What Does a Midlife Woman Have to Believe About Herself to Stay?

Why experience alone doesn’t protect women from abuse

Image by HANSUAN FABREGAS from Pixabay

The South African café felt like a world of its own. Warm light filled the room, falling across walls hung with artwork celebrating the Divine feminine — African women portrayed as powerful, sovereign, sacred.

It struck me as deeply ironic to sit beneath those images while one of my oldest friends told me about the man she had fallen in love with.

After only months together, he had punched her so hard that she lost consciousness until the following day. When she woke, Friday and Saturday had disappeared from her memory. She couldn’t remember the assault or anything else that had happened over those two days.

Her mind had forgotten. Her body hadn’t.

I could barely believe what I was hearing.

Men are capable of such violence. Unfortunately, I knew that all too well.

What I couldn’t understand was why she was sitting across from me, bag packed in the back of her car in case he needed her to rush interstate to support him on his mother’s deathbed, talking about him as though the relationship might somehow survive it.

She spoke about his difficult childhood. His struggles. His regrets. His remorse.

She spoke far less about herself.

My insides twisted as I watched her and listened. She appeared gaunt, dark circles rimming her eyes, tears ready to spill at any moment. It had been years since I’d last seen her.

Part of me wanted to shake her.

“You need to fuck him off right now, woman,” I told her.

Another part of me wanted to wrap my arms around her because, as bewildering as hearing her story was, there was something painfully familiar about it.

I know what it’s like to love someone who makes you question your own reality.

I remember how it feels to explain away behavior you swore you would never accept from someone you love.

People on the outside often ask, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” while missing the far more important question.

What happened to her long before she ever met him?

Women don’t wake up one morning and decide they’ll tolerate abuse from a man. We start out wanting to love and be loved. To find a partner. To build a life together with someone who feels like home.

We talk about it with our girlfriends as young women, imagining a future full of adventure, laughter, maybe children, and a man who loves us as fiercely as we love him.

We go in trusting him.

I know I did.

From my first awful relationship at sixteen to the even worse marriage that followed, I trusted both men to love and respect me the way I loved and respected them. I assumed we were playing by the same rules.

What I didn’t trust enough was myself.

Now and then, a voice inside me would whisper that something wasn’t right. I’d feel uncomfortable after something he’d said or done, but instead of listening to that feeling, I’d explain it away.

I was too sensitive. He’d had a bad day. He didn’t really mean it.

I ignored the red flags, and it wasn’t because I was stupid. I was young. Naïve, perhaps? I believed people meant what they said. I thought love was enough to overcome almost anything. I had no idea that not every man walks into a relationship wanting an equal.

And there I was, trusting other people and overriding my own instincts because I believed his version of events more than my own.

That’s where self-trust begins to disappear, eroding one compromise at a time.

Men who seek control don’t need to find a perfect victim. They push a boundary and watch what happens. If she apologizes instead of objecting, if she makes excuses for behavior that should concern her, if she keeps giving second, third, and tenth chances, they’ve learned something important.

That she’s learned to question herself before she questions them.

That keeping the relationship has become more important than listening to herself.

That being chosen has overtaken being seen.

But my friend isn’t a young woman anymore.

She’s a midlife registered nurse. A mother and grandmother. A devout Christian. Twice divorced. A woman with decades of life behind her.

So this wasn’t the story I thought I was writing.

How does a woman reach midlife still believing someone else’s potential is more important than her own safety?

Because by midlife, we expect women to have become immune to men who use violence, manipulation, and coercive control against us and call it love.

We assume experience protects us.

That once you’ve survived enough heartbreak, enough disappointment, enough life, you’ll spot danger before it reaches your front door.

I admit, I even have trouble understanding women like my friend who accept treatment from men far beneath what they deserve — and I’ve been her.

Physically battered. Gaslit. Verbally brutalized. Financially controlled and manipulated.

Today, there is nothing and nobody in the world worth risking the freedom, peace, and self-trust I’ve worked so hard to build.

I wasn’t always this woman.

But experience doesn’t automatically create self-trust.

Sometimes it does the opposite.

Decades of making yourself smaller, forgiving too quickly, putting everyone else’s needs first, or believing love requires endless sacrifice can leave you profoundly disconnected from your own instincts.

“You’ll always do what everyone wants.”

That’s what he told her.

She was still trying to work out whether he’d meant it as an insult or a compliment.

I can tell you what I think about that.

It wasn’t a compliment.

It was information.

He’d already worked out that she was more likely to accommodate than confront. More likely to explain than question. More likely to bend than walk away.

For a controlling man, he’d hit the jackpot.

Because every time he crossed a line, she stayed.

Every time he pushed, she gave him another chance.

Every time she explained his behavior instead of questioning it, the boundary moved.

I asked her whether he’d been violent since.

“Not like that,” she said.

I looked at her.

“What does ‘not like that’ mean?”

“Slapping me. Pushing me. Pulling me by the hair.”

And my heart bleeds for the erosion of her self-worth, her inability to hold boundaries, and her great big heart telling her that he needs saving.

She’s a beautiful soul.

But a beautiful soul without strong boundaries is still vulnerable.

Maybe that’s the difference between the midlife women who stay… and those who don’t.

The difference isn’t age

It’s tempting to think the difference is intelligence, confidence, or having lived long enough.

I don’t believe it is.

I think the difference lies in whether a woman has rebuilt her relationship with herself, and I’m not talking about the version of herself that exists in someone else’s eyes.

Her own.

That kind of relationship doesn’t appear because another birthday rolls around.

It is built in the quiet.

In the months, sometimes years, after a relationship ends, when there is nobody else’s voice to compete with your own.

After both of my marriages ended, I didn’t rush to fill the empty side of the bed.

I knew I was too muddled.

My thinking wasn’t clear. My boundaries weren’t clear. I wasn’t even sure which beliefs belonged to me anymore and which had been shaped by years of trying to survive somebody else’s idea of love.

So, I stayed alone because I knew the next relationship I needed to rebuild was the one with myself.

I sat with uncomfortable questions.

I replayed memories.

I cried.

I journaled.

I read books, learned how to meditate, lit candles, and explored my inner world.

I challenged stories I’d carried for decades.

Some days, I thought I’d figured it out.

The next day, I’d unravel it all again.

Slowly, something changed.

I stopped looking outside myself for permission and started trusting the quiet knowing I’d spent years talking myself out of.

My values became clearer.

My boundaries became firmer.

My sense of who I was no longer depended on whether someone chose me or approved of me.

For me, that wasn’t just psychology.

It was spiritual.

The more I became aligned with who I really was, the more I experienced something larger than myself.

Call it God. Call it the universe. Call it the divine.

It was remembering that I belong to something far greater than my fear. That my thoughts and emotions move through me, but they are not me. Beneath them is the soul I spent years trying to hear over everyone else’s voice — the part of me that has always known.

I stopped believing I had to betray myself to keep love. I started to believe that my relationship with myself came first.

That night, I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

So, I sent her a message.

I reminded her that her teenage daughter was watching and learning. That children don’t just hear what we say about love — they absorb what we accept from it.

I told her that the first time a man lays his hands on you, the relationship changes forever. An invisible line has been crossed. One that should never have existed in the first place.

And I told her that violence has a way of becoming normal once it’s survived.

I don’t know whether she was ready to hear it.

Perhaps not.

I wasn’t either when people said similar things to me.

But I hope one day she remembers the woman she was before she ever met him.

The woman who hadn’t yet confused love with rescue.

The woman who hadn’t yet learned to explain away violence.

The woman who still knew, somewhere beneath it all, that she belonged to herself.

Because no woman reaches midlife hoping to become someone who accepts abuse.

She gets there one compromise at a time.

And she finds her way home one act of self-trust at a time.

The journey away from yourself happens gradually. So does the journey back.

It’s remarkably difficult to manipulate a woman who has come home to herself.

If you’re reading this, wondering whether you’ve been abandoning yourself in love, I made something for you.

It’s a free 5-minute Relationship Self-Trust Audit designed to help you identify the patterns that quietly shape your relationships and begin rebuilding the relationship that matters most — the one with yourself.

**Take the free audit here**