After a session with my therapist...

...she advised me to explain what I meant in another thread.

I had mentioned "attracting" abuse. She helped me to see where wording it like that does sound like blaming the victim, although she understood it was not meant that way. She said I should give more detail about where I'm coming from, and what my experiences are.

What I meant was that someone who is already wounded from previous abuse sends out unconscious signals that may cause them to be an easy target for the next abuser. This is through NO fault of the victim. It is the result of having been previously abused, and the previous abuser is to blame.

By analogy, in the wild, predators will go after easy prey first. The other members of the herd, the ones that are strong and fast enough to run away, give the predator too much work to do. Maybe this one antelope narrowly escaped from a previous predator, and its injury isn't healed yet. That is going to slow it down. It won't run away as easily as the rest of the herd does. The predator, being a predator, takes advantage of the situation.

In no way is this the fault of the antelope. It would be unfair to tell it, "You should have run faster, and then you wouldn't have been the victim of this predator. That's what you get for being weak." Please understand, as I do, the injured antelope did not deserve what it got!!!

I mentioned to my therapist how my mother is on her ninth marriage now. That's to eight men; she married my father twice. This doesn't count the men she lived with, but didn't marry. The vast majority of the men in her life have been alcoholics, some active, and some in recovery. When I mentioned that she seems to "attract" alcoholics, my therapist corrected me and said it sounds more like she is "attracted to" alcoholics.

I know the better question, rather than "Why do victims stay?" is "Why do abusers abuse?" But since I can only change my own behavior, I had to look at why *I* stayed, and why *I* was attracted to abusers. I remember that game all too well. "Oh.... you've been hurt. Tell me all about it. Wow, that's awful what he did to you. Come here. Let me have a chance..... And I'll hurt you all over again." Abusers want to come on like the knight in shining armor. They'll present as your hero, to lure you in, so they can have their turn at hurting you too. I had to learn to recognize the warning signals, and build up enough self-esteem to stop tolerating that kind of treatment, EVEN WHEN other people were calling me paranoid, too demanding, have no sense of humor, and all that other stuff for not putting up with it anymore.