Did that really happen?
I ask myself this question more times a day than I care to admit. Am I just imagining it? Was it really that bad? These questions swirling around in my head creating confusion and second guessing is one of the hardest parts of the healing process for me at the moment. The art of manipulation is just that, an art…and my abuser could win awards for his performance. The stories and lies that I was fed after discovering countless items of evidence were always denied and argued and eventually flipped around on me to feel guilt. How does that happen? How can he cheat on me, get caught, and yet somehow I’m the one in the wrong? I’m wrong for not trusting him, for not believing his blatant lies as he scrambles and places the blame on everyone but himself.
Now….keep the theme the same; (discover..lie..deny..place blame..then guilt) change the details and multiply it by 4-5x a week. This is what I experienced week after week, year after year continuously breaking me down.
This method works y’all and works very well…at least for me it did. This man wasn’t a horrible monster every second of the day, but he did wear a mask every second. I choose to not focus on the bad but instead “forgive and forget” and only remember the good moments. The moments where he turned up the fakeness, pretended to be kind and sincere, took me on fancy dates, extravagant trips, flowers and jewelry for no reason. But these seemingly ‘nice’ moments were anything but nice…they were very purposeful to boost his ego while bonding me even more to him. This is the very definition of “trauma bonding” and how insanely powerful and strong this bond can be.
I started second guessing myself, the fights were so insane they didn’t even seem believable….”maybe they didn’t happen,” I started to ask myself. I mean how could this man who brought me beautiful flowers just earlier, suddenly be punching a hole through the wall from rage? Even with photos of the damaged wall, I still to this day wonder if somehow I made it up in my mind because it just doesn’t make sense.
When he was yelling so loudly at me in our tiny one bedroom apartment and all I could manage to yell back in between my sobs were “Please Stop” over and over again as I hid in the corner of my closet under the clothing rail as far away from him as I could possibly get. Was I imagining the blue lights I saw through the window when he yelled at me to come out from the closet, to shut up and not make a sound as we hid from the cops that our neighbors had called. I can so vividly remember the range of emotions of fear mixed with relief, but since our apartment was pitch black and completely silent….that knock on the door that I was desperately waiting for never came, instead I watched and listened and waited. That cop never came and knocked on my door, or the other 3 in our complex, instead they turned off their lights and slowly drove away. Again, there went my hope along with a little bit more of my mind. “Well, maybe it didn’t really happen” started up again in my mind.
Why was I choosing to remember only the “I love you’s” and pushing out the “Stupid dumb bitch”
Why did I only share with the others the “Baby, you look beautiful” instead of the “You’re such a fucking dumbass”
Why did I only share on social media the smiling photos of him with our dog instead of the ones of him yelling and kicking her?
Why did I post photos of a trip that only showed the fun times instead of a photo of me in the bathroom crying and bleeding after being raped.
Why was I protecting this evil monster who was pretending to be my husband? Because I thought it was normal, I thought everyone had their fights and their moments, that all marriages have their ups and downs, that he didn’t really mean it, that he was too drunk and didn’t know what he was doing, and because I was being taught that you don’t speak negatively of your husband to other people, you only build them up to the public. So that’s exactly what I did…
After 8 years, I was trauma bonded to this man. During the divorce process I didn’t even mention the abuse to my attorney until 6 months in. Why? Because I honestly didn’t believe there was any. Yes, I knew he had a temper and yelled a lot, but again I thought this was normal. It wasn’t until I showed a counselor whom I was meeting with weekly, a 5 page bullet point list of some of the incidents that occurred during our relationship. I went to her asking if this was normal, if I was overreacting, wondering if he was really a good guy after all and these memories that I couldn’t shake were just my problem of being too sensitive? She started reading the first page and was about 10 or 11 bullet points into when she folded it back up and handed it to me with tears in her eyes. “I can’t read anymore, its making me sick to my stomach, THIS is not normal, this is abuse.” She stated, and it’s like the lightbulb came on and I finally started seeing things for how they really were. I sent those 5 pages to my attorney immediately and seeing his response back to me opened my eyes even more. There, typed up in black and white, was the following abuse that described my marriage.
- Emotional
- Verbal
- Physical
- Sexual
- Psychological
- Financial
This was the turning point for me… validation for what I’d been through. This moment marked the beginning of my true healing and the long road to recovery I had in front of me.
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