If you are not alone right now, this page will be in your browser history. You can read it in a private window, or clear it when you are done.
Writing about abuse almost always assumes an exit. This page does not. A woman who is staying in an abusive relationship still has real options, and none of them requires a decision about the relationship: medical care, an accurate private account of her own life, one relationship the marriage does not run, treatment for what it is doing to her body, and a free advocate who is not there to decide anything for her.
This page does not tell you to leave and does not tell you to stay. It is not a safety plan and it does not try to be one; safety planning is skilled work that depends on facts about your household that no website can see, and it belongs to a trained advocate on the phone. Nothing here is an assessment of you, of him, or of your marriage.
Why does everything I read assume I’m on my way out?
Almost every page written about abuse assumes departure because the field organized itself around the exit, for a reason that made sense at the time. Shelters, hotlines, protection orders and the language of escape were built to get a woman out of a house that was going to kill her. What never developed alongside that was a body of writing for the woman who has read it all and is still standing in her own kitchen.
The field’s own corrective to this has a name and it is now the stated standard of good practice. Survivor-defined practice is advocacy in which the survivor sets the goals and the advocate works toward those goals rather than toward a predetermined outcome, and voluntary services means help that is not conditional on doing what the helper thinks you should do (Wood, Clark, Cook Heffron & Voth Schrag, 2020). It is the difference between someone helping you get out and someone helping you.
Survivor-defined practice is not just a nicer posture. In a study of 177 survivors of intimate partner violence assessed after a single session with a community-based advocate, the more the advocate’s practice was survivor-defined, the more the woman gained on the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety — specifically on internal tools and on her expectations of support — and that held independently of how severe the violence was and of her PTSD symptoms (Cattaneo, Stylianou, Hargrove, Goodman, Gebhard & Curby, 2021). One session. The measurable ingredient was that nobody told her what her goal was.
I know what it is now. Why hasn’t that changed anything?
Knowing what it is has not changed anything because naming was never the intervention, and for you it has already happened. Somebody has said the word to you — a nurse, a friend, a helpline worker, an agency that named it for you in advance and correctly. You accepted it. You did not move. And then you concluded that a woman who knows and stays anyway must be a different and worse kind of case.
Naming changes what a situation is called. It does not change any of the contingencies holding it in place — the money, the children’s school, the visa, the mortgage, his family, your own nervous system, and the fact that every previous attempt to alter the pattern was answered with something worse.
The transtheoretical model — precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance — was developed by Prochaska and DiClemente for health behavior change, and it is used sincerely and widely in domestic violence services to help a worker meet a woman where she is instead of where the worker would prefer her to be. Used that way it does real good.
Used as a filing system for women, it has been tested, and it did not hold. In a study of 96 low-income urban women experiencing abuse, recruited from six health care clinics, a staging algorithm put almost everyone into just two of the five stages, and women at every stage turned out to be already taking action about the abuse; the authors concluded that defining a single action stage for abuse victims is very difficult and perhaps not useful at all (Burke, Mahoney, Gielen, McDonnell & O’Campo, 2009). That finding comes from the same research group that first applied the model to abuse.
A stage model measures a change in the subject’s behavior, and the behavior that would have to change here is not yours. Staying is not a stage: not a phase before the real thing, not precontemplation, and no arrow under your feet.
Why the knowing has not moved you is a real question with a real answer, and it is mechanical rather than moral.
What am I already doing that nobody has counted?
You are already running an unbroken safety operation and nobody, including you, has counted it as one. The forecasting of a mood from the sound of the front door. The version of the day that is safe to tell. When a subject can be raised and when it cannot. Which friend can ring and when. Keeping the children upstairs. Deciding, in about a second and a half, whether tonight is a night for agreeing. That is continuous risk assessment performed under load, and it has been invisible because it looks like personality.
Edward Gondolf and Ellen Fisher analyzed intake and exit interviews with 6,612 women across 50 Texas shelters, collected by the Texas Council on Family Violence and the state’s human services department over eighteen months in 1984 and 1985, and argued from the data that the dominant model of the era was wrong: these women were not passive and were not exhibiting learned helplessness, they were help-seekers who persistently searched for resources and support, and what varied was not their effort but what the systems around them supplied (Gondolf & Fisher, 1988). That study is forty years old and its population is shelter residents rather than women at home. Its central finding has held.
What the research has not produced is a ranking of your strategies. The public health researchers Elizabeth M. Parker and Andrea C. Gielen reviewed nine US studies of the safety strategies women use and how effective they found them, and concluded that the literature on effectiveness is thin to the point of absence (Parker & Gielen, 2014). If the published evidence cannot say which safety strategy works best in general, no article can say which one works best in your house.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours · text START to 88788 · thehotline.org
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988
Deaf, DeafBlind and hard-of-hearing callers: National Deaf Domestic Violence Hotline videophone 855-812-1001, 24 hours (a partnership between the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services).
Calling leaves the number in your call log and texting leaves the thread in your messages. Both can be deleted afterwards. If that is not something you can do safely, a friend’s phone or a payphone is the safer route.
The Hotline’s own description of its advocates is that they will never make decisions for you. A call is not a step toward anything you have not chosen.
What can I do that doesn’t require a decision?
Several things are genuinely available to a woman who is staying, and what they have in common is that they are about you rather than about the relationship. None is a safety plan.
Treat what this is doing to you as its own problem. The exhaustion, the two-in-the-morning waking, the flatness, the drinking or the eating or the spending are happening to your body now, and they are treatable now, in a relationship you have not left. The clinical model for that is harm reduction: reducing the damage a situation is causing without requiring the situation to end first, and without making help conditional on a decision. Harm reduction is well developed in substance use and comparatively undeveloped in this field, which is a gap in the field rather than a comment on you. Whatever has been getting you through is part of the same account, not a separate failing to fix first.
Keep one relationship the marriage does not run. Isolation is not a side effect of coercive control, it is the load-bearing wall of it, and one person who knows you outside of it is among the most consequential things a woman in this position can hold on to. It does not have to be a person you tell. A sister you call about nothing, a colleague you eat lunch with, a cousin in another state — the function is contact, not disclosure.
What about keeping a record, or seeing a doctor?
Keeping a private record and having a doctor of your own are two of the most useful things available to a woman who is staying, and neither requires her to say the word abuse to anybody.
Keep an accurate account for yourself, if it is safe to keep one. Being told you said things you know you did not say does specific damage to memory, and a contemporaneous private record is the clinical counter to it — not because of what a court might one day do with it, but because it gives you something to check yourself against on the days you cannot. Whether it is safe to keep one at all, and where, belongs to an advocate rather than to a webpage, because the answer depends on his access to your devices and your home.
Have a doctor you see alone, and call an advocate without deciding anything. A medical relationship in which you are the only patient in the room stays a resource whatever you decide. The National Domestic Violence Hotline’s own safety-planning material covers three situations — being in it, preparing to leave, and afterwards — so a woman who is staying is not a wasted call.
Two things about that call, because they are what women ask about first. Nothing you tell an advocate is verified; their privacy policy defines an anonymous contact as one in which no identifying information is checked, and inbound text numbers are scrambled. And their advocates are mandatory reporters where a child’s welfare is concerned, so locating information you give can go to child protective services — which is true of every helping profession, therapy included, and better known before the call than during it.
One honest caution. Every safety action carries trade-offs — the researchers who built the empowerment measure used in this field made trade-offs one of its three dimensions precisely because seeking safety routinely creates new problems. Anything you change, he may notice. That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to talk it through with somebody who does this all day, before rather than after.
Does staying mean I’m choosing this?
Staying does not mean choosing it, and the reason is structural rather than reassuring. Evan Stark, the forensic social worker who developed the concept, describes coercive control as a course of conduct that deprives a person of basic rights and liberties — it works by removing options, which means that by the time a woman is asking whether she is choosing to stay, the range she is choosing from has been narrowed for years by somebody else. A choice made inside a shrunken set of options is a real choice. It is not a free one, and the difference is not a technicality.
The framing that has replaced the old one in the research literature is social entrapment. Julia Tolmie and colleagues argue that understanding intimate partner violence means looking at three things at once: the coercive behavior of the partner, the responsiveness or unresponsiveness of the systems around her, and the way structural inequities shape both (Tolmie, Smith & Wilson, 2023). Under that frame, why is she staying is incomplete on its face, because at least two of the three components are not hers. What her situation is called is coercive control.
The women who are staying apologize before they have said anything. They open by explaining why they have not gone — the mortgage, the visa, his mother’s illness, the boy’s last year of school — before anyone has asked a single question, because they have learned that the explanation is the entry fee. It is not the entry fee here. A woman who is not leaving is not a woman with an unfinished story. She is a woman with a situation, and the situation is the thing that gets worked on.
What this page can tell you, and what it cannot
This page can tell you why the writing you have found assumes an exit, why naming the abuse did not move you, what you are already doing that has never been counted, and what is available to you that requires no decision. This page cannot assess your safety, cannot tell you what to change first, and cannot build you a plan. Those need a person with information about your household, and that person exists and is free.
One thing said plainly, because you have probably been waiting for the catch. There is no catch and no timeline. Nothing in this article is a softer route to the same destination, and if you read this page every few months for three years and change nothing, this page will still say the same thing.
If you want to talk to somebody now: National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours, or text START to 88788. For anything legal, WomensLaw.org is free and organized state by state, and it also carries a section on safety while living with an abusive partner — which is theirs to write, not this page’s.
Therapy does not require you to be planning an exit, and it should not quietly aim at one — ask a therapist that directly, before a first session, and listen for what an honest answer sounds like.
You do not have to have decided anything to start. Not leaving. Not staying. Nothing at all.
SOURCES
- Wood, L., Clark, D., Cook Heffron, L., & Voth Schrag, R. (2020). Voluntary, survivor-centered advocacy in domestic violence agencies. Advances in Social Work, 20(1), 1–21. doi:10.18060/23845
- Cattaneo, L.B., Stylianou, A.M., Hargrove, S., Goodman, L.A., Gebhard, K.T., & Curby, T.W. (2021). Survivor-centered practice and survivor empowerment: Evidence from a research–practitioner partnership. Violence Against Women, 27(9), 1252–1272. doi:10.1177/1077801220935196
- Burke, J.G., Mahoney, P., Gielen, A., McDonnell, K.A., & O’Campo, P. (2009). Defining appropriate stages of change for intimate partner violence survivors. Violence and Victims, 24(1), 36–51. doi:10.1891/0886-6708.24.1.36
- Gondolf, E.W., & Fisher, E.R. (1988). Battered Women as Survivors: An Alternative to Treating Learned Helplessness. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. NCJRS abstract
- Parker, E.M., & Gielen, A.C. (2014). Intimate partner violence and safety strategy use: Frequency of use and perceived effectiveness. Women’s Health Issues, 24(6), 584–593. doi:10.1016/j.whi.2014.08.001
- Goodkind, J.R., Sullivan, C.M., & Bybee, D.I. (2004). A contextual analysis of battered women’s safety planning. Violence Against Women, 10(5), 514–533. doi:10.1177/1077801204264368
- Goodman, L.A., Cattaneo, L.B., Thomas, K., Woulfe, J., Chong, S.K., & Smyth, K.F. (2015). Advancing domestic violence program evaluation: Development and validation of the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety (MOVERS). Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355–366.
- Tolmie, J., Smith, R., & Wilson, D. (2023). Understanding intimate partner violence: Why coercive control requires a social and systemic entrapment framework. Violence Against Women, 30(1), 54–74. doi:10.1177/10778012231205585
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
- WomensLaw.org — Safety while living with an abuser. womenslaw.org
Educational content. Not therapy, legal, medical, or financial advice. Nothing on this page is an assessment of any person or any relationship.