This is an excellent thing to consider. I especially like the realness of the way I always see you think. 

I think abuse has nothing primarily to do with appearance. It is the desires of the fleshly mind. For the fleshly mind seeks to gain, and therefore to take away life; whereas the spirit seeks to impart life. It doesn't matter how it appears, for when the fleshly mind desires something it will always find ways to attain to it on the back of someone else. For example, those supposedly meek people that seek to attain to that imaginative place of forgiveness are in fact abusive in this their desire, because that pursuit of theirs binds them to hold transgression against others and to manipulate through guilt. It just doesn't appear this way, because the definition of abuse has been perverted by the same intellectual mind that finds loopholes in it. How much of what we used to consider as abuse might actually have been love? And how much of what we used to consider as love might actually have been abuse? How much of meekness was restlessness, and how much of restlessness might have been meekness? Or it might as well have been neither, for we know the expertise of the fleshly mind in that it changes appearances according to what is said to be the right one.

Though in Christ there is no knowledge of sin, it is only the mind of error that assumes that the mind of Christ is blind to the ways of the flesh. But in Christ there is no knowledge of sin precisely because though his life recognizes the erroneous it nevertheless reaps life through it. This is how love endures all things and covers all transgressions. This is the basis of true and lasting relationships. For if God was in the business of altering circumstances in order that on the basis of that change in appearance we may arrive at a sense of independence and well-being, then the world as it is would not have existed in the first place. 

By no means am I exacting from anyone to maintain a relationship, or even to depart from one. In this I appear to take no stance. But this is because the insanity of the intellectual mind sees a one-sided issue as something both good and bad. 

* On a side note, I noted that my experiences of confusion arise only when I attempt to provide an intellectual justification or reason for the motions of the desires of my heart, because the very beginning of this attempt is the fleshly mind with which we are incompatible. The intellectual mind will never justify the longings of the heart; similarly, the embedded wisdom of God will not justify the mind of the intellectual and dead concepts, because they are always appearance-based. For the flesh has no access to the wisdom of God. So I ceased from the attempt to figure my freedom out by the outward and began relying on that recognition of things that to us comes by nature.

We don't need and we can't have a validation for our freedom other than the reality of that freedom itself. It is the search for such an intellectual validation that binds us to appear abusive in the first place, because it binds the mind to the knowledge of lack.