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Thank you very much this is helpful.
Does anyone know of any posts or resources that are targeted at rationalists that help with extracting yourself and recovering from an abusive relationship?
I hope you don't wait with getting help until you find something targeted specifically for rationalists. Get all the help you can right now. A little bullshit here and there may annoy you, but non-rationalists can also have a lot of domain-specific knowledge.
GO BACK, YOU HAVE TO HELP HER
If there are any methods -- rational or not -- to erase this feeling from your mind, do it a.s.a.p. That is priority #1. Stop your brain from ruining your life.
Congratulations on telling your family. Actually, telling anyone. Saying certain things aloud allows one to think about them more clearly.
Thanks for this. I am pursuing help. I have scheduled appointments with two therapists (first office visit today) and I'm looking for a third to try to find one that I can work well with.
Erasing the dangerous thoughts is the hardest part and what I wish I had better methods for. I'm in general the type of person that likes to help others, and feel more empathy for her than any other person. Part of the reason I stayed so long is that I viewed the way she was treating me as an illness and thought to myself, what would I do if she had cancer? I'd stick around and be supportive and try to get her the help she needs. That's what I should do here. That analogy breaks when you start to not feel safe though, something that took me too long to realize.
Please write more about every part of your experience. As we know from a related field; "people who are sleep deprived don't know how sleep deprived they are". People in an abusive relationship don't know they are in an abusive relationship (until the moment of clarity) any writing about noticing things will help people potentially get away from bad relationships.
Edit: have some karma to help you recover and/also reap successful feeling from your present adventure
Thanks for the encouragement, I do intend to write more.
It's only been a week since I removed myself from the situation, and I'm already starting to feel shocked at how much worse it was than I realized at the time. Seeing the faces and hearing the comments of friends and family when I tell them stories makes a world of difference. Not one person has told me I'm making a bad decision.
If you'd asked me 3 years ago if I could ever be in a situation like this I would have assigned it very very low probability. Low probability events happen, but I think what is more likely is that it's a lot easier than I thought to become normalized to an increasingly toxic environment over time.
I think the best advice I could give so far is, if you think you're in an abusive relationship, talk to people about it. On some level I knew something was very wrong, but I began lying to family and friends about what was going on. I did this both to protect her, and to protect our future relationships as a couple. I was always optimistic about getting to a better place, and I didn't want people to hate her once we were there. I told my mother one small story once (far from the worst thing that had happened, and one story among many) and she called me in tears several weeks later saying she was worried I'd hate her for it but she had to tell me that she didn't think the wedding was a good idea (we were engaged).
I'm going to write a lot over the coming weeks and will make a post here if I think I uncover any worthwhile advice.
Does anyone know of any posts or resources that are targeted at rationalists that help with extracting yourself and recovering from an abusive relationship?
I've been a longtime student of LessWrong and related communities, studied physics at a top school, great at programming, very introspective etc. etc. All the regular boxes checked. Just a week ago I left a relationship that I realized has become extremely abusive (both emotionally and physically) and I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how I ever got in that situation. Having intensely strong signals from my rational side (RUN RUN) and even stronger signals from my emotional side (GO BACK, YOU HAVE TO HELP HER) is a very uncomfortable position for me to be in and something I've never experienced before.
I had a moment of clarity a week ago after my significant other threatened in a calm, honest tone to give me sleeping pills, cut off certain of my body parts, and then make me watch her put them down the garbage disposal. I opened up to my entire family about everything going on over a frantically intense few hours because I realized soon I would go back to hiding what was going on so that everyone would continue to love her. They've rallied around me and prevented me from going back over the last week and it's been the most difficult week of my life. I knew I'd need to hedge against my future decision making because in that moment of clarity I saw the abuse victim cycle I was in. I've intensely wanted to go back at times over the last week and I know I would have if not for people preventing and constantly reminding me not to.
On some level it's fascinating. I've never been this irrational in my life. I can analyze the situation and output an answer that I know is correct intellectually... but every feeling I have is telling me the opposite, and they're the strongest feelings I've ever had. It's very uncomfortable and leaves me feeling like things would be easier if I just went back.
That was a bit long. I'll stop there and write more if there is any interest.
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Finally an opportunity to use my Dark Arts for the benefit of humanity. Here it goes:
You see the abusive mentality of your girlfriend as an illness, and your support as a cure. Your urge to stay is rationalized as a hypothesis that being there, exposing yourself to the abuse, somehow cures the illness. Now let's ignore the fact that it is you and your girlfriend for a moment, and ask a general question: Do you really believe, as a general rule, that the best way to cure abusive people is to give them a supply of victims? Is there any psychological pubblication suggesting that this could be true? If you were a psychologist, would you recommend this as a therapy? Because as far as I know, it is exactly the opposite: enabling harmful behavior, protecting people from natural consequences of their actions, makes it more difficult to heal. That means, your staying in the relationship actually makes your girlfriend's illness worse.
Returning to your specific case, is it your personal experience that the longer you are with your girlfriend, the less abusive she gets? (Something like: at the beginning, she was threatening to cause you serious bodily harm every day, now she barely does it once in a month.) Do you have any data to support the hypothesis that your "healing" actually works? Or is it all just imagination and wishful thinking?
Does your girlfriend take a therapy? If you believe she is ill, she definitely should. Using your analogy, if she had cancer, would you let her stay home avoiding the doctors and try to heal her using your power of love? What would be your opinion about someone who did exactly that? Because that's what you are doing right now.
If this wasn't a situation between you and your girlfriend, but e.g. your (male) friend you deeply care about and his abusive girlfriend, would you recommend your friend to stay in the relationship? Imagine that the friend is not dating her yet; he just noticed her a he likes her, but you already know that she is an abusive person. Would you recommend your friend to start dating her, knowing that this will happen afterwards, or would you try to stop him?
Imagine a parallel reality where you live with a girlfriend who is not abusive. Would you break up with her only to be able to start dating an abusive girl and have a tiny chance to heal her by your suffering... because doing that would feel more altruistic, so you are morally required to choose that instead of happiness with a non-abusive girl? I am not just talking hypothetically here; the non-abusive girlfriend actually exists in your future, and it is your choice whether you open yourself for the relationship with her, or if you dump her in favor of the abusive girl you have now.
Imagine that you stay with your girlfriend and she remains exactly the same, or keeps getting worse. (Which is quite likely: the best predictor of a person's behavior is their past behavior.) Imagine yourself ten years later, twenty years later, having dealt with the abuse all the time. Ask your 50-years old future you, who is probably too emotionaly broken to rescue themselves, if they could use a time machine and send a message back to the past, to your current self, what would that message say?
Do you want to have children one day? If yes, do you want your children to have an abusive mother? Do you want to see them abused in the same way you are, or worse? Because they will be more helpless than you are. And unlike you, they didn't choose this voluntarily. Please realize that if that happens, it may become impossible to do help those children in any way, because in the case of divorce, the judge will most likely let the mother keep the children, regardless of her personality. (Read some stories in "men's rights" debates to get an idea about how horribly family court can work in real life.)
Do you believe that decent human beings should help each other and support each other, as much as possible, especially when they are in a relationship? How does your girlfriend fulfill these criteria? Or do you perhaps believe that moral duties apply only on a few selected people (such as you) and don't apply to other people (such as your girlfriend)? That would mean you don't even consider her a member of the same "moral species".
If helping other people is a high priority in your life, is staying with your current girlfriend really generating maximum good? Imagine that you would find another girlfriend, who is not abusive, who would make you happy, which would probably make you more productive. Then you could together sometimes volunteer in a kitchen for poor people, or contribute some money to effective altruist causes. Wouldn't that generate more good?
For best outcome, please read this list repeatedly, focusing on the parts than resonated with you.
Thank you for this, exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
Believe it or not, I've had almost every one of these thoughts myself over the last year and a half.
Nope. Don't believe it at all.
I have data to the contrary. I've spent a year and a half trying and the abuse has gotten progressively worse.
No. She doesn't acknowledge that she has a problem. When I try to talk to her about getting help she says that her problems are because of me and if I would just do what she says (a long an unreasonable and constantly shifting list) she would get better. She also believes I deserve what she does because I "push her over the edge."
Absolutely not
I do this all the time. I of course would not leave her to sacrifice myself for an abusive stranger.
It would tell me to leave ASAP and never look back. It would be sent as close to the beginning of the relationship as the time machine allowed.
Yes and no.
I believe moral duties apply to everyone and she has certainly failed at fulfilling hers. I don't think it's her fault, however you want to parse that sentence, but the consequences are real for me and should be for her too.
It wouldn't at all. I do care about helping others and in my normal state I'm an extremely high functioning and successful person. I've basically become a drone that works and worries about her and that's about it. I miss my former self and getting that back is one of the things that excites me most.
Thanks for the long response. The most difficult part of all this is feeling a bit insane myself. My rational mind can output the right answers, but I haven't been following them. Introspection and internal consistency (and a willingness to update) has always been something I'm naturally good at and valued greatly. I'm not the same person I was before this started and that's terrifying. I feel like I'm on the road to recovery though. Your comments are very helpful.