I blogged about him being an emotional vampire and that he just wanted to be the baby and me the mommy. But as I dwell in it, the more things make sense to me.
The more I hold space for this truth, the more it is screaming at me to be the absolute truth.
I added this to the bottom of that post, but I think it needs to be its own post:
ETA: The more I sit with this… that he hated his mom, he was outwardly expressing this hate, he was projecting that hate onto me AND I had betrayed him all make it the perfect recipe for him to hurt me. He was angry, he was having mental problems, he began hoarding obsessively but we never talked about it (we just stepped over it), he was very secretive and had all his devices on lockdown and, towards the end, he was mimicking the movements of one of his coworkers who had severe autism. He was rehearsing and pantomiming things in a way that was SO unsettling. He skipped towards me in a strange gait when he came to tell me he was filing for divorce. I was the only witness to any of this, I was the only one who knew him well enough to see how much he had changed, but in a very strange way, in a distorted, warped way. I was the target of his glaring and evil faces. I was the only one encountering this version of him.
His best friend died, his other friend was terminal (and later died) and a 3rd friend was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. All at the same time. And the girlfriend of the best friend was probably the one who killed him (long story with drugs involved.), so… there’s another woman to hate. I could feel that he projected all that hate onto me. The timing of all of that couldn’t be more perfect. It was the perfect storm of anger towards women.
I say all this because I was scared for my safety and nobody believed me. I was dealing with a man who was very intelligent, very controlled, very angry… blaming me for shit his mother had done, for what this other woman had done to his best friend and then I was no longer coddling him and sleeping with him, so I was enemy #1. He had to go on Prozac because I wasn’t mothering him anymore so I was the reason everything was happening. I could see it in how he looked at me and the energy…. that intangible force in the room. I could feel how much he hated me. I could feel how much he just… despised me. But it wasn’t just what *I* did, who I was, I could feel the lifetime of hating women falling into my lap.
From the cornerstone philosophy that women were “less than” in a religion he grew up in, to the saga with his bipolar mother being the reason their family was dysfunctional to him believing women were only good for servitude and sex to a very young woman being the reason his best friend was dead… all of that vitriol landed on me.
Call me crazy, don’t believe me… but I felt like a target of his hate. I could feel that he couldn’t separate out all this shit. He even said he believed that “ALL women can’t love men”. That was a hateful statement. Especially after I had spent 23 years making sure he had all his needs met. He didn’t have ONE complaint. Maybe one, I forgot to pay the Best Buy bill and they slapped us with a bunch of interest (we were traveling on an emergency trip because his grandmother died and I forgot to pay it). Otherwise, he had his needs met, he was happy. He was taken care of. But I wasn’t happy, and me asking for change was the catalyst of ALLLLLL this bullshit. Me wanting respect and to feel safe, connected and loved before he crawled on top of me… and him saying NO to this and telling me I was stuck was the beginning of the end.
I just want to say this again. I was fearful. I was scared for my safety. I felt like he absolutely fucking hated me but he wouldn’t say it out loud. I could feel that energy shift in a way that made my skin crawl, that made me feel scared to be around him. And nobody believed me. And I believe his shift into this dark place is the reason why I haven’t left my rental in a year. He scared the shit out of me on that last encounter. And again, nobody believes me. And you don’t know how this feels until it finds you. You don’t know how scary it can be, it’s just an abstract thought until it happens.
We call the women who haven’t died “crazy” for thinking their husbands could hurt them. And we say that the dead ones should have seen it coming.
I’m saying that I had a fear that scared me *this* much. I guess it’s just an opinion, but… I see it now. Clearly. That is why I’ve been emotionally frozen for almost 2 years.
Just another reason to say… If you ask for change and it doesn’t start happening? Leave immediately. I should have left in 2019. Hell, I should have left in 2011. No, I should have left in 2002 when he told me I wasn’t sleeping with him enough and he was awful about it. This will forever be the biggest regret of my life. The MOMENT, the SECOND he shows that he doesn’t respect you in words or actions… FUCKING LEAVE. No figuring it out, no three strikes… leave immediately. I’m the canary in the coal mine here to tell you… LEAVE at the first sign of disrespect. It doesn’t get better.
I’m not depressed. I’m coming out a toxic, stressful situation where I now believe my life may have been in danger. This isn’t classic depression, it’s PTSD of the punctuated abuse mixed with CPTSD from the years of emotional abuse and my nervous system acclimating to tolerating that. Then realizing it all and the panic that comes from that. You are finally safe, you can finally handle reality so it comes screaming in and dealing with it is all out exhausting. That is what I’m dealing with.
All I can go on is my intuition here, plus a very small amount of clues. I know what I felt. I know how severe this is. I went through a lifetime of not feeling safe from neglect and emotional abuse and this was so so different. I spent years on defense, this was offense. This was aggressive anger moving towards me with intention.
I can’t really share this with too many people because they won’t get it. And if I was truly scared, wouldn’t this have come out immediately? No. Survival mode is a funny thing.
So, if you went through this. I believe you. You aren’t crazy. Get the fuck out NOW.
And I know the heartbreak of your friends and family not believing you, rolling their eyes at you, them telling you to get over it, snap out of it, “it’s not that bad”, “I had a divorce, too, you’ll get through it”.
It’s so lonely and dehumanizing. And you gaslight yourself into believing them and trying to force yourself to be ok and ignore your instincts.
Don’t ignore your instincts. Trust yourself. Do what you need to do to get away. Just get away.
I’ve made light of this, joked about it and intellectualized this for way too long. This was emotional abuse for decades and then a discard/climax that left me fearing for my life at the end. Calling it was it was will help me move on.
