that by her own account she left her house six different times but returned on each occasion.

There are various other possibilities, of course. A few weeks a go I tweeted about a court case where a judge denied a woman her divorce from an abusive husband because he provided for her economically and he felt her children would suffer. I think that we have to be able to look at these cases and not just criticize or ridicule the abused for remaining in or returning to unhealthy relationships, but understand how and why it is that they actually make those conscious decisions.