"I don't know why I let it go on as long as I did. I guess I just loved him/her."

How many times have we heard this coming from the cracked and bleeding lips (and soul) of a victim of abuse? How many times have we tried to find the words to help them through their grief and anger as they realize that their love was not enough to keep the whole house of cards from coming apart at the seams? One question always comes up, the hardest to answer: "How can I walk away when I love them so much? How can I just abandon them - go back on my vows and my promises?" We talk about loving yourself first and how love isn't supposed to punch and frighten and chill with steely glares and withering silence, but it rarely helps to heal the bitter and self-inflicted wound of perceived betrayal.

However, one aspect of love and spiritual teachings of love often goes unspoken and unheard, the aspect that teaches and compels us to love unconditionally the true divine nature of the other, perhaps more than we love the present incarnation and weakness of that other, and that instructs us to seek to protect them from harm, loss and diminishment in any way possible. Yet this is an important facet to consider, a part of love and our understanding of love that can help us deal with both our love and our pain and that can enable us both to love our attacker, yet move away from their sphere of influence - without guilt, without remorse and without the desperate feeling that we're betraying our vows to stand by their side for better and worse, in sickness and health.

One of the core tenets of this teaching and understanding of love is that when we harm others, we harm ourselves far more. Violence, anger, spite, malice, denigration, exploitation - all of these blacken and shrivel the soul of the perpetrator in far greater measure than the physical damage done to the victim. In fact, many of the non-violent spiritual sects and religions take that stand precisely because of this, no amount of force or violence is ever safe to impose on others, no matter how right their intent or how good the sought-after outcome, lest they break their own hands on the rod they picked up to strike their brother with. Akido, a variation of the martial arts, takes this to it's logical end by teaching only throws, holds and blocks, offering the student no skills that could be used to injure or attack, but only those needed to ward off attack until the aggressor is worn our or defeated by their own violence. This is one aspect of this approach to love that is rarely understood, yet is of singular importance - that by preventing our attacker from harming us, we are not only preventing harm to our own souls but are indeed safekeeping that of our attacker's as well.

And so we come to the meat of the issue. By allowing someone to abuse us, for whatever reason, we are doing them harm by allowing them to harm themselves through violence to us. Removing ourselves from their influence is not a betrayal, nor is it an abandonment - it is an act of supreme love, the prevention of harm to one that we hold dear to our heart. Just as we would not let a child repeatedly injure itself on a hot stove or a sharp implement, we should not allow our weakness and our silence to continue to present to our abuser the opportunity to do more and more harm to their own soul.

If we love them, we owe it to the true "them," the core spark of divine energy that is the soul, to remove ourselves until they have learned the self-restraint necessary to avoid harming us - and through us, themselves - just as we would protect any other loved one from self-injury and danger. By learning to love another so much that we are willing to walk into loss and loneliness to preserve their soul, we remove ourselves and them from the spiraling cycle of abuse that binds us both to our eventual, and mutual, destruction.