When it comes to love and marriage, most get so they grow to idealize the idea itself and they grow to believe this is what is suppose to happen and that's what makes someone complete. When we are little we watch all the Disney Movies and we see how a young girl suddenly comes across her "true love" and this man basically "saves her" in some way and she learns she can feel "safe" and that with him she can live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, this "ideal" can set a young girl up to fall for the love bombing a toxic man can do with her not realizing this guy has another side to him that is so toxic. The desire to want to believe if one is patient and caring that the imperfect toxic side can be fixed with time begins to take shape once the more toxic side of this man appears. Before the girl realizes it, she gets used to living in the toxic loop and she finds a way to endure it when the toxic side happens.

The "Supposed to be" formula that is laid out when we are children tends to have a lot more power then it should have. However, nature also plays an important role in that nature's formula has one main mission, "procreation". There is a lot more involved then just the psychological "love bombing" that makes one so vulnerable. Truth is that when you find someone that is compatible your body senses it and one can get wrapped up in an addiction they are really not consciously aware of. With this powerful aspect that involves a lot of chemicals, a person can actually go through withdrawals when the source of this chemical addition is absent.

I am pointing this out to you BigMama because while this exercise or homework your therapist has asked you to do is important, what you wrote out is NOT telling the whole story. My concern for you is that in your effort to lay out how toxic your husband really is, that you don't fall into "self blame" where you start to consider yourself "stupid" or you see yourself as a "failure". Truth is, according to NATURE, you are not a failure because you procreated. When you use the term Stockholm Syndrome, well, truth is NATURE plays a very strong part in that, more than we consciously realize. To not recognize that would be a huge mistake.

If you were to spend time and make it a point to watch the series "Planet Earth" narrated by David Attenborouh you would get to watch a lot of footage that has been captured about how significant a role NATURE really plays when it comes to all kinds of living things on our planet. How, when it comes to "life" the major role Nature plays in creating "life", all kinds of "life" is driven by "procreation". Nature really puts on quite the production when it comes to all kinds of creatures and how they procreate. Actually, birds, who have such small brains often go to great lengths when it comes to putting on an exhibition just to attract a mate to procreate.

I sat and watched this bird go through a huge ordeal where this male built a grass mound and he had a circle around this mound and when he was finished building this mound that really was his "stage", knowing there were females nearby, he began leaping up into the air. Turns out there were several of these males doing this very same thing and many of these males began leaping up in the air. The female is small and plain, it is the male that is fancy. They show all these males jumping up in the air and I sat there wondering who the female would pick, there were so many of them. Well, it turned out that the male that ended up winning was the male that could jump up and down the longest. YET, that was not the end, that was just to get the female to pick the one that jumped up and down the longest. After he got her close he did a dance and his feathers all puffed up. The actual mating only lasted a second. This is a reflection of how intelligent NATURE can be BigMama.

As human beings, we intellectualize a lot and we can unknowingly talk ourselves into a lot of "emotional confusion" and duress. We tend to design "formulas" about how we should live our lives and what one should "think" is living the "perfect" life. Yet, we forget about how NATURE is also always right there with a power we fail to recognize. When we are young we can fall into Nature's trap and most of us, when we are past the trap when Nature drives us the most, can sit and say, "how could I have been so stupid?". That is something I have seen you do, and I have done that myself as well, and the truth is a lot of people do it. So, with that in mind ((BigMama)), that is when you can consider what I described that bird doing, a bird that only has a brain that is maybe about the size of a pea and doesn't have ANY of the intellectual capacity you have. Yet, that bird had the most amazing way of practicing this very sophisticated way of procreating that was driven by this incredible thing we call NATURE, the very strong influence you struggled with that played a big role in the choices you made and many of us make where what we end up engaging in that might not be all that "healthy" for us.

This forum tends to be the most active forum in this site. It's literally full of all kinds of questions and situations that so many struggle with and are asking advice about. It's so important that you realize that your challenge is not "all your fault" or that you deserve to carry guilt and suffer so much emotionally. I was "love bombed" too BigMama, and I lived my life according to my husband's cycles of having two different personalities where he could be a kind Dr. Jeckle, and then he would become this Mr. Hyde and his Mr. Hyde emotionally abused me over and over again. Like you, I can look back and see all the red flags I had missed, I can think of myself as STUPID, a dummy and it's very easy for me to "self blame" too. I thought I was going to be "safe and happy" with him and I failed to see the red flags that was going to mean that I was NOT as safe as I had thought. You know that saying, "Love is blind"? Well, it's true.