"What It Was Won't Be Anymore": Reaching the Turning Point in Coping With Intimate Violence

Abstract

This article presents a study of the experiences of 20 battered Israeli women in the process of reaching the turning point in their experience of abuse—the point at which they refused to live with violence and took active steps to stop it while living with the perpetrators. The process needs to be understood as a series of losses on the personal and interpersonal levels that, taken together, lead to a total change in the women's meaning systems.