I’m doing everything I should, why do I feel so scared and vulnerable?
This has been my life for four years. Bad as he is, my husband has been my life for those years. Crummy one he may be but he has been my best friend, confidante, mentor, partner as well as abuser for all that time and it is just so scary to go out there on my own knowing that he is still there. He still has a hold on me I know.
Yesterday, I was beginning to feel like a fraud because he is being so nice and everything is so ‘okay’. We went out socially and a friend who is vaguely aware that we have had problems came over to me and said “It is good to see you both together and looking so well.” She smiled and patted my hand whilst saying it and in my imagination I could also hear her say “There, I suspected you’d been exaggerating all along. Drama queen!” But then I remembered; what he is doing now is only normal. It is nothing extraordinary. Any half-decent man would behave in a mature, civilised, responsible manner. He is not doing anything extraordinary that would really show me that he is changing – like checking into therapy!!
Then I read the comments left on here, from H especially, and it was like reading my life and it reminded me that it is all part of his game. As soon as he gets even a sniff that I believe him and that I’m staying it will start all over again. I need to stay strong and keep my resolve – and I will. I need to do some form of detachment exercise or something to keep reminding myself why I’m doing this – to be FREE to have the life I deserve!!
If it helps, you can view his big “I’m a normal human being” skit right now as part of the abuse. Because, really, it is. A normal person acts like a normal person on a daily basis without expecting some reward, and they certainly don’t do it because they suspect it may really hurt another person. Only an abusive person tailors their behavior to cause another person harm. He wants you to feel guilty and wrong and crazy, and instead of calling you ugly or stupid or pushing you around, he’s working another angle.
(On that note, *if* he went into therapy, I would only expect it would make the abuse escalate similarly. When my ex went into therapy, he came home with all sorts of new words to abuse me with, like “projection” and “enabling” and “daddy issues.” Far better for him to go into a domestic abuser’s program, which is less likely to let him get away with his shit, and will have a primary focus on your safety instead of his health.)
When real, non-abusive people are nice, it doesn’t make others feel bad or afraid. If his being nice makes you feel frightened or unsure or bad, it’s because he’s still abusing you. He’s just doing it with a happy mask on these days.
The almost-left-but-not-quite stage is really overwhelming. There was too much going on inside my head, the war between my hatred of myself for being a bad wife and hurting him, my fear of him, my reeling disbelief that this could be me, this could be my life. And very quiet under it all, the solid resolution that I was leaving, I was leaving, I was leaving.
I finally just gave myself a mental break, gave myself permission to stop trying to sort out my emotions and always feel or do the right thing. I wasn’t going to be able to make sense of anything until I was OUT. So everything had to just focus on getting out. I could feel guilty, or happy, or sad, or frightened, or any kind of feeling I wanted, but I wasn’t going to act on it, blame myself for it, or go into a tailspin. I would just let it wash over me and keep working on GETTING OUT.
I also had to accept doing some things I normally wouldn’t. Like lying to friends about how we were doing, because if I told them I was leaving, they might talk to him about it before I wanted him to know. Or hiding money, or getting a new cell phone on the sly, or various things that felt so dishonest and wrong. I just had to keep telling myself, until I’m out, I’m going to stop judging what I do as wrong or right. I’m just going to get out, and there will be time for fixing mistakes later.
I think being in an abusive relationship really destroys your ability to focus on anything other than how others view you, what they will say, what they will do, and how that might hurt you. You have to focus so much on fixing every little thing that goes wrong RIGHT NOW because if you don’t, you don’t know what kind of horrible thing will happen as a result. It was terrifying to me to put off my usual constant stream of highly critical self-judgment, because it felt like the world would spin away if I wasn’t spending every breath holding it up.
I had every confidence that as soon as I left, I’d be curled up on the floor degrading myself for all the lies I’d had to tell to get away from my marriage safely (never mind the fact that he assaulted me, and I didn’t get away safely at all), all the people whose trust I betrayed, all the money I had to borrow, the smiles I’d had to fake. And I had to tell myself, that’s okay, if that happens. But it’s not happening until I’m OUT.
Instead, a surprising thing happened. The morning after, I woke up in my new bed in my new apartment, and I thought, okay, your permission is revoked. You can now start judging yourself for all the wrong things you did.
And you know, I couldn’t think of a single one.
As the days went on, I kept waiting for the guilt. I felt some general regret, wishing things had gone better, but I didn’t feel like I’d done anything wrong. Then my ex emailed me a long diatribe detailing every single thing wrong about me, every way I’d lied, every way I’d been a bad wife, and all the things I’d have to change to come back to him. Reading that, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Come back to him? Come back to *this*?
Even though I knew, *I knew* that if he’d said those things to me while I was still with him, I would have swallowed it and started to beat myself up for how rotten I was. But after having been away from him for even a handful of days — not a break, not a few days off, but a few days where I knew without a doubt that every day when I came home *he still wouldn’t be there* and *I wouldn’t have to tell him what I was thinking*, I was finally able to see how crazy he was. How crazy every single thing that came out of his mouth was. And suddenly, everything clicked. All the years of being unable to think straight, of being afraid, of living in a world that didn’t make sense. Well, that’s what happens when you live with a crazy person and try to make sense of what they say.
I don’t want to tell you everything gets better forever and ever once you leave. You will still have a lot to deal with. But it gets a lot easier to deal when your thoughts are your own, your body is your own, your space is your own, and your timetable is your own. And, too, your guilt and pain is your own. You won’t have to carry around his hate and anger and beliefs anymore, trying to force them to be yours.
I don’t want to make this comment go on too much longer. I wanted to say something about the friend who approached you. It’s a long process, putting yourself together after abuse, and I’ve found dealing with friends has been one of the hardest parts. A lot of them just don’t understand. If you think about it, you can see why. They’re saying all the same things you were: this can’t be as bad as I think it is, this can’t really be happening, I must be making this up, there must be something wrong with me that I see it this way. Nobody wants to believe another person could be so willfully cruel, and they’re supplying themselves with all the rationalizations you’ve used up over the years.
I read a lot of books on domestic abuse when I left, and on the topic of the people around an abusive relationship, there was one thing that really resounded with me. The abuser isn’t unhappy. The abuser is living the life he wants. He doesn’t feel crazy, or attacked, or frightened. It’s his victim who does. So he presents to others as a perfectly together, happy, stable person, while his victim seems hysterical, unstable, borderline. She’s that way because he made her that way, but that’s not what everybody else sees. Everybody else sees a wonderful man who, for some reason, puts up with this crazy person who cries at the drop of a hat and can’t seem to speak to other people coherently. They see that because, in a lot of ways, it’s a projection of what he sees. An abuser breaks his victim down into somebody who is so frightened and unstable and irrational so he feels justified taking control of her and her life; obviously, she’s too messed up to do anything right, and he’s a really noble person for taking care of and protecting her.
Don’t ever let it minimize what you’ve gone through, but the people around you who just don’t get it are, effectively, experiencing a lesser version of what you’re going through. They’re getting sucked into the lies and craziness, too. After trying for too long to break through those lies with my friends to explain what happened, I finally stopped explaining and justifying as if I had something to defend. I just began being a broken record. If anybody asked me why I left, what happened, why I was going around calling him abusive, I would say, “I think his behavior speaks for itself, and I think you can judge it for yourself. I find it hard to believe that anybody who knew us for as long as you did could see the way he acted as appropriate, or could wonder why I would ever leave him.” Some people still didn’t get it, but I saw a lot of friends sort of give a sigh of relief, and tell me how they’d always thought something was terribly wrong, but I would say it wasn’t, he would say it wasn’t, and nobody else wanted to talk about it, and they felt like they must be crazy or seeing it wrong. One friend even gave me this lame thing: “I guess I just thought he must be nicer when you were alone…”
A very few people will get it, right out the door. Some of them won’t ever understand. Some of them won’t ever understand, but will stand by you anyway. And some of them won’t ever understand, and will believe what he says, the way you did, because it’s easier than admitting that somebody you love and care about is abusive. Just like I had to give myself mental permission to stop judging myself for a time, I had to give myself mental permission to stop talking to or listening to my friends. They didn’t know what I needed. They might have good intentions, but they almost always had bad advice. Only I knew, at heart, what was good for me, what I needed to do, and how I needed to do it. I might not be able to express those things clearly, or defend them, but I wasn’t going to judge myself for that either. Those inabilities weren’t innate, but a product of somebody making a special effort to keep me from expressing or defending myself. I was just going to do what I needed to do, and if I couldn’t handle other people judging me for it, I had permission to stop talking to other people. This was, pretty much, the very first thing I had to learn about boundaries, though at the time I didn’t call it that. I thought it was selfish, but I had to give myself permission, okay, be selfish now. It can’t be any worse than the way you live right now.
View it as a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thing. Your job right now is to maintain your safety. Until you’re safe, you can’t really judge your feelings or actions, you can’t realistically connect with others who are not a part of keeping you safe. Once you’re safe, you can build up to the next level. But until then, you officially have permission to not give a damn about anything that doesn’t keep you safe or make you safer.
Don’t want to make this comment go on much longer, ha ha ha ha.