A revelation about the exercise in futility

I just had a revelation that makes sense of one aspect of my ex's behavior that I've never before been able to understand. 

He used to regularly bleat at me, "I need you to fill my looovve taaank!!" But no matter what I did, of course there was never any filling it. 

One of the things he insisted would "fill his love tank" was my spending time with "the girls," aka his two teenage daughters... which was an exercise that most certainly did not fill *my* "love tank." 

I could drive the 70 miles one way to his house, spend some time with him and both girls there at the house, then take one girl out for 1:1 time, return several hours later... and he would bleat at me, "I neeeeeed you to spend time with the girls!!! That fills my love tank!

And I would feel so confounded, and so chastised. <the voice in my head: "I *literally JUST DID* the thing you're saying you neeeeeed me to do for you!"> He would act as though it was something I refused to do for him. It was so crazy-making to have him express it as an *unmet* need, something I was "failing" or outright refusing to fulfill.

It's been years since I've been out of that relationship, yet I'm still putting the pieces together - unraveling and making sense of what it was all about, as well as putting the pieces of myself back together. 

The revelation that just occurred to me about this particular aspect of our relationship is thanks to my brain's ongoing work to synthesize the immense volume of reading I've done to fully understand narcissism and all its facets.

In the same f-d up way that narcissists can't differentiate their own feelings from those of their partner, such that they accuse US of having anti-relationship or other negative feelings that THEY actually have, or such that they accuse US of doing things THEY are actually doing... 

I think that perhaps in this same way, when I would return from spending an emotionally, physically, psychologically, and financially taxing few hours with one of his teenage daughters, he would look at me and see ***MY*** empty "love tank" and then reverse-project it as being his own! His own feelings instead of mine! 

It's like an extra twisted spin on the already twisted game of "emotional hot potato." It's yet another appropriation of my personhood, of my soul, of my psychological energy. 

So, I think it was quite possibly *that* that was going on.

Also, due to the lack of "object constancy" and "theory of mind" that narcissists seem to have (they lack those things), I also just realized that maybe my spending time with the girls wasn't in any way "real" to him, and therefore he couldn't take any true personal pleasure in it, because he wasn't there to participate in and experience it himself. So it, and all of my other efforts outside of his immediate physical and "emotional" purview, were "de-realized" in his mind. 

Talk about the "law of diminishing returns"! Talk about an exercise in futility!

 Today my therapist read the following advice column response to me. She wanted me to know that it's the response I deserved years ago from all the therapy I sought (and paid a lot of $$$ for) when I was in an abusive, controlling relationship and trying to understand what was going on. None of the therapists I sought help from for eight years ever identified for me that I was being abused or controlled. 

After reading the column to me, my beloved now-therapist, who has helped me through years of post-abuse trauma, then tore up my payment check to her from last month and told me she chose to do so because she feels strongly about doing "reparative" work where harm has been done. 

What she read to me was the second story, on the following linked page, from Carolyn Hax's advice column in The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/advice/carolyn-hax-its-simple-support-your-sister/2021/03/09/15c24dfa-785c-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html

Here's the text of the column:

"Ms. Hax: I have been dating a gentleman for 1½ years. He's a nice man, in my same profession, divorced and also a single parent.

Since the pandemic he has spent a lot more time with me, and every time I get on a call with a friend, he sulks, often seems upset, and storms off. He's in his mid-40s so I find this behavior peculiar. He also often gets upset with me when I agree to outdoor, distanced gatherings with a friend who needs to talk; he admonishes me for days about not being cautious.

I am feeling a bit trapped and wanting to run. I have found myself changing who I am and walking on eggshells as a result of his behavior. I have suggested therapy and tried talking to him about it, but he deflects and turns it back on me. He is otherwise lovely, but this is extra stress during an already hard time.

— M.

M.: Get out. Respect your impulse to run. It’s a healthy response to danger.

If he were putting you in a cage, then you’d have no doubt he was restricting your freedom. You say you’ve responded to his moody possessiveness by eggshell-walking, which restricts your freedom to be yourself. Just because it is psychological doesn’t mean it’s not a cage.

Pandemia teems with mental health challenges, but don’t lump in possessiveness, control or blaming. They star on lists of predictors for abuse."

"Just because it's psychological doesn't mean it's not a cage." Yes! Exactly.

Historically, psychological abuse has been roundly downplayed across society. Many victims remain in relationship or contact with their abusers (whether spouse or dating partner or parent or other family member) because they think "domestic violence" is only about physical abuse, so that if physical violence isn't happening in the relationship, too often victims don't realize that they are being abused. 

The words of the column prompted me to realize in a new way, as I then told my therapist, that psychological abuse actually IS physical abuse because 1) it quite frequently or even regularly impacts the recipient's body because of the stress hormones it causes and the neurological pathways it establishes within the brain and overall neurological system, and 2) especially in intimate partner relationships, it restricts the recipient's physical freedoms, as well as agency and autonomy over choices such as when to be with friends or even how to dress or rest or even feed her own body. 

Psychological abuse creates an invisible cage, similar in some respects to the invisible fence that a pet owner might use to contain a dog. If the dog crosses the invisible line of the invisible fence, the dog will receive a painful, frightening shock! The target of psychological abuse might not actually be inside a physical cage, but nevertheless is aware that there are numerous invisible lines all around, lines that dwell within the mind of their controlling and abusive partner, lines that they dare not cross or else risk being punished for in some form. Worse even than that, often the lines change or move, the rules are inconsistent or appear out of nowhere, or the bars of expectation (aka entitlement) get raised ever higher, so that there is never actually any safe pathway and the invisible bars of the cage encroach closer and closer around the victim until she can barely breathe or is terrified to even move. Living in a house of mirrors would be far easier. 

The restrictions of personal freedom waged by a psychological abuser are very real. The limitations of personal and bodily - and even mental thinking or feeling - autonomy and agency are very real -- and very harmful. 

From the advice column response that she shared with me, what my therapist most wanted me to have heard years ago were the simple words, "Get out." Would that I could have been gifted those words when I was 36 instead of 52! 

My hope is to use this blog to start writing and verbalizing more about these and related topics. 

#goodtherapy #thatwasnotlove #psychologicalabuse #autonomy #agency #entitlement #narcissism #covertnarcissism #fuckthepatriarchy #fucksexism #fuckmisogyny 

Memory Trigger: Putting clean sheets on the bed.

Memory:

It was one evening late in the last year of the relationship.  We were at my home, having spent the day and the evening together, rounded out by a nice meal that I had planned and shopped for and lead the cooking of.

We were closing up shop for the night, getting ready for bed. As usual (and as is usual for many women), I was running around the house doing a dozen last-minute tasks (including making sure the front door was locked because I'd learned I couldn't trust him to have locked it after going out out his car for something). So I'm running around doing physical and mental labor, and meanwhile he's already in bed, pretending to read (really just waiting for me to come to bed so he can move on to what he hopes will come next - sex).

Finally after about 10 minutes of tasks, I come to bed . . . to find him pouting and upset. My first thought was, "Really?! What the fuck did I do or fail to do this time?!"

I truly believe that he considered himself to be taking an "adult" approach when he turned to me and scolded me for not bringing his water glass into the bedroom and putting it on the bedside table next to him. You see, as part of the dozen or so tasks I'd done while he sat there pouting in bed, one of them was to bring my own water glass to my bedside table. So seemingly, in his warped mind I was selfish for bringing my glass but not bringing his.

Nevermind that he could have brought his glass his own damn self. Nevermind that he was five steps away from the kitchen and could have gotten a different glass of water for himself. Nevermind that I can't recall ever even once seeing him drink out of a water glass during the night. Nevermind that I don't believe he regularly had a glass of water beside him in bed on nights when I wasn't with him.

It's impossible to have a happy, healthy, sustainable relationship with someone with such an incredibly low level of emotional maturity. With someone who wants to hold their partner's every action under the microscope of criticism and fault-finding. With someone who could not seem to internalize the thousand positive, giving, loving things I did but would hyper-focus on any perceived failure. With a partner who needed so much care-taking that his expectation was that I should bring him his fucking water glass while he sat there in bed waiting for me to do it and sulking at the fact that I didn't.

It was utterly demoralizing and crazy-making. And I'm still living with so many psychological triggers for these memories. Instead of getting to remember a tender moment of affection or intimacy, I have to remember abuse and manipulation and control at every turn.



#pathological #crazymaking #emotionalabuse #psychologicalwarfare #intimatepartnerviolence

An early lesson that I now reject

When I was a little kid in elementary school, there was a boy who lived in my neighborhood and, of course, went to my school and he was a bully. We lived in the last cul-de-sac at the very bottom of a long hill of cul-de-sacs and this boy lived at the very top. But he often made his way down to the bottom of the hill and bullied we kids who lived down there.

One day at school, this boy started bullying me on the playground. He pinned me up against a chain link fence and wouldn't let me go free. I asked nicely, like the good little Christian girl I was taught to be. As I recall, it only made him grow nastier. I got scared. So I hauled off and kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. I got away.

But the playground monitor saw me kick the boy (but apparently didn't see what had prompted me to do so). I got reprimanded and made to sit against the wall outside the classroom for the rest of recess.

Over dinner at home that night, I recounted to my parents what had happened. I was feeling proud of myself and unjustly punished by the school. I thought my father would be proud of me, too. He was always trying to get my younger sister and I to "toughen up."

Well, not so. He got angry with me. He suspended dinner and proceeded to march me all the way up that long hill to the boy's house in the top cul-de-sac, forced me to ring the doorbell, and then forced me to apologize to that boy - that school and neighborhood bully.

I remember feeling so incredibly confused, as well as dismayed and betrayed by my parents. Betrayed and abandoned. I had stood up for myself against a bully who was physically threatening me, and I got into trouble for it (trouble that felt pretty serious to me, a child my father once later called a "goody two-shoes" because I was always so obedient and emotionally delicate).

So this was my first and early lesson on what would happen to me for standing up against someone - particularly a male - who was being abusive and controlling toward me. I got into trouble. I was rejected by my caretakers. I was punished and shamed. The cognitive dissonance was very hard to deal with especially at that young age.

It was an early and harsh lesson on how unjust and unfair the world can be. It was a lesson on not being able to trust my parental figures - those most important persons in my life who claimed to love me - not to trust them for protection or to stand up for me or to listen to or believe me. And it was a lesson in males lording power and control over me and winning at it.

It's a core spot inside of me from which now comes the anger at being told yet again to not take up any space, to not have any needs, to not have feelings, to not stand up for myself, to not have expectations about how other people treat me. I'm growing quite ragey and strong lately, against such messages. I WILL STAND UP FOR MYSELF. I WILL SPEAK UP. I WILL KICK SHINS (HARD!) IF NECESSARY. Don't threaten me. Don't diminish me. Don't try to demand that I disappear. Fuck you if you do. Guard your shins. And your nose. And your solar plexus. I AM GOING TO RESPOND WITH FIGHT!  SORRY-NOT-SORRY if you don't like it.

Casualty of a Manipulative Person

My healing process includes listening to a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos.

Over the weekend I found a new-to-me YouTube channel with some really good videos about narcissistic abuse: "Stephanie Lyn Coaching."

She has a video called "How to Handle A Manipulative Person" that I found particularly good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbon_o01hI

She says that manipulative people are "very child-like" and that growing up they never learned how to respect boundaries. Uh - check!

She says, "These are the people that learned over time that if they pushed and pushed, either their parents or siblings or whoever... you know, pushed . . . that they eventually got their way and people around them caved in."

This explains so so much about the relationship.  There are posts - serious posts of desperately abusive, destructive incidents - that I haven't written yet but that this video explains.

She claims that perhaps these people had parents who were a narcissistic/codependent combination and who observed one parent using manipulation tactics against the other. "They learned, over time, these tactics, in order to control the outcome of a situation and ultimately get what they want from someone."

She goes on to say that manipulative people are "extremely insecure" and that they have "very fragile egos" so that when someone says "No" to them, it creates a wound and bruises their ego. "They never learned how to accept a 'No' and how to process that and how to deal with it. Again - very child-like." 

She explains that "life is a game" to manipulative people, that it's about "who's winning, who's losing, who's in control, who's not, who has the power... they're not the people who are going to rationally sit down and think about what's fair or, you know, 'Let me compromise with you.'." That explains so much about the power and control dynamic that existed!

She says, "They just want what they want when they want it!"

This was the crux of all of the abuse.  All of the bullying.  All of the psychological manipulation.  All of the fights.  All of the character attacks.  Everything.  It always always came down to that I wasn't giving him what he wanted, and he was determined to try to get what he wanted from me, no matter the consequences.  No matter the effects on me. 

And the effects on me have been enormous. Six years of (C)PTSD symptoms following on after I (still very uncertainly) ended it.

She said next on the video said something that was so simple and yet was so profound to me because it explained SO much of my ongoing experience of subtle abuse and coercion in the relationship.  She says, "These are the people that, when they ask something of you, they want an answer right away. And again, it's that pushing back - it's that, 'I don't want to give you a second to think about what you actually want and how you feel. I want you to give me an answer right away, because I want what I want and I want it right now. So if you were to say to a manipulative person, 'Well you know give me a minute' or 'Let me talk to you tomorrow about this, I just need time to think about it.', they won't like that, and they will continually be pushing on you until you give them the answer."

OH. MY. GOD. This was so much of the abuse, right here, in a nutshell. This was some of the worst and most insidious parts of the relationship. This was where he trapped me the most, so many times. This was where so much of the true scarring of the abuse happened. It was so fucking underhanded. He would come across, at certain times, as being so "reasonable," when really he was absolutely pushing me to answer *right now* to what he wanted.

It was *so fucking abusive* and *so controlling*. All of my internal bodily systems told me so at the time. But at the time he also managed to make it sound like he was being so incredibly relationally focused.

It's really hard to even figure out how to explain it!

He pressed me in this way in particular when it came to committing to events and to dates on the calendar. He frankly made me feel like I was a super commitment-phobe, when I'm really not, it was just that he would push me so fucking hard! 

So sadly, I remember a conversation in my car on our way to go sailing one night during our last year back together when I remember actually hoping we were making a tiny step forward in progress together.  He was pushing me to commit to attending his family's July 4th gathering *again* - there was never any room for compromise or any recognition that I have my own tradition of spending July 4th with my own family - and he *totally* emotionally manipulated me by extolling how his own family was putting a lot of pressure on him over the phone about committing to whether or not we would attend the annual gathering.  He *totally* emotionally manipulated me about it! I remember that the conversation was so incredibly stressful for me - because he kept pushing and pushing - and yet that he did an "emotional reveal" where I actually felt like maybe he was emotionally vulnerable with me for once, about the stress he was feeling because he said his family was putting pressure on him about committing to attend. I now believe that was all pretty much utter bullshit. He was merely using yet a different other manipulation tactic on me to get me to agree to do what he wanted to do. Fucktard! What a fucking asshole.

We broke up for good before that July 4th event ever happened.

She (Stephanie Lyn) goes on to say some stuff that's frankly hard to hear, about how these people know their targets and know our vulnerabilities and so target those with intention toward getting what they want from us. :(

"When all else fails and they're still not getting what they want out of you, here's where the really abusive behavior comes into play.  Here's where the bullying starts, and the threatening, and the name calling - 'You're selfish,' 'You're crazy,' 'I do everything for you and you're never there for me.'"

All of the ensuing tactics are to make you doubt yourself, to make you wonder if what you want and how you feel is wrong, and that you should be giving them what they want because they deserve it. "It's that sense of entitlement also within a manipulative person, that it shouldn't matter what you want or how you feel, 'This is just what I want, and I deserve to get whatever I want at any moment, and if you're not giving it to me, then you're going to get some backlash.'"

She goes on to say some really good stuff about knowing how to set good boundaries.  This is what I was doing certainly at least the last year together. I was paying attention to how everything felt inside. I was paying attention to all the boundary violations. I was paying attention to how much I was giving and to where my internal limits were, and to all the way he insisted on pushing those limits. I was paying attention how it felt different when I was giving to him or the girls from a genuinely loving place versus when I was giving or doing something because he was manipulating me into it. Ugh!  That last part was SO SO horrific and was the absolute downfall of the relationship! 

I want my life back!! I want myself back, not just the self I was before him, but the awesome self I was *while* I was with him! I gave him all of my very best self.  I want her back!!!  Sometimes, when I think I'm missing him, I have to remind myself that who I am actually missing is myself.  I don't know how to get myself back. :(

So tired of sadness

I'm so incredibly weary of feeling sad.

It's been almost 6 long years. My brain is still stuck in the past. I deal with constant flashbacks and intrusive memories. CPTSD is hell on earth.  So much time has passed, but everything from the relationship still feels like it happened recently.  It's still all so present with me.

I don't know what to do when I myself feel like I'm my own trigger. Just being me, being myself at home, triggers all sorts of memories and feelings. I can't cook without feeling triggered. It's like my love for him and his kids entered my bloodstream and still flows there, even though they all rejected me and abandoned me.  It's like my body has a serious "muscle memory" problem, so just in moving my body I feel the pain of it all.

I'm so weary of it.  I thought I could leave the abuse and take all of my positive lifeforce energy with me, but it hasn't worked that way.  I feel so trapped.

I cried almost literally every day for the first three years.  I don't cry very often anymore.  But I've become a hermit.  I've hidden myself away and stopped doing everything I used to enjoy doing.  I go to work, and that's it.

I gave my all to him and his daughters.  I believed him when he said he loved me, even when his behaviors toward me said differently.  I gave everything I had to give.  I planned my life around us.  I planned my future around us. 

I'm still stuck in cognitive dissonance. My brain fluctuates back and forth between loving memories of him where he was sweet, charming, loving, and memories of the extensive emotional abuse and constant manipulation. 

I know he left me no choice but to leave. But he stole so very much from me. I want everything back that he stole from me.  He stole so much during our years together, and he stole my future as well. He's stolen my well-being the past six years, due to PTSD.  He thwarted my future.  I haven't been able to figure out how to restructure or reimagine another future.

He was and is such a fucking dumbass!!  He has no idea what he tossed aside.  He has no idea the level of my loyalty and commitment.  While he accused me of have feelings for someone else. Dumbass!

Emotional Abuse Podcast Notes: Dr. Jennifer Degler

As part of my recovery and healing process, I am going to use some of the helpful podcast episodes I've listened to as starting points for some of the experiences I need to write about here.  Since to help myself with this effort I plan to transcribe (roughly, not word-for-word, more like highlight notes) the episodes, I thought I'd go ahead and do so here, to publish the notes as part of my blogging process.

It's a bit of an experiment. Here's a first effort, a three episodes of a four-part series plus one extra earlier episode, all on the topic of what constitutes "Emotional Abuse."

From the podcast "Healthy Relationships Rx with Dr. Jennifer Degler"

Episode #035 January 9, 2015 "Emotional Abuse Part 1 - What is Emotional Abuse?" 6 minutes

The words and actions that go along with emotional abuse continue to haunt [survivors] long after the bruises [from physical abuse] have faded. 

Emotional abuse is a consistent pattern of hurtful, humiliating, and condescending behavior. 

Emotional abuse is a type of psychological violence that happens in a relationship.  ... It's a consistent pattern that happens over and over again. 

Examples of Emotional Abuse

Overt Types of Emotional Abuse:

• Domination: Attempting to control someone else's actions. Or having unreasonable expectations, where you place unreasonable demands on someone else.  
• Humiliation: You embarrass or shame someone else.  
• Discounting: You devalue someone else or devalue what is important to them.  You devalue what they've said.  
• Emotional Distancing: This is giving someone the "silent treatment," where you choose not to speak to them or look at them or acknowledge their presence for an extended period of time.  
• Verbal Assaults: Constantly criticizing someone, yelling at someone, using cutting sarcasm. 

Covert/Subtle Types of Emotional Abuse:

• Withholding: This can be withholding attention or affection.
• Disapproving, dismissive, contemptuous, condescending looks or comments or behavior (rolling your eyes when someone says something or sighing and looking down your nose at them.)
• Sulking or Pouting: As a consistent pattern in a relationship, it's hurtful and can be emotionally abusive.  
• Making Accusations
• Subtle Threats of Abandonment: "I'm going to leave you," either as a threat to physically leave or to emotionally leave. "I'm just not going to speak to you anymore" or "I don't ever want to hear from you about that topic again." 

Verbal Abuse is Emotional Abuse: 

• When you define someone in a negative way that causes the other person emotional pain and mental anguish.  It's a negative statement or even an insinuation that tells the other person who or what or how they are in an negative way.  Examples: "You're just clueless." "You're so high maintenance."  "You're holier than thou."  "You are too sensitive." "You are impossible to deal with." "You're just immature." "You're just lazy." "You're just mean."  
• Telling another person what they're like. Examples: "You're like a child." "You're like a crazy person." "You're like your mother."  
• Telling the person how they're behaving. Examples: "You're acting emotional." "You're attacking me." "You're being dramatic." "You're jumping to conclusions." "You're making a big deal out of nothing."  "You're just yapping." "You're just trying to start a fight." 
• Telling another person what they think or feel or want, as if you can read the other person's mind.  Examples: "You think I'm wrong." "You think you know best." "You think you're always right." "You think you're soooo smart." "You think you're better than everyone else." "You think this is all my fault." "You're just confused." "You're just never happy." "You aren't sad!" "You aren't tired!" "You enjoy arguing."  "You don't love me." "You don't care." "You don't have anything to cry about."  "You feel too much." "You love your parents more than you love me." "You only care about yourself." "You just want to be right." "You want me gone so you can be with someone else." "You want to hurt me on purpose." "You just want to embarrass me."  This is acting as though you're inside the other person's brain and can know what the other person is thinking and feeling.  You tell the other person this and it's negative and hurtful.  

Episode #036 January 27, 2015 "Emotional Abuse Part 2 - Red Flags for Recognizing an Emotionally Abusive Man or Woman" 9 minutes

Emotional abuse is a consistent pattern of hurtful, humiliating, or condescending behavior.  Emotional abuse is psychological violence against another person.  Some examples are attempting to control someone else's actions or placing unreasonable demands on someone else, embarrassing or shaming someone, discounting or devaluing someone else or what's important to them, giving someone the silent treatment, or verbal abuse where you're criticizing or yelling at someone or using cutting sarcasm or calling someone names.  Emotional abuse can also be covert or hidden or more subtle, such as withholding attention or affection, or rolling your eyes or other contemptuous behavior that you communicate non-verbally such as sulking or pouting.   

How to recognize an emotional abuser: 

In a dating relationship, the typical emotional abuser is looking usually for a younger person.  They tend to date someone who is "one down" in the relationship, meaning the person is significantly younger, or are in less authority (maybe a boss dating his employee, or a professor dating a student, or maybe a female supervisor dating a male supervisee). Emotional abusers are looking for someone they are already "one up" over.  It could be a parent who is being emotionally abusive toward their child, one down in authority.  

In a dating relationship, emotional abusers usually accelerate the dating process; they get things moving very quickly.  This is the person who on the first date or in the first few weeks is already saying, "I want to marry you" or "Will you marry me?" They typically have a family history of emotional or verbal abuse and maybe even physical or sexual abuse.  

Emotional abusers are typically very charming when you first meet them.  They sweep people off their feet.  Initially they seem to be everything that you're looking for and they seem to be saying everything that you would like for them to say.  But at some point, red flags do appear, but typically the person who is being set up to be emotionally abused will ignore the red flags, to their own detriment.  

Some red flags of men who turn out to be emotional abusers:

• Talking quite a bit more than he listens or putting no effort into the conversation and expecting the other person to carry the whole conversation.  
• After the initial wooing where they're very very interested in you, the conversation ends up being primarily about them the longer you're in a relationship with them.  
• They make critical comments about other people, or jokes at other people's expense. Initially in a dating relationship they don't do this at your expense, but if you stay with them long enough, what you observed them doing against other people, they begin to do against you.  
• They laugh at, belittle, or ignore your opinions, ideas, and activities.  
• They may be flamboyant and loud in inappropriate settings, but they can also be the quiet type.  
• When you try to bring this person's mistakes to their attention, they get angry, they shut down, even if you do the correction appropriately.  
• If you share that something good has happened to someone else, they seem to resent that or try to "one up" that person.  
• They lie - little lies and big lies.  They exaggerate their accomplishments and they fudge the truth if it will benefit them.  
• They may encourage you to disagree with or dislike family and friends in an attempt to isolate you.  
• They get offended easily.  
• They get angry quickly and without much provocation.  
• Once they're in a bad mood, they stay there; they sulk and pout.  
• They get jealous easily and want to know where you're going, who you're with, what you're planning on doing, and they monitor your activities.  
• Typically they're so charming and first and seem so much like the prince or princess of your dreams, that it's hard to believe when they begin to change.  
• The relationship starts out 95% amazing and 5% not so amazing.  Over time, that ratio beings to shift (more quickly than you could imagine). Suddenly it's 80% amazing and 20% bad.  Then it gets to 60% good and 40% bad.  If you stay in it long enough, all of a sudden it's more bad than it is good.  But people hang in with the relationship because they keep thinking that that time when it was 95% good was the real person and they keep hanging in there hoping that things are going to get back to that.  Unfortunately they fail to recognize that this is an emotionally abusive person and that person is only capable of sustaining a relationship where maybe it's 20% good but 80% bad. 

Episode #037 January 29, 2015 "Emotional Abuse Part 3 - Warning Signs That You Are In an Emotionally Abusive Relationship" 10 minutes

We define emotional abuse as a consistent pattern of hurtful, humiliating, and condescending behavior that can range from verbal abuse, belittling someone, constantly criticizing someone, calling someone names, to more subtle tactics like intimidation or manipulation or pouting or refusing to be pleased. 

Warning signs of an emotional abusive relationship:

• The other person often seems irritated and angry with you, and when you try to ask why they are upset they will either deny they are upset or will in some way tell you it is your fault, that you are to blame.  Over time you come to believe that you cannot please this other person no matter what you do.  
• When you feel hurt by something the other person has said or done, and you try to talk with them about it, the issues never get resolved.  The other person refuses to discuss your upset feelings by saying things like, "You're just trying to start an argument." or "I don't even know what you're talking about." Or they just walk out of the room.  
• You frequently feel frustrated because you cannot get this other person to understand your intentions.  When they are upset with something you've said or done, they act like they know your motives for your choices and they judge your motives as bad.  They believe they somehow magically can see into what you're thinking and what you're feeling, like they know your heart. 
• They often accuse you of doing what they do but won't acknowledge.  For example, they accuse you of trying to control their every move, when in fact they are the ones who are monitoring what you do, criticizing what you do, expecting you to report on expenditures of even the smallest amount of money, expecting you to ask them for permission, in effect, before you make even the smallest of decisions.  
• When you look at the relationship, you sense that communication is really really hard with this person.  What they think they said or think they did is so different from what you remember them saying or doing.  When you try to discuss this with them, the communication never goes well and you always leave the conversation feeling like everything is your fault, and that you're a really bad person and that you can't even remember things accurately anymore.  
• The other person seems to take the opposite view from you on almost everything.  When they share their opinion, they don't state it as though they simply have a different opinion from you.  They state it as though you're wrong and they're right, that they are the adult in the relationship and you're the child, that they are somehow superior and you are inferior.  
• You walk on eggshells.  You spend a lot of time monitoring your own behavior and watching for the other person's bad moods before you bring up a subject.  You find yourself trying to figure out how you can perfectly word something so they won't get upset but you can never come up with the perfect words because no matter what you say, no matter how many eggshells you've walked on, no matter how carefully you've waited until they seem to be in a good mood or seems to be calm, it never goes well when you bring up what you need to bring up.  
• You feel worse about yourself now than before the relationship started.  You ask yourself, "What is wrong with me? I shouldn't be feeling so terrible.  My life is not that bad, and yet I feel really terrible and I don't like myself anymore." You realize that other people seem to like the person and that the person can be charming to other people, but that when it's just you and them, it's like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing happens.  Change happens and the result of being in the relationship long-term is that you slowly lose your sense of self and don't feel good about yourself anymore.  An emotionally abusive person will communicate disapproval of you.  At first it's subtle, maybe just a little dig here or there, a little rolled eyes, a big sigh, a little silent treatment here or there.  But then it becomes more and more direct how they communicate their disapproval.  They do this whenever you show up in the relationship as a real person, when you show up as a separate person.  You are a separate person; you both have two different brains, you have your own thoughts and opinions, your own dreams, your own experiences of things that have happened, your own goals and plans. When those are different from what the emotionally abusive person thinks you should be thinking at the moment or you should be planning or you should want or the way they think you should have experienced something, they communicate disapproval.  Over time the disapproval will cause you to doubt yourself and to lose touch with your own voice, because they are so certain they are right, they never question their own experience, they only question yours.  You learn to tip-toe around the emotionally abusive person, trying to keep him happy so he won't get angry or give you the silent treatment, so he won't pout or say hurtful things.  You walk on eggshells and you're not an equal in the relationship.  Over time, this destroys your self-esteem. 

Episode #022 March 12, 2014 "Identifying Emotionally Abusive Relationships" 6 minutes

Examples of emotional abuse:

• Domination: Attempting to control someone else's actions on a consistent basis.  
• Unreasonable Expectations: When someone places unreasonable demands on you and they aren't willing to make those demands realistic.  
• Humiliation: When someone has a pattern of embarrassing and shaming you.  
• Discounting: When someone devalues you or devalues what is important to you, what you say, what you choose to do, your opinions.  
• Emotional Distancing: This is giving someone the silent treatment or the cold shoulder.  
• Verbal Assault: This is when someone is constantly criticizing you or yelling at you or using cutting sarcasm on you.  

Covert/Subtle types of emotional abuse:

• Withholding attention or affection.  
• Dismissive or disapproving or contemptuous or condescending looks or comments or behavior.  
• Sulking or pouting when they don't get their way.  
• Making false accusations.  
• Subtly threatening to abandon you, that they're going to leave or they make insinuations that they're not going to be in relationship with you anymore if you don't do exactly what they want you to do or be exactly what they want you to be.  

Spiritual Aloneness

In a follow-on to my previous post (Women's March 2018 Reflections)...

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Particularly I listen to them while I'm working in the kitchen. They help to reduce the level of emotional distress that cooking has caused me since the end of the relationship. 

This evening I made a super cheesy Mac & Cheese while listening to (the one and only episode of) "Hard Feelings." Three Seattleite hosts introduce themselves and talk about who they are and how they met.

I ended up in tears several times as I listened, as I often seem to do when listening to podcasts. It wasn't that this episode was particularly moving or insightful (frankly it was a little rambling and unfocused, perhaps why they never produced any followup episodes).

Rather, my tears were about the extreme loneliness, fear, and difficulty of my own "deconstruction" process as I slowly moved away from faith and from Evangelical Christianity, a process that occurred from my early 20s up until six years ago when the last of my faith evaporated.

What struck me was that the hosts talked about their church history going back to 1998. I relocated to Washington State from Florida in 1997, and really floundered. I very hesitantly tried to visit a few churches to find somewhere to attend, but my experiences all made my hair stand on end and drove me further from church and faith.

I reflected as I listened tonight that if things had gone differently, I could have met these other questioners and gone through my deconstruction together with them instead of all alone (save for eventual but only occasional furtive fearful conversations over dinner with my friend Mick).

I also reflected and wept when one of the hosts mentioned entering deconstruction of faith at a time when their partner was still a believer, and how the partner was fully supportive.

My experience was that my journey was both unsupported as well as made additionally painful by the person who claimed to love me. I attempted very actively to share my process with him, but he never engaged with me in any real way. That was "at best." At worst was his ongoing pressure for me to reengage in church and Evangelical Christian circles.

I didn't understand it fully then, but I was trying desperately to break free from indoctrination and the spiritual abuse and related trauma from growing up in a fundamentalist religion that bordered on "cult." Rather than offering me support or love or a safe space in which to be in my own process around all of that, he consistently added to my stress and trauma. It was one more aspect of the psychological warfare that was our relationship. It was one more element of the abandonment and withholding he perpetuated, and one more piece of my ongoing aloneness in life.

So tonight I wept as I reflected back on the pain of how difficult things were and on grief over how things could have been instead.

Women's March 2018 reflections

On this day of the Women's March 2018, I've been doing what I do most weekends nowadays: sitting in bed reading stuff online.

I'm a member of two Facebook groups that have been tremendously healing for me, both related to getting out of fundamentalist religion. Both groups are full of pretty or even highly progressive people. They affirm LGBTQIA people and rights. Their politics are mostly Liberal. They support Black Lives Matter. And so on.

Most of the members of both groups - most of us, I should say -  are still slowly unpacking former belief systems and deconstructing our way out of our former worldviews.

Today, on this day of the Women's March, there have been several posts about difficult marriages. And several posts about marriages in which one partner has been "deconstructing" while the other partner still holds tight to old fundamentalist beliefs.

On woman posted to express some of the major changes she's making in her life and in her family's lives as a result of her deconstruction.  She currently homeschools her children but has decided to try to get them into a charter school.  She's been a stay-at-home mom for 8 years but is entertaining the idea of going back to work.  As she says, "I seem to be turning our lives upside down. My identity. My interests. My parenting. My marriage. I'm not sure my hubby is going to like all this."

Other women responded to the thread to talk about similar changes they're undertaking in their lives as a result of their new found freedom after coming out of fundamentalist religion.  Some are going back to school to pursue a new career after being in the home for years.  Some are exploring their sexuality in new ways. As another woman put it, they are "discovering, recovering, and claiming their autonomy."

What I suddenly realized as I was reading was that Larry and I crossed paths with one another while I was walking OUT of fundamentalism and he, apparently, was wanting to walk further INTO it. Or at least, he DID walk much further into it after we broke up, whereas I just kept on walking further away.

His wedding 9 months later took place in a church. That's not how I would have designed our wedding.

His wedding photographs (which he made sure to post where he knew I would see them) show his bride standing in a prayer circle with her hands and the hands of her friends raised in the air to Jesus. <shudder>

When the Skagit River Bridge over the I-5 freeway collapsed in 2013, he wrote a prayer in their church newsletter (I saw it online) that he and his wife were praying for those who were struggling to get to work because of the collapse.

When armed anti-government protesters took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, he posted to a local group we're both in to scold people for being against the thugs, calling them "freedom fighters." (Reading that was a hugely dysphoric moment for me because I realized I have no idea who I was really involved with for 8 years. But he always did turn his chameleon colors "red" whenever we were around religious people.)

After we broke up, I very quickly became strongly feminist. I think I had been in many ways for a long while but didn't know it. And "feminism" was an evil word in my fundamentalist upbringing.

The very first thing I ever told Larry about myself when we met was that I didn't go to church anymore and that while (at the time) I still considered myself to be a Christian, I wasn't an "in-the-box" sort of Christian or I wasn't what most people at that time would have thought of as Christian (nowadays what I was then is called "Progressive Christian").

I was already L&G affirming and on my way toward affirming all the rest of the alphabet.

I couldn't tolerate Christianese or the way churches are so cookie-cutter I could finish the sentences of every Evangelical pastor anywhere.

Listening to sermons made my skin crawl.

I couldn't even pray out-loud anymore, though always enjoyed when he prayed out-loud for us before our meals. I was on a journey away from and trying to heal from spiritual abuse, indoctrination, mind control, and cult participation.

He bugged me and bugged me and bugged me to go to church with him, even though he himself wasn't a regular attender and said he only wanted his daughters to go "for the morals." I relented on several occasions and went with him, but was so triggered by the experience each time that I left in tears (while he sat in the pew falling asleep). It didn't seem to bother him to subject me to further traumatization.

He pestered me numerous times to attend the "marrieds" ministry at the church. He wanted us to have "couples" friends (he was never very supportive of my intentional efforts to maintain friendships with the friends I'd had while I was single before meeting him). I told him repeatedly that I was fine with pursuing "couples" friends but that we needed to find them via some other context other than church.

Once when a church person asked us why we weren't married yet, he replied that we were "waiting for the Lawwd (Lord, pronounced in an in-group churchy way) to tell us when to get married." (I was like, "WTF?!? No we absolutely are NOT doing that!" It was such an incredible misrepresentation of our situation and I was floored and deeply disoriented by how easily the lie rolled off his tongue.)

He reinforced "Purity Culture" with his two daughters and thoroughly fucked with my mind, which had already been so thoroughly fucked with by Purity Culture, by making us pretend around them that we weren't sleeping together - when I had wanted to wait until we were married to sleep together but he pushed and coerced me and I capitulated. How many ways could I get twisted in that relationship?

The crazy part is that, with his mathematical and science degrees, it was some of his observations to me about the natural world that actually contributed to my deconstruction from some of the fundamentalist Biblical theologies I had been indoctrinated in. And he was actually much more non-practicing and un-Christian than I was. So confusing!!

So, today while thinking about the Women's March and reading about women who are coming into freedom and autonomy, I was struck by the realization that I walked out one door while Larry walked in through the door just beside it.

I'll have to blog separately at some other time about the "box" (of Patriarchy) I was in the midst of struggling my way out of and how he worked very hard to try to shove me back into it.

Soft sucker punches

He never hit me. But there was no end to the emotional and mental sucker punches. He landed them, soft or hard, at every turn.

He kept me constantly on edge.

Once, early in the relationship, he accused that he had to walk on eggshells around me. That was actually one of the sucker punches, I now realize, a projection, a reverse mirroring of what the dynamics actually were in the relationship, a way to make me doubt myself and to manipulate me into trying still harder to do or be "better."

One of the "soft" sucker punches that's been running through my memory lately was a lovely weekend afternoon several years into the relationship.  We were at his home for the weekend (as we most often were unless there was a commitment or reason that kept us closer to the city - all a subject for a separate post).

He was out in the yard, changing the oil in my car. Nice, right? Sweet and loving, right?

I was in the kitchen, working happily on domestic pursuits for us both to enjoy (dinner prep or something, I can't remember the exact details now).

With love and happiness flowing from my heart, and those qualities pumping through my veins, I was feeling a lightness to my energy and all the best of my femininity and creative passion flowing from my soul.

From the base of this energy, I decided to make us a special summer beverage of a warm, minted iced tea that I had learned about years ago from a co-worker. I had become enamored with the idea of it after she served the tea when I visited her home and she explained that she had learned the tradition from her husband who was of Middle Eastern descent. (It was so many years ago that I unfortunately no longer remember which country he was from.)

I traipsed out to our large garden to cut lots of fresh mint. I boiled water and filled tall glasses with ice, the right kind of tea bags, a teaspoon of sugar, water, and mint, slushing the mixture with a long-handled spoon to get the tea to steep nicely.

I took a glass out to him, happily looking forward to offering him the thoughtful surprise. Happily looking forward to the loving moment of connection the gesture would create.

I approached the front passenger window of my car and looked in . . . and my heart dropped to my stomach.

He was sitting in the driver's seat looking through and scrutinizing the small cluster of papers and little notebooks I kept on the console under the emergency brake for making grocery or other lists and jotting notes while in my car.

He was snooping on me.

I had never done anything in the relationship to warrant being snooped on or to deserve being distrusted or checked up on.

His face blanched when he looked up to see me watching him do this. Seeing the color drain from his face and shame come over him told me he knew what he was doing was wrong. But apparently the impulse to snoop was greater than his sense of integrity - both his own integrity and mine.

My happy gesture was suddenly sucker-punch-ruined. My happy energy and sense of emotional safety abruptly went from 8 to about a 4. I went from feeling open and happily vulnerable, to realizing (once again) that my world was not safe. I was not safe. He was not safe.

I delivered the glass of tea and turned quietly to retreat back to the kitchen, saying nothing to him about the obvious infraction he had perpetrated on us and on our relationship.

It turned out to be one of the few times in our history together that he actually offered me some semblance of an apology. Why that time and not any of the others when the pain and damage and trauma was so egregiously more severe, I may never understand.

It took him more than a few long minutes, but eventually he made his way to the house and came into the kitchen and offered me a small apology.

I wish I could remember now what exactly he said.  I only remember feeling that what he offered was about half as much as what he should have... but also that he didn't (for once) somehow twist blame toward me and also (for once) didn't try to pretend nothing had happened.

I also remember feeling internal confusion and a sense of warning bells chiming. I remember sensing vaguely somewhere in my brain that I was being manipulated - what I would now call "gaslighted" - through his seemingly good, "relationship repairing" action of apologizing and actually owning up to this small thing he'd done.

This small thing, the snooping, was so minimal compared to the numerous other abuses of manipulation and control that he constantly perpetrated on me and our relationship.

It was so "tip of the iceberg" that on the inside my psyche knew that the very act of owning up to and apologizing for the breach was itself a manipulation. "See what a good honest man of integrity I am? Yes, I messed up a little but I admitted to it right away and apologized. I'm a person of good character who will readily fall on my sword to create a needed relationship repair so that our love can be strong."

Yes but . . . there's the whole iceberg down below, serving as the ever-growing foundation of our very painful relationship.

And in choosing to follow his impulse to snoop (and in my inadvertent discovery of it; who knows how many other small or large things I never did and still don't know about) he added to that foundation: he violated my trust in him; he demonstrated his (completely unwarranted) lack of trust in me; he exhibited his controlling and stalking tendencies; he violated my privacy; he violated his own and my integrity, he violated my autonomy ... and more.

It would be one thing if he were snooping for gift ideas. That might qualify as an excusable, lovingly motivated "invasion" of my privacy and autonomy.

Or if he was snooping to try to understand me better, say if I was going through a particularly hard time or something. Maybe I could understand it then?

It would be another thing still if he was snooping because I was acting oddly, throwing up red suspicious flags indicating that I was hiding something that might mean he was unsafe from me. I don't support snooping but I do support self-advocacy so I can understand breaching personal integrity (by snooping) if in service of the greater salvation of your ultimate integrity if a partner is acting hinky over a significant period of time.

But he wasn't snooping for any of those reasons. I don't even really understand to this day why he was snooping.  Was it his insecurity?  Was he looking for "proof" of supposed infractions or betrayals that he was imagining in his head?  Was he looking for things to use against me, to further attack my personhood, to devalue me, to attack and further erode my self-esteem, for fodder for more crazy accusations?

My gut and breadth of experience with him tells me it was mostly the last reason.

Though I didn't fully understand it at the time, I now know with clarity that we were engaged in an epic battle of psychological warfare. We were engaged in a massive power struggle, me fighting for the right to be a separate person from him, and he fighting to keep me manipulable and controllable to his will. One major way of keeping me gullible was to keep me in a perpetual state of self-doubt and weakened self-esteem.  

So I believe he was snooping in my car in an effort to look for things to use against me to further destabilize and weaken me, looking for things to throw in my face, to criticize me about, to accuse me of, or to use to discredit me further with his family and few friends (otherwise known as a "smear campaign").

He was snooping because ultimately in his heart and mind I was the enemy he needed to protect and defend himself against, not his partner to protect and love.

The bottom line is that, regardless of the specific (warped) reason why he was snooping, he was not looking for information to use toward promoting my well-being or the well-being of the relationship. Nothing more than that even really needs to be examined or said.

What he sadly could not or would not see was that I was standing right in front of him offering him love, support, loyalty, faithfulness, intimacy, trust, honesty . . . and a glass of lovely special hot iced-tea.