Personal responsibility is often a difficult issue for women who have been physically and emotionally ill treated by their partner.

It goes without saying that they are never responsible for their partners treatment of them.

They will, very likely, have expended a lot of time and energy in vain efforts to persuade their partner of all the things they are not to blame for. These could range from his problems at work, to their alleged indifference to or neglect of his needs, demands and wishes, to the dog barking, to a lack of toilet paper within easy reach when required, and all manner of other things in between.

Responsibility has become confused with blame.

(Sometimes, people who are blessedly ignorant of the reality of abusive relationships will argue that what befalls the woman is her fault. It is an argument that they use to put a distance between themselves and something they find frightening. They can then reassure themselves that nasty things dont happen in their world.

In fact, they have missed the principle. As with rape, even if a woman dresses and behaves in a provocative - or provoking way, that does not justify any kind of assault on her. Ever.

Generally, abused women end up behaving in specific ways because they have been subjected to endless attacks and accusations. And, ultimately, any woman can be open to abuse when they become vulnerable at certain difficult junctures in their life.)

Still, blame and responsibility are, essentially, quite different things. Responsibility has sometimes been defined as response-ability.

My point, when I wrote that I was starting to take responsibility for myself, was that I was saying: I am starting to own my response-ability. Instead of telling myself that my past experience conditions and limits my present and my future, I can choose to respond, or react to it. I can select my future course.

It is very easy, when you have been, repeatedly, physically and emotionally mauled to lose sight of the person you truly are, together with your worth. When that happens, you become your feelings. It is as though feelings become the last refuge. What they actually are is a straightjacket.

In his important book The Sedona Method Hale Dwoskin observes:

We hold on to our feelings and forget that we are holding on to them When we feel angry of sad, we dont usually say, I feel angry, or, I feel sad. We say, I am angry, or, I am sad. Without realizing it we are misidentifying that we are the feeling. Often we believe a feeling is holding on to us. This is not true we are always in control and just dont know it.

even your deepest feelings are just on the surface. At the core you are empty, silent, and at peace, not in the pain and darkness that most of us would assume. In fact, even our most extreme feelings have only as much substance as a soap bubble. Feelings are incredibly powerful and persuasive for as long as you are stuck inside them. The soap bubbles of feelings have iridescent walls that blur your vision of the outside world and endlessly reflect back to you, your own isolated, trapped image.

Personal response-ability allows you to poke your finger into the soap bubble of feelings and burst it.

Do that and youll be free to reclaim your place, your stature and your role in the world beyond the soap bubble.