Originally Posted by
roxiestone 
My experience has been that I was as addicted to him as he was to the alcohol. That it wasn't logical for me to "love" someone that was so bad for me. Taking a good hard look at my part, my victimhood in this was painful.
I think Roxie makes a very important point here. It's that person that was bad for me, not just the mean, dishonest, exploitative parts. It's the whole package.
I'm more repulsed by the "good, kind, loving" times or behaviors because they ARE the sugar pill, the lure, the part that kept me in and kept me from staying strong and confident in my perception of reality. It's like Lundy Bancroft describes- the sugar and sweetness is a necessary part of the whole destructive package, which itself imbalances me in its whipsaw effect. The sugar/sweetness blinds me- that's the drug that leads me to ignore, forget, or whitewash the nasty, dishonest, exploitative things XABF did. In retrospect the sweetness is even more repulsive and insidious to me than the nasty was, because the good was the drug I swallowed to blot out reality.
I have a lifelong history of this traumatic bonding process, since I was about 3, so there is a lot of retraining to do.