New book teaches how to escape abuse and choose healthy relationships

Jenni Viken’s new book, Choosing Healthy Relationships, explores an area many women struggle with. Most people aren’t given much guidance on how to find their partner in life, and that choice is even more difficult if you come from an abusive home or have a legacy of generational abuse in your family. Children learn what their parents model for them, and if no one models how to find a healthy partner or how to deal with problems in a relationship, then a dysfunctional relationship will usually occur and can often be marked by physical, emotional, and verbal.

Jenni Viken understands that. She has been there. She spent eighteen years, sixteen of them married, in an abusive relationship. In this book, she tells her story of how she met her husband who would become her abuser. She speaks honestly about her own unwitting role in the abuse and shares how she found the courage to protect her children and get them out of it. But the book is more than Jenni’s story. She uses her experiences as a means to explore hard truths about relationships and pave the way for the reader to make better decisions for her own relationships.

Part of the problem, as Jenni points out from the start, is that as children we’re taught that the goal is to fall in love and get married one day, and we’re fed fairy tale versions of marriage, but we don’t. taught what to do when the person we choose turns out not to be Prince Charming. Worse yet, we are not taught enough about how to cultivate our own self-worth and self-esteem so that we don’t attract the wrong partner.

While the abuse is not acceptable in any form, Jenni is honest about her own role in the abuse. She didn’t go looking for him, but she did have the personal qualities that told her abuser that the abuse was acceptable. Her longing for self-worth and validation led her to associate with toxic people. She became a “people pleaser” and continually tried to fix others when she first needed to learn to fix herself. She honestly says, “I picked broken guy after broken guy. I was after the ‘bad guys.’ If a guy was good, respectful, and healthy, I thought there was something wrong with him, so he would do something to sabotage the relationship and break it up. Now it’s obvious to me that he didn’t think he deserved healthy attention…or love.”

I won’t go into Jenni’s entire story, but the abuse she experienced ranged from receiving the silent treatment and having to walk on eggshells to physical abuse, manipulation, and threats until she finally found the courage to leave.

Jenni does not want other women to experience this situation. She tells her story to share the warning signs that you might be in a relationship with an abuser. Most tellingly, her abuser was a narcissist, most are. She discusses how narcissists try to control others in order to retain their power and their own feelings of self-worth. Unfortunately, Jenni thought that much of her husband’s crazy behavior and her mistreatment of her was normal in a relationship. Only when she came to understand about narcissism did she really realize how dysfunctional her life was and that she couldn’t change her husband, he was unable to change. So she decided to leave.

In the book, Jenni discusses how to create a safety plan for leaving an abusive relationship. She also examines all the reasons (aka excuses) women have for not leaving. Most tellingly, the women will stay for the children. Shamelessly, yet empathetically, she explains that this is an excuse born of fear, and discusses the deep emotional wounds inflicted on children left in abusive homes, so the sooner you and your children are removed, the better.

After she leaves, the healing must begin, so Jenni explains to the reader how she was healed. She shares how she set boundaries with her ex-husband and, ultimately, how she came to forgive him. Perhaps most importantly, she learned to forgive herself for disappointing her children by allowing them to live in an abusive environment for so long. In the end, she came to accept that both she and her husband did the best they could with what they had been taught, but even though he couldn’t change, he has now transformed her life, and even found a new marriage. and healthy.

Finally, Jenni reveals the secret ingredients of healthy relationships. She states, “I believe we are all on this earth to love and be loved. Love is about open communication, mutual respect, forgiveness, grace, kindness, and patience.” She talks about how to communicate with love and the different ways that people express love. She reveals how a healthy relationship requires setting healthy boundaries, having good communication and sharing and not compromising your core values. Through exercises, she helps the reader explore these areas to gain a good understanding of their importance and how to develop them in a relationship.

I admire Jenni Viken for her courage in sharing this story. We are all dysfunctional in some way, and we can all do better. This book gives us hope and, more importantly, practical steps to take so that we can have the peace and happiness in our relationships that we have always wanted.