It is my belief that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and part of being human involves inhabiting a physical body. That body is a culmination of all the ancestors who have gone before us and much of the human experience we have is shaped by our genes and innate makeup.

I was born with the trait of High Sensitivity. I was born with mirror-pain synaesthesia. I was born with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome & Mast Cell Activation Disorder. I was born with spinal stenosis. I was born an extrovert with mousy brown hair and grey eyes which look either blue or green depending on the light.

Despite the myriad of abuse I’ve suffered over my lifetime, the medical gaslighting for diseases I had no control over, the decade spent bedridden, alone, neglected and left to die, the losses I’ve incurred and the righteous anger I have every right to feel I’ve never lost my empathy or kind nature, which I was also born with. I could no more abuse someone than fly in the air – I genuinely wouldn’t know where to start.

Does that mean my personality is fixed rigidly from birth and I have no capacity for growth or character development? Of course not. I feel like a totally different person in my fifties to the young woman I was in my twenties. I’ve worked through my trauma, I’ve acquired wisdom, confidence and maturity, I’m firm in who I am and what I stand for. But I still have grey eyes which look blue or green depending on the light, still have all the genetic diseases with which I was born and am still an extrovert who has to balance my need for socialising with my sensory processing sensitivity and need for time alone. Growing and expanding into who we were always meant to be does not equate to changing who we fundamentally are.

I’ve come across some pretty toxic people throughout my life and in my empathy I thought my love, my understanding and my care could change them. Could fix them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, my standing by them no matter how they treated me simply gave them permission to abuse me more.

Trying to change our innate nature is nigh on impossible and it’s doubly impossible when a behaviour is rewarding. People lie, control, manipulate, rage, deceive and abuse because it serves them and if there are no consequences why would anyone even consider changing?

While Googling the bizarre, cold and cruel behaviour of a former boyfriend, I came across the following video by diagnosed narcissist Ben Taylor. Every word could have been written about the relationship I was in with my ex and it was a pivotal moment for me to realise that abusers know exactly what they’re doing, they’re behaviour is deliberate, it has zero to do with me and my standing by them won’t change a thing. Although the video is about cheating you can apply the principles in the video to any toxic behaviour. Watching the video was a seminal moment for me in moving on from that relationship: “I didn’t just cheat on her body I violated her soul”.

Personally, I would know if someone had truly changed if I observed the following:

• The person approached me and apologised. This doesn’t mean they say something like “I’m sorry you felt that way….” which isn’t an apology at all. An apology lists what the person has done to cause you harm, takes full and sole accountability without excuses, and makes amends.
• They have no expectation of my forgiveness.
• They want to hear about the way their behaviour impacted me so that they can learn and grow.
• They have had weekly therapy for at least a year, with a therapist specially trained in the type of abusive behaviour the person shows, eg addiction, personality disorder, domestic violence, and is willing for me to talk to their therapist.
• I can observe a consistent pattern of changed behaviour over time, particularly when in stressful or triggering situations.

Even with all of the above, I’d still be very cautious and it’s important to note that research shows only 7% of men who attend domestic abuser programmes show any improvement in their behaviour even when given targetted and specialist therapy.

Another former boyfriend of mine admitted on our second date that he was a former alcoholic who had domestically abused his ex Wife. However, he hadn’t had a drink in 25 years and had been through extensive therapy, including anger management, a domestic abuser programme where he’d had a deep dive into his misogyny, and now ran Alcoholic Anonymous meetings 3 times a week. I saw a couple of red flags in our time together but nothing which overly concerned me, however after we broke up and he married someone else I was contacted by the friend of his new Wife who was concerned that he was showing coercively controlling behaviour. Despite all his therapy over many years it was clear that toxic behaviour was still his go to base line.

Can people fundamentally change who they are? Not really. I couldn’t fundamentally change to be toxic, manipulative, deceitful or abusive so there’s no reason to think that abusive people could fundamentally change to be empathic, kind, loyal or honest. I’ve been known, on rare occasions, to be retaliative and do things I’m not particularly proud of but they have been one off events outside my usual character and only occurred because I’d been abused past my limit to be a tolerant doormat. But these rare events in response to being abused don’t change who I innately am.

“Give me the boy aged seven and I’ll show you the man”.