It is understandable that the LW is not happy. She does not like her aunt. Who can blame her; since Goneril sounds like a dreadful person.

Note however the changes in the LW's mother, whom I shall call Cordelia. Cordelia, who has always played the nice-girl role, is suddenly discontented due to Goneril's evil influence. She notices that her children, for whom she has sacrificed everything, live very well. Is she compelled by Goneril? Not necessarily. It is too easy to assume that Cordelia is using the money she has borrowed from her children for Goneril's benefit. Perhaps she is using it for some pleasures of her own. Or perhaps she is being blackmailed by Goneril. These dramatic families can have equally dramatic secrets.

LW, do a little investigation. One of you could take Cordelia and Goneril out to a really fancy lunch and the other could gain entry to the house, which shouldn't be hard with the assistance of the landlord, and snoop like crazy. Start with any diaries and move on to financial records. If nothing seems amiss, you may follow the advice of all the other nice people in this thread.

However, do not discount the possibility that, in their shared childhoods, Cordelia and Goneril established alliances, guilty secrets, sacrifices, switched roles, shared hatreds, and impossible dreams together. In families where one person takes on all the nice traits and another assumes all the evil ones, neither is healthy.

By the way, what was King Lear like? There are good Daddies and bad Daddies . . .

I don't think we will ever find the one single thing that causes victims to stay with abusers or abusers to abuse.

To provide an example of an abuser that was not really very interested in his wife, I will recount this:

A couple I knew in which the wife worked and the husband rarely worked. He was financially dependent upon her. There, for the most part, his interest ended. He was exactly the sort of guy we think about when we want to conjure some sort of male bogey man, the sort we warn our daughters to beware of. He drank, he raped, he screwed around, he had a regular mistress, and he once took his 4 year old daughter to a whore house while his wife was waiting at the hospital to be picked up with their new baby.

Occasionally, he battered his wife. She was not stupid. She was quite intelligent. He, however, wasn't neither smart nor pretty. He'd been in so many bar fights that one eye was askew from the other and his nose was on one side of his face. Mean, ugly guy.

"Why do you stay with him?" I had to ask. Her answer was (paraphrasing), "I have never been slim. In high school, I was the pudgy girl with the nice singing voice. Now I am a fat woman. Who would have me but him?"

Talk about low self-esteem!

He really only hit her to control her. She was his meal ticket. He also informed her that he was going to keep screwing around because "that is what men do."

Why? Anonymous, please tell me why you felt responsible. I am trying to understand. Was he like a child to you?

her use of the work grok seems correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

Also, people who know something about domestic violence are not of a hive mind on the issue. We get to have differences. You can ask both "Why does she stay?" and "Why does he hit her" at the same time.

Because the behaviors of some of us are not easily comprehensible to others of us does not imply a lack of sympathy. I believe the question "Why does she/he stay?" is a truly legitimate one to ask in order to try to figure out how to solve the problem of domestic violence. After all, the abuser can't the victim if the victim is not there.

As to the very real, scary, and sometimes life-taking violence that occurs when women do try to get free, I concur that our laws and public attitudes do not do nearly enough to help victims be safe. Orders of protection are really useless against someone determined to kill you.

I can think of several practical ways to keep victims safer who have truly determined to leave. One way would be to recognize that domestic violence is not just a threat to the victim but also a threat to the community. Neighbors can be drawn in, bystanders can be shot, other family members who try to intervene are at risk, and the children in these families ARE in an abusive situation. The couple could be ordered to stay away from each other until both achieved a satisfactory result in therapy.

Futhermore, when women try to get away, is the state doing all it can to facilitate the exit. Hardly. Courts can still order the couple to remain involved with each other despite the risk to victim through a court mandated visitation order so that the victim is still tied to the abuser through their mutual children.

As far as I am concerned, if there is spousal abuse and there are children involved, witnessing the spousal abuse is a form of abuse for those children. Getting stronger criminal penalties against abusers provides the leverage to force them into treatment. If not treatment, then prison!