good onya aswell
breaking the cycle is harder than you think, though both you and your mum seem to have either a lot of bad luck in their selection of blokes.
I'll tell you one incident. My wife had a ex-boyfriend who'd hit her, so I promised i would never do the same. One night she was under a lot stress at work and was drunk and had displaced the blame onto me for something. she did everything she could to provoke me, before attacking me. now I'm a big guy (and was sober) and was able to hold her off. but it took an awful lot of restraint to keep from retaliating, and i'm a placid guy who has never hit a woman. The next day, I told her I never want to go through that again, and thankfully we haven't. the point i wanted to make, was that I reckon if you been through that abusive situation before, as victim, perpetrator or active onlooker like you as a kid, it seems easier to get yourself in those situations because their is this expectation or mental possibility that it might come to that. Where, because i had never experience violent abuse before, it never crossed my mind that argument could end that way. I think my wife expected me to react violently. Actually i'm not sure what point I'm making, but it's all food for thought
( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Fri 1 May 2009, 3:58, Reply)