One of the reasons it's intensely difficult to leave an abusive situation is that you absolutely do not want to hurt your abusers, for several reasons.
The most obvious one is ā they retalliate severely. Your experience tells you that even a tiny, unitentional annoyance or upset with them can quickly escalate into chaos, destruction, death threats, violence and danger. If a tiny accident gets you nearly killed, how will they react to abandonment? It's terrifying, and abusers are at their most dangerous when they realize they're losing control over you. Your instincts are telling you to not do anything that might set them off. And leaving doesn't mean you're now safe forever, you know they'll go above and beyond to get a hold of you, and if they do, you are in bigger danger than staying put.
The less obvious ones have to do with guilt and doubt they inflict on you. You don't live with the knowledge that you're being abused, you're working with the assumption that you are the one who is being abusive, because that's what's being told to you. You are likely isolated from support and the abusers becomes your main source of information, and they inflict their point of view on you until it becomes your identity. You are forced to see yourself through their eyes, and they see you as a toxic harmful monster, who lives to inflict pain on them. Everything they do to you is minimized and presented as a mere reaction to whatever worse stuff you've allegedly been doing to them. You are fighting with all you have to try and refute this, and how do you fight back the accusations of cruelty other than being kind?
You can't easily catch onto the fact that they're lying, because firstly, they are convincing enough to have outside people believe their perspective over yours, and secondly, they make sure you are overwhelmed with fear, shame, guilt and doubt to the point where you can't think logically. Even the most intelligent, down to earth, logical person can't thing clearly if they're pushed into horror, fear for their life or lives of others, when they're facing betrayal and violence. If someone is keeping a gun to their face, threatening to kill you and themselves, you don't stop and think about how unlikely this is, and how they're trying to scare and manipulate you, you are frozen in terror and your instincts are to do anything to avoid an impending disaster. It's only when you can be away from the abuser for a significant amount of time (years) that you realize half of what they were saying was inconsistent bullshit created to manipulate you. And they make sure you never get that kind of distance.
Trying to escape abuse is a fight against your own instincts, your identity, your worldview, your sense of safety and what's real and what isn't. Your brain is telling you that staying is actually safer because there's less of a provocation of abuse, your heart is telling you that if you leave, you will hurt them and it will become a fact that you're a heartless, selfish monster who deserved all of that abuse, your spiraling thoughts are telling you it's your fault whatever happens to you next, if they hurt you or themselves, it's on you. If it turns out you can't survive on your own, like they've been telling you all along, it's going to be your fault. And you don't know what's going to happen out there, if anyone will take your side, if survival is possible.
This is why, even for people who financially are capable of leaving, it might be too dangerous, or too devastating for their own sense of identity and what kind of person they are, along with the fear of the abuser, and for the abuser. We want to be kind to our loved ones, and abusers have established themselves in our lives as our loved ones. You wouldn't go and try to hurt a family member or your partner unprovoked, and this is how leaving feels, like you are the one choosing to inflict harm, on purpose. Because you know none of them will ever see it as anything else, for the rest of their lives. And their view of you has defined you for a long time. You don't even know how to know yourself without seeing yourself through their eyes.
Despite it feeling like the most harmful, selfish and downright dangerous decisions that risks both you and other people, over time the truth of the situation will start to come out. Once they can't keep you in that intense emotional hell of gaslighting, you realize that you've been lied to, that the emotionally heavy situations were orchestrated to keep you scared and compliant, that the responsibility for their actions was never on you, and you in fact did nothing to deserve any of that. That leaving saved your life. It is hard to come out of these lies, because they were designed to keep you captured, eternally guilty and ashamed, there's a prevention measure for every time you try and doubt them. Often they're inflicted under torture, so if you do start doubting, you feel so much pain you can't stand it. You have to develop your identity despite this, you have to start to believe that you're a human being with an inherent right to be happy, despite everything that's been said and done to you that negates this.
If someone is struggling with all this, don't shame them for not leaving, or for not figuring it out faster. Even if their life seems in danger, their instincts are trying their best to keep them safe. Nobody is doing anything wrong by not being able to see through manipulation and lies while being tortured. We're all human, we're all vulnerable to that. It's always the abuser's fault for doing it, and they should be held responsible both for the abuse, and the intense damage to another person's identity and free will. Only a monster would put somebody through that.
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