When you are a victim of abuse as a side effect of abuse you will experience confusion. This is why even if you are successful at practicing self-defense and you are no longer being abused you can still suffer from that abuse even years after the abuse was inflicted on you.
Confusion is the main reason why we self-sabotage ourselves, confusion means to perceive wrong things as right and right as wrong. Which is going to make one voluntarily do the wrong thing over and over again because he thinks it is the wright thing to do.
Clearing your confusion is what really allows you to recover after abuse and regain back your life and integrity.
In order to brake free out of this cycle you need to understand two things over what you are confused about. You have to understand the essence and the nature of that thing.
The definition for essence is the common key characteristics of a thing, for example the essence of a chair is that all chairs have a platform on which you can sit and some sort of legs that connects the platform to the ground. Only the common characteristics determine the essence a lot of chairs have backrests but not all of them so then backrests are not part of the essence of a chair.
When you don't understand the essence of a thing you could confuse it for something else, a bar stool looks very different from an office chair. If you would have an allergy to chairs and don't understand exactly what makes chairs you might think that avoiding office chairs is all what you have to do to protect yourself from your allergy, but of course sitting on chairs that look diferit of office chairs would still trigger your allergy because they are all chairs.
Of course this is a silly example nobody has an allergy to chairs, but it illustrate the mechanism a better example is when people don't understand the essence of abuse, which is someone subjecting you to a certain treatment either violence or lying in order to gain something from you in an unfair way. If you have problem understanding this you might tolerate it for years even think that the people who are abusing you actually love you.
Understanding essence gives you the clarity of what makes a thing so it is easy for you to identify it but it doesn't tell you what can you expect from that thing or what it is really possible to do with it.
This is why understanding the nature of things it is also important. The definition of nature is: all the usual and expected characteristics of that things. For example the nature of a chair is that it is made out of some sort of material that will eventually break and decay, it can hold only a certain amount of weight based on the material from which it is constructed it is also an artificial object made by humans it does not occur naturally etc.
By understanding the nature of things you have realistic expectation from that thing, if you know that human beings don't change for other human beings there is no point in attempting to change them, the best decision for you to take is to either accept that person or move on.
Finding clarity is not happiness or bliss often reality is terrifying, this is why we are so willing to live our lives in ignorance. But ignorance only keeps you comfortable it doesn't make you happy!
