Success That Breeds Silence

I have a friend who recently decided to divorce her husband. In the course of our recent talks, I discovered that their relationship has been tarnished by his abusive behavior for years.

I am sad that she did not feel comfortable discussing this with me before now, but her silence is not unusual. She is what most of us would deem "a success" — an intelligent professional with a good income, a great education and lots of friends and colleagues in her life. In other words, she has more potential support systems, as well as resources, than the vast majority of women in abusive relationships.

So why is it that women like my friend are often the least likely to end a bad relationship or even disclose to others that she is suffering? The reason is one that I hear in her words often these days — she feels like she has failed. Failed by being "unable to make the relationship work." On the other side of the coin, she feels like she has failed her son by not leaving sooner because he suffers from the effects of his environment too.

From the outside, I suspect most of us can see that this insistence on personal blame isn't justified. Abuse is never your fault. Any marriage that fails — even when the awful reality of abuse is not there — is the result of the decisions of two adults. By definition, partnerships take two to succeed and two to fail.

Sadly, the women we perceive as the most successful by the usual norms are often the last to leave a bad marriage. They feel that on some level they are not entitled to help. In a life where they have been responsible for their success, they assume equal responsibility for any failures. Logically they may know differently, but in their hearts they feel the end of a marriage is their fault. They should have worked harder, come up with better words, found better resources, understood how to placate their spouse in ways that would have worked.

These women are often also uniquely vulnerable to a particularly vile attack — because they work full time, often at jobs that require many hours above and beyond a normal 40 hour workweek, it is all too easy to accuse them of shirking their "responsibilities" as a wife and mother.

Because to this day, no matter the progress women have made in equality efforts, so many of us still feel the burden of succeeding in all our many roles. We work and then come home and feel like we must also be the ones to take care of dinner, childcare, laundry, and everything else. Because it is virtually impossible to manage all of these things all the time, it is easy to criticize us for something somewhere that has fallen between the cracks — and for many women these criticisms really do resonate. Our brains know this is unfair but the rest of us simply feels inadequate.

Academic and professional success require a certain degree of unwillingness to fail. People who choose demanding paths often hold themselves to sometimes impossibly high standards in all areas of their lives. Faced with an abusive marriage, a woman with great professional success is all too likely to see herself as a failure because of it — at a bare minimum, a failure because she made a poor choice of a life partner.

All these dynamics can lead to isolation — the world incorrectly assumes that certain tangible measures of success necessarily lead to happiness in all areas while the person deemed a success feels unworthy of assistance. No one thinks to offer her a hand and she is unable to reach out for one.

The many roads to success available to women today is wonderful and should be the source of a real sense of achievement. But sometimes we can best help a friend by peering beyond the title, the income or the house and checking in to make sure that the woman with those things is okay. Okay inside.

I hope you all have someone in your life you know is there when you feel your least successful — and that this person reminds you that the gift of success does not always have to come with the obligation of responsibility and blame.

This post very well could have been one sentence: No woman — no person — should ever, ever feel ashamed to admit that he or she is suffering abuse.