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My Ex should have a tat on his forehead, "Toxic". I feel bad for anyone who gets involved with him, and just watch as he destroys the lives of other women. I feel sorry for them, but realize if I said anything, they would think I am crazy. They have to experience him going from Prince Charming to Satan themselves.
....Remember when we sat around a campfire and listened to ghoulish tales….the scarier the better, the more gruesome, far better. Remember getting that creepy feeling in our stomach, the one which moved into our solar plexus, made us gasp with terror, break out in a sheer panic and sweat….We were supposed to feel scared at a campfire….and for the movies, we could always turn off the television or walk out of the movie theatre.
The same sense of intense fear and terror exists with domestic violence. However, it is not as easy to walk out of our homes as it is to walk out of a movie theatre or away from the campfire.
Remember how furious we could get with our children, how we could get to the point where we could give them a good wallop…and why didn’t we? We did not hurt our children because there was a control, a stopping point; we could and did catch ourselves.
A batterer does not stop.
[Battery] is fear-based behavior, it is a lack of control….a switch which gets turned on by the batterer and does not get turned off. It involves fear, with both parties. The batterer has a sense of entitlement that this behavior can be done and of course, is therefore justified. We also know the effects of domestic violence, some short-term and others long-lasting and haunting: bruises, broken bones, lack of self-worth, shame, fear, terror, lack of confidence, and even death.
Domestic violence comes in many forms; it can be emotional, sexual, financial, spiritual and of course, physical. It can take on one or two of these elements or it can integrate all....
Emotional abuse is not swift, it is subtle. Emotional abuse can be much worse in that outsiders cannot see it or understand it; physical abuse is abhorrent and easily understood. If the battered does not make a move immediately, then it becomes harder for anyone to believe and more difficult for the battered to leave....
I was terrified a lot in this relationship....This is about power and control. This is about sheer unadulterated fear. This is about not knowing who or where to turn because you are terrified of the ramifications if you do come forward, or worse, who is going to believe you if you do?...
[topping domestic violence] is about education. It is about zero tolerance. It is about taking every opportunity to expose violence and holding people accountable for that violence. The mechanismsare the prosecutors, legislators, law enforcement agencies, affiliate agencies and the advocates who have a commitment and responsibility to help victim/survivors and to create an atmosphere where equity and accountability are tantamount to safety and respect. "
This post caught my eye, so I thought I would quote much of it and bring it to the forefront again.
I am age 63, and unlike what the post above concentrates upon, I was victimized by my mother, the wife of a pastor and a professed, practicing witch who was very active in most ministries in Father's Christian church, teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, etc.
Why would I want to bring this up? Because once again, I am going through what I call a "healing process," when personality issues come to a point in my life when I must deal with them. These times used to happen in fairly fast succession, but over the years, they have slowed to the point that they only occur once or twice in a period of 2 years or so.
I need to keep this as short as possible. Since this thread was asking about the effects of abuse, that is what I will concentrate upon.
My Childhood
As a child, I had a very tender conscience, but I remember the day I killed it. One of my male cousins broke my new, favorite doll I had just gotten for my birthday when I was three. Mother made me stay in my room without dinner until I would "tell her the truth" that I had broken it. Since I was so young, I thought I was banished forever there, forever without food. After some thought, I decided to lie. When I did, something inside absolutely broke. I felt it. And I was never the same. In fact, I immediately hated G-d, did not want to "go to heaven," as I had been taught, because Mother and G-d would be there. I dedicated my life to satan before I was four and lived that way until I was 14.
Throughout that time, Mother beat me often with belts, shoes, hair brushes (Dr. Dobson's favorite weapon for "bad" children and daschunds), switches, and anything else that was handy. She threw books, boxes, and emptied wooden drawers from our chests-of-drawers at me, with the full intent to hit me with them. (I became amazing good at dodgeball at school -- champion material in elementary school.) Mother would also fall to the floor in tantrums, screaming and flailing, sending my youngest sister and me into complete terror, and these tantrums were followed by beatings. (Wow, am I glad no one knows who I am here IRL!) Worse yet, my oldest sister was treated far worse than my youngest sister and me, and our older brothers have not told what they went through.
My response? I lied, stole, and deliberately did anything I could imagine would make G-d hate me enough that He wouldn't want me. In fact, I had my own little thought sessions, in order to think of more things to make Him hate me.
Growing Up
But at age 14, I decided my life was going way out of whack, and I decided I wanted to be a Christian, like my father. From that point, Mother was not as bad as before, but she would still hit me with her hands. The last time she hit me, I was 19 and getting married in order to get away from her. It was a week before the wedding, and this was the first time it occurred to me that I was taller than that woman, so I smiled down at her as she flailed my face.
One of the stipulations for my new husband was that we would never live closer to her than 100 miles. We lived 350 miles from her. We had our two babies, and I will need to tell how I handled them in another post. But the last time I visited my parents with my children, widowed by that time, we left two days earlier than planned, because I caught her doing the same thing to my daughter that preluded her hitting me. I packed and we left. I would go visit on very rare occasion after this, leaving my children with friends.
What the Abuse Did Long Term
1. I did not love my first child until the day I was preparing her first birthday party, and I had a very emotional "falling in love" experience on that day.
2. I "fell in love" with my son while he was in my womb.
3. I "fell in love" with my first husband a year later, but by that time, I had basically destroyed our marriage and him.
4. He was killed in an accident, and once I was without him, I could see many of my faults and determined to work on them. I was 27. At age 63, I am still working on them -- specifically the direct results of the abuse.
5. I determined not to remarry until I felt healthy enough. That took ten years, at which point I did remarry. That marriage has lasted. We just celebrated our 25th. It is working well.
Oh, there are so many nasty, binding, blinding, cruel tentacles of what the abuse did to me. It cannot (and should not) be told in one post. But the reason I found this area was that right now, the area of healing that has cropped up most recently is that of love -- my inability to feel the emotional attachments that love should bring. While I have such "emotional attachments" for a very tiny group of people in my family, it does not reach outside of those few. As I explained it to my husband last night, I can act out love, but outside of that tiny group of family, it is without completely void of emotional attachment, even though I desire it so badly. This is just another thing that Mother destroyed. However, she will not win: I will learn.
My Ex should have a tat on his forehead, "Toxic". I feel bad for anyone who gets involved with him, and just watch as he destroys the lives of other women. I feel sorry for them, but realize if I said anything, they would think I am crazy. They have to experience him going from Prince Charming to Satan themselves.
My ex is with a woman who has been married before to people like him. She is even a couple of years older than he is, and she knows better. I know she knows better, because I have had conversations with her about him. Yet she stays with him. I look at her and I am so glad it is not me.
I wish that after more than ten years of divorce, I could say he no longer affects me. But sometimes the anger crops up because of the things he did that have permanently damaged my life--I will never be financially whole because of him, and I don't think I will ever be emotionally whole, either.
And his stupidity and love for his alcohol above all else still creates problems. He lost his job. Supposedly because they brought a new property management firm in (he was a building super at a nice co-op complex) but my daughter tells me that he would often insult the doormen and the residents when he was drunk and not remember it the next day--but they did. So when an excuse came, he was let go.
So now it's his turn to co-sign a loan for my daughter's last year of school, and of course, he can't co-sign because he has no job. So he sends a message through my daughter that I should co-sign the loan...and he will make the payments. Do you know how many times in my life I had to borrow money to cover his lazy stupid drunk ass for one thing or another and he promised to pay me back and never did???? To hear that again just made me want to drive fifty miles to his house and kick him in the face. Hard. Repeatedly. Until it was unrecognizable. And it upsets me that he still has the power to make me that mad.
My mother basically destroyed my life. Then I married crazy, abusive, narcissistic husbands (just like her). I'm on number 7 right now, that should tell it all.
I remember we had the cops show up to our door one day when I was a kid..Some neighbor reported shouting . So wasnt raised in a very nurturing enviroment. . I married to a great normal family and everyday I am thankful for this.
I grew up in a home, with a Father who had PTSD, and was a drug addict. My Mother was/is Borderline Personality Disorder. I will tell you, that you learn how to be absolutely invisible and silent. I tried to never be home, if I was home, I tried to be invisible. I jump at loud sounds, even now. At age 10, I decided to leave and live with my Grandparents...fundamenalist Mormons...can you imagine, I felt like that was a "better" place to live?! Gotta love that choice...same thing, be invisible. I did excel at school, because I knew it was the only way out...
To everyone on here who has had domestic violence in their lives, I am truly sorry. It is nothing to be happy about; I know of families where this was very common. I live in a city where DV is probably a lot more common than depicted in the media; it's almost like this place is a magnet for bad parents. I still think that many of the things people do to their kids and their loved ones (and pets) is unreal.
then there's the "opposite" of domestic violence, being ignored and unwanted... You're invisible and do all you can to get attention, no matter who it's from; no one cares about your grades, how you are,.....I don't know which is worse, the being beaten or the being ignored. I didn't experience the being beaten or yelled at when I was a kid so I can't compare.
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