Sometimes, just these recent years, I feel as though I’m hiding in plain sight. My world is compartments. I have the real estate compartment. The dog-mom compartment. The “I do CrossFit” compartment. The “good friend to my girlies” compartment.... And, there’re the little spaces I really don’t want to admit. I don’t want them to be seen. They are the compartments filled with my short-comings; my failures; my weaknesses. In there lie monsters.
I’m writing this because I can’t keep it to myself anymore, yet I am fearful of sharing with friends. I’ve tried to explain this to my loved ones; my mom; my sister; friends. I’ve been disbelieved, shamed, abandoned, even lied about, but rarely have I been supported or believed. So I lay my truths here in this tomb of digitalization, knowing I’ve finally spoken it somewhere, even if only to electrons and silent technology.
I think that my community doesn’t believe me because, all my life, I’ve been a warrior. I’ve been fierce, and I’ve stood up for myself and spoken my truth at almost any cost. It’s not that I’ve won every battle, it’s that I’ve never ducked my head and submitted. Everybody who’s ever known me well knows that about me, because at no time in my life have I been different than that. And so, in the quiet of my personal life, behind closed doors, and absent any obvious wounds or bruises, people simply can not believe that I could be the victim of spousal abuse.
But, here’s what I know. The reason I’ve always been a fighter and a self-advocate, and a defender of other underdogs as well, is because I am a target. I have lived my life as a target. There is some thing about me that makes friends want to use me as their scapegoat or their “disposable” sacrificial lamb. And I? How do I respond? I go back for more. I think that more than anything is my terrible, ugly, secret. I want so badly to be loved by a person I’ve come to believe is a friend, that I simply just keep crawling back for further abuse.
I’ve done lots of work on myself in counseling and in various personal growth and awareness programs, going all the way back to when I was 19. I’ve got an exceptionally high emotional intelligence level, but, I have a blind spot that I believe is the product of a life-long abandonment relationship with a parent. It seems I can know much about the theory of the psyche, or even about my own; but managing emotional hooks and triggers still is a lifelong challenge.
In my marriage, I find even after nine years married that I struggle to understand the reality of my marriage and our life. It’s not that I didn’t take time to get to know him. We were a couple from January 2006 until our marriage in late 2012. For the last two or three years before we married we were formally living together.
I had only been married once, at the age of 29, also after knowing my intended for two years. That marriage lasted 18 months. My first husband literally threatened to divorce me the day after our wedding, in an angry snit on our honeymoon. Then, much like when my current husband became almost another person when we walked through the door of our home after our wedding, I inwardly crumbled, feeling betrayed, powerless, and desperately wanting to find a way to erase what had just been said.
So, I can’t help but conclude that I am the common denominator. I am the magnet that drew these two men to me; one who would serially cheat on me all through our engagement and marriage (I later discovered), and one who would only reveal an ugliness and mean spiritedness once we were married; committed to each other so that I could not easily escape.
I’ve been so independent in my life; married only a total of 10 years out of my entire 59 years of life and the rest having lived on my own, running businesses, putting myself through college to be an engineer, leading a company and mentoring others. This entire “compartment” of misery in literally every aspect of my marriage simply is baffling to me. I am a happy, friendly, engaged, active, energetic person. I have experienced the loss of friends, and, actually, yes, sometimes in very similar ways: feeling betrayed or lied to by a friend followed by them simply ghosting me, seems the most common. It’s not every friend, but it’s been some. It has happened much of my life, beginning in childhood.
And, a parent who is a serial abandoner. So, I was constantly feeling as though I couldn’t be sure I would really be loved by anybody. And, I must still have the stench of neediness. Because here I am with a husband who has, after nearly nine years of marriage bullied me into a place where I wake up and put on a suit of emotional armor even before I get out of bed. Emotional armor means there is little in between pleasant and yelling in pain.
My husband realized this early in our marriage. When we married, I was already, at 51, experiencing advanced osteoarthritis in my hips and was nearly unable to do most of the things I’d taken for granted three years earlier. I was so constantly in pain that much of what I had, emotionally, was given over to surviving each day. I had little left for defending myself against ugly abuse. And I was managing a real estate company as it’s founder and CEO, as well as taking care of clients and also agents who needed me.
Many people can look right at my husband abusing me and not know that it is happening. That is often that case with emotional abuse. Emotional abusers get to know every detail of their victims so that the smallest of details can be used to torture without anybody else becoming the wiser.
For me, the first thing he realized is that I did not want to hear him talk about killing animals. He began that conversation as a test, I now realize, to see if it was a painful thing for me to hear, and, of course it is. At first he would tell me about injured animals he’d elected to kill on his job as a highway patrol officer. Eventually, I would anger just because he would begin trotting these stories out just to haunt me, and I would demand he stop. He eventually would: satisfied in knowing he’d evoked such a painful response.
Another thing he quickly realized is that I have extreme abandonment issues. He observed repeated betrayals and abandonments as the on-going dynamic between myself and my parent, and he found that he could also emotionally injure me by betraying me. Over the years, the betrayals have mounted in notability, beginning with small things and growing larger as the years pass. They are never cheating, per se, but instead things others couldn’t recognize as betrayals: in essence leaving no marks or record of the betrayals. An example: when once, he would advocate for me and garner business referrals from work and his connections at work, now, he quietly refers to me in terms of being a cold bitch, and paints himself as the tortured husband. Who would contact me to do business with me after hearing such things directly from my husband?
To the few people he calls friends, I am the wife who “doesn’t cook” and who “won’t go out to eat” and many other characterizations. While the characterizations are, themselves, untrue on their face, I reflect that it is odd that anybody would think of me as a bad person if these were true statements; simply for not wanting to eat out often, or not cooking. Yet, I’ve been painted with those labels as though they are downright felonious. I’m now a bad person.
Today, like most days, my husband got up and went out to breakfast with his buddies. He left the house at 7:30 and returned at nearly 11 am. When he got home, he walked into the bedroom and collapsed on our bed. He slept until 6 pm. He will be back in bed by 8 pm, if history is our guide. This is the routine he follows most days, and it requires me to beg, demand, cajole, and Even yell to get him to do anything around the house. While he can be very industrious on odd occasions, this—today’s routine—is his primary routine.
I live my life alone, though he’s here, and the torture is in tiny little increments, such as slowly abusing or damaging something I own and care about. Other times, it’s sabotage. We have an obligation and it requires his performance of some task and he waits until the task is due to be completed and then has a complete melt-down and won’t cooperate.
Eventually, feeling cornered and responsible for the failure of the thing we are supposed to do, I lapse into crying and yelling, which is his ultimate goal anyway. He plays up how horrible I am for yelling, and I tell him his actions hurt me, and he laughs. He tells me all the neighbors are hearing me, and thinking what a bitch I am.
I used to ask him to help with the management of the bills. We have rentals, two businesses, and other corporate entities. They, alone, are a full time job. When I used to have him managing the payments for his company (to which we lent $50,000 from his 401k) he would routinely make the payments so late that he would have to call the company and ask for forbearance. Eventually, he basically let us down — “us” as in our little family— because he had run out of forgiveness and didn’t pay the loan. They called it due, conveying the entire outstanding balance to us as income for that year. Our tax obligation then shot through the roof, and, moreover, the balance of the fund was drastically and permanently reduced. So, I took over that duty. Again, this is the guy who spends all day and all night in bed.
Back then, when money was tighter, and when that all happened, I also used to tell him to check with me before he spent money, He would, without warning, take himself out to lunch at a chinese place, or pull a wad of cash out of the checking, simply because he wanted “walking around money.” When I would ask him not to, and pointed out that we were going overdrawn every month, he yelled at me, claiming the money was his hard-earned money and he could do whatever he pleased. At one point, I was searching couch cushions to cover bounced checks while he walked around with $500 cash in his wallet. It was emotionally draining to be constantly caught off guard on the finances. And when we were out of money, the verbal tirades would start; it was always my fault.
As a hoarder, he crowds our lives with junk we do not need, and it sometimes feels as though each time we get the house cleared of junk and can breathe again, there is more junk dragged in and dumped in any available space. On one occasion, he brought home a karaoke machine from an abandoned house. He dumped in in our family room. It sat in the same spot for six months until I got so tired of looking at it I asked him to give it away or put it in his (private) storage space. He ignored me for several more weeks. I continued to ask. One night, when I finally asked him to take it right then and there and at least put it in the garage, he began screaming and stomped into the family room, picked up the karaoke machine, walked to the front door, and flung it down to the bottom of our concrete front steps. Just to make sure I was clear on what he would do to anything I “nagged” him about, it sat there for several more days.
If it wasn’t bad enough that his belongings were thrown and broken, my own things have been treated the same way. My Bose headphones, which I keep at my bedside to listen to shows when I can’t sleep (which is most nights) were the target last year. He threw them under the bed when I was out of the room, and tore the lambskin covering off the earpieces.
I understand this “don’t try anything, because I’ll make sure you suffer worse than I do,” mentality is a way to control me. We have dogs we love, and our home is mostly furnished with the last of the items I *finally* was able to buy for myself as a single career professional after many years of saving up for just the items I loved. His M.O.? If it’s something important to me, it must be slowly destroyed.
Over time, he’s created an environment that I recognize appears to friends as “that couple that is always bickering.” That is all that it takes to drive some friends away. Who wants to be around that all the time? And, he never wants to allow me to enjoy my friends without being included. So I am more and more isolated as friends opt out.
When we were dating, and he behaved like a relatively normal, supportive, boyfriend, we had friends that he introduced to the relationship. But, in the time we’ve been married, those friends have drifted away. Perhaps because the friendships he forged were merely superficial (for him), and I was one hop away from a connection with them. Perhaps because he’s changing. I am truly not sure.
What I do know is this: I demanded in December 2018, after a very sad experience taking a trip to see my lifelong friend on Whidbey Island, that he find a counselor and begin going to weekly visits (not sad about our visit, just sad with respect to his behavior during the trip and his efforts at isolating me and disrupting my enjoyment of the trip and the visit).
He did find a counselor. Of course, a man, and I think he chooses a man whenever possible because he is confident of creating the fictional version of me to a man, whereas a woman would question his disparaging characterizations. And the counselor did diagnose him as having Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). He’s on a variety of medications but they do not do more than barely control his rage.
I’m not seeking a divorce, but if I were to so much as mention it, he would immediately launch into a course of action to destroy everything in our lives. He has made this threat. And what I know is that it’s not something I can easily protect myself from if I were to discuss a divorce.
I know that I do not feel loved, nor do I feel cherished. I feel obstructed. I feel betrayed. I feel competed against, though for what prize, I have not a clue. I feel as though my beautiful younger, self; my free spirit of a woman, is buried beneath a mound of scar tissue that makes her ugly and unrecognizable.
I can’t even say why I’ve written this. But I feel a bit less of all of this burden now that I’ve put it someplace. At least, for now.
Note: here’s a link to an article on adult ODD
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