Abuse doesn’t always leave bruises

So it took me a while to get the guts to write this post. Mostly because I know it’ll just make me sound whiny. “The dude didn’t even hit you, get over it.” Well that’s the point, jerks, you can be abused without someone laying a finger on you, and it pretty much makes the female half into suicidal baby makers at the whims of their masters. Think I’m being extreme? Grab some popcorn and a violin to play me a sob tune, because you’re in for a long read. This is my story.

It started as a teenager. I had the bad home life that was stereotypical of girls who get themselves into shitty relationships. Abusive father (that guy really did hit), social services up in our business, court dates, etc. The combination of feeling like the lowest piece of shit in the world and wanting to escape had me searching for boys. None of the boys at my school would do, I knew them all and none of them thought me particularly appealing (I might have had an extended awkward phase – and girls with black eyes don’t really garner much attention). So I turned to the internet. I played video games on the net all those years ago and quickly discovered that most girls didn’t touch video games with a ten foot pole. This was in the 90’s when the internet wasn’t cool and saying “lol” pretty much got you beat up. This gave me two things: vast amounts of attention that became my heroin, and my choice of any one of those losers to be my “boyfriend” and lavish me with the desirability I’d never experienced before. You can see where this is going, I’m sure.

After being used by one and almost getting into a very serious relationship with one I now know to be psychotic, I settled on one of these losers two states away in California. He seemed the sweetest and the most grown up, and he was four years older than me and transferring to a university. There were red flags early on, but I didn’t see them because I was so desperate for this person’s attention. Let’s call him Doug. Doug would draw up ultimatums – “I won’t be your boyfriend unless you stop talking to this person.” “You’re on antidepressants? Stop taking those or else I won’t be your boyfriend.” He got his mother involved – “Hi sweetie I can’t wait to meet you! We’re going to be best friends and I’ll take care of you!” (this is not a good thing – I grew up eventually and didn’t need another mommy figure and she came to hate me for it). And, the biggest red flag of all, he was searching for people the same way I was. I was doing it because I had issues. Derp.

He came to visit me, he proposed after one day of knowing me, I accepted because I saw a shining white horse with an escape route (or maybe because I thought I knew what love was at 17), and my parents happily delivered me into the arms of my new fiance a scant five months later because his mommy wouldn’t stop bugging them. At that point, it was better for everyone that I was out of the house, tension was high and I was the one that social services were focused on. (my dad cheated on my mom and left her soon after, a story for another day)

Life wasn’t bad at first. He had his issues. Instead of “please don’t wring your hair out there,” I got “Wtf is your problem? Don’t do that.” Or instead of “Hey, I thought we weren’t using that half of the sink for anything dirty” (I was the one who cooked and cleaned, so it’s not like he had to sanitize), I got “What the fuck is your problem? Look; dirty (pointed to dirty half of sink), clean! (pointed to clean half). Dirty, clean! Dirty, clean!” I felt like a dog. I was embarrassed at being treated that way. But he wasn’t hitting me, so I wasn’t being abused. I used to try and take care of him when he was sick, and when I’d spill a little soup (hey, I was new to this) he’d yell at me for that, too. He’d act like I was an imbecilic child and treat me like I was dumb. I was anxious not to have any ripples in our pond, so I brushed it off and apologized. Every goddamn time.

I should have broken up with him the night he punched the wall and told me it should have been me. It was over something really stupid, he had no reason to react that way. I should have broken up with him the night he broke the vacuum and the book shelf by angrily throwing them around. I don’t even remember what that fight was about, I’m pretty sure I ended up apologizing though. I should have broken up with him when he laughed at me for trying to do something nice, or when he told me I was a horrible, empty-hearted, bad human being because I was working so hard to put him through school that I developed a sleeping problem and couldn’t wake up enough to tell him the news that his grandma had died (hey, the woman had been “dying” for years, it wasn’t exactly news). It was news to me that I was empty inside, but I accepted it as he sat in the dark, alone, and whispered what a horrible person I was. Yes, Doug was dramatic.

But I didn’t break up with Doug. I was scared, I was new at this relationship thing, and I vowed never to give up. We were all the other had in life (except his mom, he held her on a higher pedestal than me). I married him two years later. I was terrified and warning bells kept ringing in my head, but I trudged on, reassuring myself that people in foreign countries get married to perfect strangers and they’re happy, so why can’t I be happy for life with this man that I love? I know now that it wasn’t love, it was simply acceptance. The first time I met him I found him vastly unattractive, and as we grew older I became more repulsed by him. From the acne that covered his body, to his weight that he didn’t seem to care to try and control, to his blond afro, to the stupid way he walked like a troll, to the way he grew tufts of hair on his fat back, or the way he always wore stripes because his mommy picked it out for him. She was still buying him underwear when he was in this thirties, for Pete’s sake. But when I was 17, I didn’t give any of that any thought, this person wanted me. This person thought I was attractive and wanted to be with me forever. He was getting a bachelor’s degree and that meant he was smart and we’d have a good life together. I never thought I’d be so lucky, I had always thought my future would be lonely and void of any happiness.

Fast forward to ten years later. Yes, I stayed with him ten years. During that time, he had choked me, punched holes in the walls of every place we’d lived, threatened to put a bullet in my head, and told me to go back to Washington because no one wanted me. He would punish me by taking my things away (my computer wouldn’t work anymore and only he could fix it, the keys to the car had magically disappeared and he wasn’t speaking to me) or ignoring me for however many days it took for me to say it was my fault that he was mad. If he felt impatient that day, a simple “Fuck you, bitch” would do if I was out of line, and I knew never to fight back, or more of my hard earned (yet scant) things would be ruined. If I crossed him, he’d take his affection and love away until he was satisfied that I had suffered enough.

If I was upset with him and didn’t want to have sex, he’d accuse me of abusing him and using sex as a tool – my body had to be open to him at all times no matter how I felt, or else I was the abuser. And sometimes, I felt raped. I would lay there and cry, hating him, while he did what he wanted. I could never let him see me cry, or else he accused me of being manipulative. He used to sit at his computer and touch himself in front of me (to porn that I consider extremely raunchy, no less), turning toward me and waving his little member around, expecting me to jump on him like a ravenous dog in heat. When I ignored his offensive behavior, he’d finally go “are you going to let this boner go to waste?” There was no easy to way to turn him down without incurring his wrath.

I had two kids with him – not because I was ready for children, but because he was a master of manipulation and I somehow saw it as my duty to give my husband children or else I was ruining his soul. He cried on my shoulder one day, saying that he could die tomorrow and never know the joy of being a father and it was up to me to make sure he knew that joy. A small alarm bell of indignation actually went off in my head one day when he stubbed his toe on the coffee table and because I didn’t run and hide like I usually do, he began cursing me and telling me that it was my fault. But I was well trained by then, I apologized. Yes, master of manipulation. But he never actually hit me – despite threatening to or telling me that he knew why my father did it – so I wasn’t abused, right?

At the end of ten years I was broken. I cooked and cleaned and took care of the children and him. I put up with his manipulative, passive aggressive mother. I was completely dependent on him for my and my children’s lives. I had hoped that when we bought our first house, we could remodel it and sell it. I didn’t want to be white trash, I wanted my house to look nice and to give my kids somewhere to be proud of. Since I was always nursing, cleaning, or watching the children, I didn’t have the time or the know-how to do any home improvement myself. He didn’t care. He sat on his ass and played computer games. All day. Every day, while the house, my prison, rotted around us.That prison was all that I had, though. And I lived in constant fear of him punching more holes in it if I accidentally set him off.

When he’d get home from work and I was just so happy to have someone to talk to, he told me to fuck off, he didn’t want to talk to people because he was at work all day and he was tired of dealing with people. I got no break from the kids and no adult interaction. If I tried to work in the yard, he was angry at me because I wanted him to “babysit” the kids. I would get maybe an hour of work in before he’d pound on the window and yell “I’m done now, get inside.” I was depressed, and lonely. I couldn’t have friends, he got angry if I tried to make any. My punishment usually included his frosty demeanor punctuated with poison dart for a comment now and then. “Why don’t you ask your new friend to come take out the trash instead?” I couldn’t call my family back home and tell them that I was depressed and lonely or that he got angry and told me things that made me cry, his first rule when we met was “don’t you fucking talk about me to people.” And of course, crying only made him go “Look at you, crying like my mother does. That shit doesn’t work on me.” I stopped crying. I stopped caring. If I didn’t have my children to look after, I probably would have stopped wanting to live. I buried a lot of my sorrows in cheap wine or writing novels, no one who looked at me would know how I suffered inside.

We were broke all the time – living penny to penny because money burned a hole in his pocket and he had to spend it. Since it was my job to pay the bills, he considered it my fault if food or gas were too expensive one month and told me that I was acting like his mother if I informed him of our dire financial situation. If he didn’t have any money for new toys, he’d have his new toy NOW with the use of a credit card – giving us more bills. Finally, one poor decision of his was the catalyst for me waking the fuck up and getting out. He wanted a sports car. I told him we couldn’t afford it. He told me “you’re either going to agree to this or I’m just going to buy it and you can’t stop me.” So what could I do? Desperate to avoid making a scene right in the middle of visiting my mother, I agreed. He soon realized that I was right and we were sinking, financially. Without ever admitting that I was right, he told me to get a job to pay for his car, and I did.

I got a job at a casino where there were 800 other employees for me to talk to, be friends with, and learn from. My way of handling my misery was to amp up the bubbly-happy girl act, no one would know that I was secretly living in an embarrassingly dumpy house and suffering through the world’s shittiest marriage. I soon came to realize that people thought I was pretty – something Doug got angry over, and he promptly told me to stop wearing makeup and doing my hair. I also came to realize that people liked me, and wanted to be around me. People would go out of their way to spend five minutes talking to me. I felt something I’d never felt before in my life… I felt popular.

Doug hated me for it and accused me of valuing work more than him. He began going to therapy (because of me, of course) and came home with all sorts of psychological reasons why I was ruining him. I have a feeling that his therapist didn’t actually say that I was the cause of his issues. He turned extremely religious (I was, at the time, agnostic) and became more hostile to me – this time he masked it in scripture, hoping to get me to bend to his will using society’s accepted method of control – the Bible. By this time I was working full time graveyard, watching the kids all day, and still doing all the cooking and cleaning. Doug was angry at me for making him “babysit” the kids when he got home because I needed that three hours of sleep to survive on (“whatever, go take your nap, I’ve only been at work all day it’s perfectly fair that I get to come home and babysit all night while you take a nap”). Physically, I was killing myself from lack of sleep and my marriage was sinking, but at work the coffee was free and I was the social butterfly I’d never been before. I was happy to be treated like a person, and not a single one of them punished me in any way if I disagreed with them. I wanted to be around them more than I wanted to be home with Doug. I confess. I was changing. I was realizing things about myself, and my marriage, and I was growing a spine.

Our marriage finally began to deteriorate. I realized that I could be so much happier without Doug. Without being punished for days on end because I disagreed with him. Without having my things broken. Without living in a run down shack of a house that he had to call his daddy over to help him fix when something went wrong. Without subjecting my two girls to an abusive relationship and teaching them that this is how women are supposed to be treated. I saw it then, finally. After being around 800 other people at the casino and simultaneously finding my highest points and my lowest depths, I realized it.

After realizing (and being told) that I could have any man I wanted – easily. After realizing that I was strong, and smart, and capable, and able to excel at anything I wanted. Doug began to ask me to quit my job because it was “destroying our marriage.” No, Doug, it was destroying your happy little world where you could treat me like shit and still have me wait on you hand and foot. He called me selfish. He told me I was ruining the children’s lives and that their mother was never there for them anymore. He told me that I was that horrible, empty-hearted person he had always accused me of being. He told me I was destroying everything with my selfishness. I didn’t back down, I needed my new friends as much as we needed the income.

He switched tactics and lied to me, telling me he was depressed because of me and they were going to fire him at work because he couldn’t do his job anymore. He said that if I quit it would make him happy again and we wouldn’t lose the house. I told him I’d get a second job if he got fired, and the problem magically righted itself. He got more religious and tried to make me be religious, too. He told me that God’s word was that women should be subservient to their husbands and that was how we were going to happy. That I would never know true happiness until I was subservient to my husband for God. I became an atheist.

Since his forceful manipulation wasn’t working, he finally begged me to quit my job and give him another child – a son. By this time, I knew it for what it was. He wanted to clip my wings – because nothing clips a woman’s wings quite like having a man’s child and relying on that man for her livelihood and the child’s. He once told me “don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” and there was no way I was going to let that hand feed me again. I told him I was getting my tubes tied. And I wasn’t quitting my job – especially with how unstable he seemed to be. Punishment ensued. And finally, I did the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life: I left. Some part of me was still very trained, though, and I felt sorry for Doug because I left him. I left him everything except my clothes and jewelry, and a few toys for the kids so they wouldn’t be bored at my house.

Still, he sent me angry emails about what a venomous, short sighted narcissist I was. How his mother was always right, I was poison and now he had the cure (dramatic, much?). He wasted no time calling/emailing all of my family and friends from Washington about how I’d gone crazy, and since I was never allowed to tell them of my problems for the past ten years, they believed I’d snapped. I’d go back to the house to get something I forgot and there was every picture ever taken of us together, strewn out in the driveway, glass shattered everywhere. I held my chin high and pretended not to see it. Since I had no close friends or family in this state (work friends aren’t exactly close friends), I had no one to help me get set up on my own. He sneered at me when I asked for help, saying “this is your fault, you did this, its your problem.” More punishment. I asked a family friend at work to help, and he did. We became involved, something I should probably thank Doug for.

Doug tried to use the fact that I had no furniture against me in court, attempting to have the courts take the children away from me every chance he got. He filed declaration after declaration about what a cruel mother I was, how the children hide and cry when they find out they have to see me and that he uses God’s love to calm them enough to get them to their mother’s house like a dutiful father. How I starve them and he has to feed them excessive amounts of Pedialyte and juice when they get back from my house. In reality, I was always the one telling him to please feed them something besides Goldfish crackers and canned fruit when the rare opportunity to care for them fell upon him, and I always found his complete lack of willingness to forgo the computer games for a night and be a father to them rather cruel. They had fun at my house and never showed signs of not wanting to be with me. Thank goodness the courts saw through all of his lies, they must get a lot of it.

But still, lie after lie poured into the courts. He was using the children to try and manipulate me now that he no longer had any direct power over me. It was the most scary and liberating time of my life. After three months of him harassing me and laying on the guilt trip of how I was breaking his heart and soul then seeing that I wasn’t going back to him, he found a good Christian girl on eHarmony.com and married her nine months later. In the meantime, I found The Man Thing who I’m with now and the full extent of the emotional abuse I suffered for the past ten years slammed into me like a truck.

The Man Thing has never once treated me the way Doug ever did. I distinctly recall one time when I put something in the toaster oven for him and when he went to retrieve it he burned himself. I immediately knew that it was my fault apologized profusely, nearly in tears that I had already ruined this beautiful new relationship. But, my wonderful boyfriend was only confused. “Why are you apologizing?” He wasn’t angry, or accusing, or degrading, or patronizing, simply confused. I told him that it was my fault he burned himself, that if I had put food in the real oven instead of the toaster oven then he wouldn’t have burned himself and that I wouldn’t make the mistake again. But – here’s where it hit home with me – he hugged me and said that nothing was my fault and that I didn’t have to apologize for anything. He thanked me for making him something to eat and we went about our day – the incident entirely forgotten on his part. Just like that. Holy shit, I was a mess. It began to hit home just how badly Doug had treated me all those years.

And that’s when the healing process began. Thank goodness, The Man Thing has been eternally patient and loving with me, no matter what strange things I need to do to heal from my disastrous marriage. I am happily divorced. He wants to marry me, and he’s okay that I’m in no hurry. He knows that we may never get married, and he’s okay with that as long as he’s with me. The real tragedy here is the fact that the children still have to see Doug on weekends. I see signs of his emotional abuse in them, too. My six year old took a while to realize that The Man Thing and I weren’t going to take our love away from her and treat her like a bad dog when she did something wrong. For the longest time she’d ball up on the couch and cry when she got in trouble, and it confused me until my mother pointed out what Doug probably does to them.

My four year old is a little harder to convince. She recently knocked my computer monitor over because she was horsing around in my spinning chair, and I kicked her out of the computer room while I finished making dinner. She carried on as if I was disowning her, though. Crying hysterically that she wanted me and that she wanted to hold my hand and hug me. What the hell does Doug do to her when she misbehaves at his house? I make it a point to tell her that I’ll always love her no matter what, but she needs to be more careful and not do what she did again. I very much doubt family court will listen to what I say on this matter and remove the children from Doug, so I have to do my best to heal the damage he does to my children. It’s heartbreaking.

Now some of you may be wondering, “why did you stay in that relationship if it sucked so bad, you idiot?” Hey, assholes, it’s not as easy as just walking away when you’re in over your head like that. These abusers, they’re careful and they’re manipulative as all hell. Their process is slow and tricky and the full extent of their abuse isn’t usually known until it’s too late. In my situation, I was young and had a very low self esteem – I didn’t know any better. And still, I didn’t even know I was being emotionally abused until I wasn’t being abused any longer. If you call up an abuse hotline and tell them you have a bloody nose from your spouse, they’re on you like a swat team on a drug bust. If you tell these people “my husband just got mad at me and punched a hole in the wall,” they tell you “Sorry honey, sounds like he has anger issues, but we deal with real abuse here. Try the anger management line.” Right, like that guy was going to admit that he had anger issues; instead he was blaming me for his bruised knuckles and laying a guilt trip on until the discoloration went away.

Hopefully you can see, from my experience, that abuse takes forms other than just hitting people. Emotional abuse is a big deal. And even when you think you’re away from the abuser, they still try to find ways to control. I’ve been divorced for over a year now, and Doug still tries to control me. He moved out of the house we bought (after being court ordered to maintain it until it sells) and told me I would now have to pay half of the mortgage. I quit my job to go back to college months before, how was I going to afford half of a mortgage payment? Upon informing him of this, he told me that I had two months to figure it out (aka find a job). Once again, trying to control me even though I wasn’t his to control anymore. I refused to pay, and he took me to court, trying to force me to get a job and pay him half of the mortgage. The judge scolded him quite eloquently, denied his motion, and sent him packing. It was one of the most beautiful court sessions I’d ever witnessed.

On the plus side, I get to watch the drama that is his new marriage unfold. His new wife, whom he impregnated within three months of marriage, is in for a real treat. He also made her quit her job, and they’re currently living down to the penny in a small two bedroom duplex in the next town over. The financial statements we’re forced to swap regarding court and real estate issues reveal that he’s nearly nine grand in credit card debt, fourteen grand in the hole for a new car, and can’t afford his rent (which is only slightly cheaper than the mortgage he was paying). My children inform me that Doug and his wife won’t have anywhere to put the baby, so the crib is next to their bed – the bed that I used to sleep in with him. I don’t know how that doesn’t bother her. I wonder how long until he snaps at her and talks down to her like a bad dog. I wonder how long until he starts conditioning her to be sorry for his every upset. How long until she gets tired of him sitting on the computer day and night, ignoring their new infant? How long until she realizes that she’s essentially a single parent? How long until she’s on the phone with her family (she’s from Oregon) and he yells at her not to talk about him? I wonder how long until she feels raped, too.

I should feel sorry for her. It’s her first child and she won’t get to nest and make a nursery. She married herself into a horrible situation of poverty – something she probably didn’t see coming when he arrived at her door in that shiny sports car that broke our marriage (he’s since had to give it to his friend) and told her that he works in IT. She’ll never get to live near her family again because Doug could never stand to be away from his mother (he used to dangle the prospect of moving to my home state over my head all the time). I should feel sorry for her – I should reach out to her and offer her a place to go when the inevitable wall punching begins and she wants to get away. But she’s made it very clear that she hates me – that she thinks I’m a terrible mother (thank goodness children are complete parrots, right?) and that I’m a blasphemous sinner in the lord’s eyes. Okay lady, that’s fine that you feel that way, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to see things my way real soon.

Until then, people, know that you don’t have to be bruised to be abused. It takes courage and sometimes a second point of view to realize that you’re in a bad situation. Take it from someone who’s experienced both types of abuse – emotional abuse can be just as terrifying as physical abuse. Make sure you open up to those closest to you and tell them what’s going on – they could make all the difference in your world.

-Mwah