{"id":3308,"date":"2012-10-26T12:27:45","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T19:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.organicmamacafe.com\/?p=3308"},"modified":"2013-10-10T10:56:21","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T17:56:21","slug":"why-dont-they-just-leave-a-psychologists-perspective-on-victims-of-domestic-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.organicmamacafe.com\/home\/2012\/10\/why-dont-they-just-leave-a-psychologists-perspective-on-victims-of-domestic-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Don’t They Just Leave? A Psychologist’s Perspective on Victims of Domestic Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Dr. Melissa Estavillo<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

A dear friend of mine recently asked if I would mind writing a brief blog post surrounding the topic of domestic violence and family abuse, and for a moment I was caught off guard by the request.<\/p>\n

As a Clinical Psychologist, I am often asked to give brief interviews and posts surrounding various psychology topics, and most often, the requests are for something interesting and relatively easy to fix in a few simple steps.<\/p>\n

However on most occasions when I bring up the complicating factor of domestic violence and abuse, the news anchor or radio show interviewer\u2019s face often goes blank, they stumble over a few words…and that part of the interview is often edited out.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note, I don\u2019t believe that this occurs because people don\u2019t want to acknowledge abuse, I think this happens because we don\u2019t know how to wrap our minds around it.<\/p>\n

Abuse does not make us feel safe<\/em>, and the fact that it could happen to any one of us is a fear that is better left unacknowledged. But due to our desire to mitigate our fears, abuse has become (and remains) prolific<\/strong><\/em>. It is in this darkness that abuse and domestic violence grows and grows.<\/p>\n

To begin, let’s take a moment to reflect on a few statistics around abuse:<\/p>\n