When we approach our painful relationships with the intention to use them to discover more about ourselves, we grow exponentially. For example, when instead of fighting against the way someone treats us, we look at how our interaction with them reflects our own thoughts, feelings and behavior towards ourselves, we do better because we put our energy towards the things we can do something about, rather than investing it in blame and futile efforts to change them.
Rather than staying fixated on what they are doing to us we instead become increasingly interested in treating ourselves better. We focus more on how we don't take care of ourselves and become more committed to taking better care of ourselves, (which may include leaving an abusive relationship). Rather than resisting the way they treat us, we use our interaction with them to discover how to be kinder to ourselves.
The seeming miracle happens when they begin to treat us better too which, in reality, is them reflecting to us our kinder attitude and treatment of ourselves.
When we use the world as an instructional reflection of our own attitudes and beliefs, and shift accordingly, abusive dynamics disappear – either because we move away from them, or because our interaction with them changes for the better.
Think of it as an energetic thing. As long as we abuse ourselves, by the way we think about and treat ourselves, there will have to be someone in our life who mirrors that abuse to us. It is universal law; as within so without. When we shift, the world outside us changes to reflect the shift.
The energy we experience in the world is always, and can only be, a mirror image of our internal relationship to ourselves and the world. Why? Because the world is designed to do just that – the world is set up to mirror our individual and collective state of consciousness.