Something an ex-girlfriend told Tom Sartwell decades ago, when he was 19 years old, has stuck with him his entire adult life.
“When she broke up with me, the words she used were, ‘You couldn’t possibly love me. You never hit me,’” Sartwell recently recalled. Even now, at 66, his brow furrows at the memory, because he’s still perplexed by her reasoning. “It wasn’t until years later that I started thinking about where that stuff came from, why that young lady equated pain and violence with love.”
Sartwell believes his long-ago girlfriend’s warped view of relationships was rooted in physical abuse she suffered as a child, and that her expectations speak to the cyclical nature of such violence. Left unaddressed, it passes down generation to generation as abused children become abusive parents, he said.
“It’s a clichÉ, but children are our future, and we’re perpetuating the kind of violence that creates more abusers.”
[For more of this story, written by Howard Hardee, go to http://www.newsreview.com/chic...content?oid=16598874]
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