Regaining Courage to Leave Abusive Relationships: Theoretical Framework

Abstract

Intimate partner violence encompasses a wide range of physical, sexual, emotional, and economic abuse. Factors that affect a woman’s decision in staying in dysfunctional relationships include economical dependency, isolation, lack of social support system, learned helplessness, lost sense of self, fear of safety, re-victimization, and cultural barriers. This article will present a model of micro-changes that would facilitate empowerment and encouragement from the humanistic orientation. In this paper, we investigated the micro-process of regaining courage and potential ways of overcoming barriers that may occur in an abusive relationship via exploring and processing underlying feelings and needs. We integrated humanistic perspectives with the transtheoretical model of change for the theoretical conceptualization. The process is illustrated in case examples.

Keywords:

• Intimate partner violence
• situational couple violence
• regaining courage
• micro processes
• transtheoretical model of change
• empowerment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was made possible in part by the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Cleveland, KL2TR000440 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) component of the National Institutes of Health and NIH roadmap for Medical Research. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.