I’m sharing this because more than half of the women have befriended over the past 20 years have gone through this or is going through it today. It’s akin to the feeling of having your identity stolen. I love what the film Invisible Man reveals about the silent, invisible abuse a person you care very much about might be going through. This video explains the plain, every day dynamic that is served visually in the film as a masterful technological stunt. The video explains a dynamic of isolation, abuse, and entrapment with words that victims often do not have to render themselves visible again . ❤
To be given care and love from those who say they love and care for me
To be positively viewed by those who say this rather than be perceived in the worst light
To have someone stop attacking me when I say “please stop.”
To be respected – i.e. valued enough to either honor my boundaries or leave
To not have my reality messed with
To choose my own path based on truths rather than distortions
To live in a place that feels relaxing and safe
Why do I participate in mind games?
I’m not always sure the difference between regular conversation and mind games.
Once I detect that someone has no intention to have authentic conversation but rather wishes to manipulate me, I feel already overinvested in the conversation.
I then get caught up in demonstrating that what I am involved in is a mind game. It’s not so much that I want to be right – part of me still hopes that I’m not or that something will change. But I want to at least make it clear that I’m onto the strategy and am not going to fall for it. This is as much about easing my own doubt about being right in what I’m witnessing. In a large way, I participate to keep convincing myself that I know and am correctly identifying what I’m seeing.
Out of habit. Walking away is a strategy that is relatively new to me, but it has always been very useful, and when I have made this choice instead, I am much less stressed. I see the difference between disengaging and engaging in terms of the toll engaging takes on me.
Tony won’t let me disengage. I am trapped or attacked or both.
Cycle of Abuse
Build up of tension – distance, arming, provoking
Emotional abuse – projection, blaming, mocking, anger, diminishing, dismissing, cross-blaming, statements about my worthlessness, insecurities, maliciousness, callousness, cold shoulder, silent treatment, repeat until
Complete emotional breakdown
Remorse – tries to take care of my feelings. Is “honest” about that which he had been vehemently defensive.
Honeymoon stage – expects complete recovery on my part emotionally. He is being “loving” and he is verbally and physically aggressive about me returning the same.
I try but ultimately my feelings have not been allowed or taken care of and the things that continue to cause tension aren’t addressed. My true emotions/vulnerabilities/fears/concerns come back to the surface. When I bring them up, they are denied/diminished or he is angry that I brought them up and ruined the “good” moment “he” was having
This is usually the way the tension builds and the space from which the emotional abuse erupts
Why am I stuck in it? Because I keep trying to work through this with Tony. I do not know how to stay with him while exiting this horrible cycle. The last time, I had to leave to exit and stop participating because I’m disallowed the act of stopping otherwise. Leaving is the only solution I know.
This was the last day we saw my mom until Thanksgiving 2021 due to manipulations like my abuser texting my mom behind my back to destroy our relationship. I had lost my friendships with Casey and Clay because they were men who I might sleep with, I had lost my best friends because my abuser contacted them (you can hear this in real time in the video of previous post) and tried to convince them to take his side. They would say things to me like “he’s hurting” or “he really seems to love you.” I was told that I was being selfish. He told others that I was having a midlife crisis.
Everyone was taken from me or made unsafe for me to contact about what was happening to me because he was ingratiating himself or breaking relationships or finding reasons I could not have my support system.
This changed the day I told friends who I work with what was going on, the day I told my women’s group the truth and let me know my life was in danger, the day I showed up for an appointment for his psychiatrist and he shouted relentlessly that she had let me diagnose him, the day my children and I sat at a Mexican restaurant, another regular excursion I would take to remove them from the anger and abuse, and they asked me, why won’t you leave? Everyone spoke of my need to get out before they saw me and my family on the news. Murder-suicide, they said, far too common.
I’m still scared that this will happen to our family, especially if I break the silence. Not breaking the silence, though, maintains the false truth that silence is protection for any of us or that it might prevent something worse from happening. That it ever stopped because of something I did or didn’t do was the biggest lie I told myself. It’s clear why I felt I couldn’t escape on my own. It’s four years post-separation. I’ve tried to escape on my own now for a decade. It wasn’t a fear I had that was unjustified. It is simply my reality.
Once my mom was gone, we were completely alone in our continued trauma and abuse. Things got much worse. Sleep deprivation and constant manipulation of my reality or denial of my human rights ensued. Then, the physical abuse began. I was pushed, shoved, knocked out of the way, told that if I didn’t move, he wouldn’t be responsible for what he did next, threatened that he would explode or that he would pull out in front of a semi-truck and kill himself. When I didn’t comply, I was bitten, picked up and thrown into a desk, and shoved into a sliding glass door.
I started meditating and listening to//reading Thich Naht Hahn and Eckert Tolle. I stopped engaging. This made things even worse. Everything that happened to me indicates that what I was facing was sadism. I’ve been fighting with my life to escape, while I fought for my life with stage three cancer. I’ve been fighting to resuscitate the strong person that I am who everyone else knows.
There aren’t laws against what is happening to me, and this has made it all the harder to escape or prove a need to escape. So harm continues to happen to me, and it impacts my entire life and our children’s lives. I long for the day I can just live my life and finally move on and that our children can heal and be children for the little time left for them of a childhood that they have not been allowed to live.
That longing is a deep sadness, the flames of which are fanned regularly, and my happiness, of which I have an enormous reserve, keeps pressing to the surface. These pictures were taken in 2017. I have always reached far inside myself to pull up the best parts of me so that our children have stability, love, and some hope that this will not be their forever. You can see that strong side of me in these pictures, and she always shows up despite the looming threats or the threats that have become reality — bankrupting me, misrepresenting me, taking our home, taking our child’s therapist from him, and just the continued chaos and pain that he piles upon us with post-divorce litigation and refusal to cooperate so that we can live in a healthy environment with access to having basic needs met. ↩︎
My eyes still feel the salve he rubbed in to blind and enslave, blurriness of more than salt falling from a place I don’t know over an event I can’t understand.
My mind drops suddenly from the plane, from thrill-ride into freefall, beyond the atmosphere, burning red into the night, disintegrating in it’s fall from space to ocean.
The landing pad was nowhere in sight.
My pages, across the globe, begin with the line – “Is this what it is come to?”
When nothing and nowhere are to be found, she found, as many did, this one question would remain, a scorched record, repeating, sending her backwards across the moving screen to hopefully find herself where she left herself, should she ever find herself again.
If different or be indifferent, the shifting images of who she thought she was, she’d at least have the exploration, and in that, she find that nothing didn’t exist of her, as he said. She’d have something, after all.
But this time, she find herself in unrecognizable emotions, strewn across the counter like a drink – spilled, overlooked, congealed – and the image would stick to the roof of her mouth, so densely, so completely, that the tongue couldn’t force a detachment of it stuckness so that she could open her voice and stand on her two feet, bone to backbone to head held up.
For years, she couldn’t find the strength to push herself in an all-out-stare with the bruises that played her thighs and calves.
Instead, she wrote about it in a distant, third-person-first-person narrative and found herself heart-shaped within its immediacy, late one night with a random click of a mouse across the cursored screen – a file on a 3 1/2-inch-long forgotten, more real to her than when written, and she watched the time of her becoming rewind.
Rock, paper, scissors: this time she cut through the lines of a document that covered nothing.
I imagine there was a time when she didn’t let the bullshit seep so easily through the cracks, but I could only imagine it because he melted her in a Dali-puddle he called her “unreality.”
She was certainly not that person anymore, no matter how forcefully she tried to make her emerge. It just seemed as though nothing was left of it. She’d let his illogical statements force themselves upon her, face buried downward in the bed, and he would thrust in her guilt over actions for which she played very little part. That she did play a part – the enabler – was denied. He said she had not been enabling him for the five years he knew her. She was a never–satisfied, pain-in-the-ass child, he said, for sure, precisely because of that – and everyone would see it if she cried out his fouls — his use of feminism to render her an unequal, incomplete, sex object.
But when she saw him, lying on the other side of a week-old infant, in an angry fit of rage over the small girls’ cries, threatening to put someone with no defenses in a situation of ignored cruelty, one that she had faced one-thousand-and-too many times before across a lifetime –she stopped thinking about herself.
She had met someone of real, larger importance – not a doctor of good standing – not just one more fake punk – but a real being that came from inside her bones. At stake was much more her own being, and it stared her in the face the way a good conscience does, when you have one.
For the first years of marriage and motherhood, she missed the point, and in effect, she ended up not taking care of the first or the second and the way she intended. She failed to protect them from him while trying to protect them from him, and it was only the few moments when she realized this that she finally truly protected them by protecting herself first.
Of course, the moments came and went, and she went right back into the same routine of believing one absolutely twisted lie on top of another, each that seemed, on the outside, a so-very-likely-believable-reality, the way he told her he’d tell it.
In the end, it was that mind-blowing conundrum that sent her head beyond — blinding manipulations of her mind, her brain cells beating-out absolute, ground-to-the-skull-bone realities — made her strong enough to withstand tornadoes of mind-bending-guilt-trips, where she was to feel bad for making him feel bad for hurting her. As he railroaded her with oblivion, he failed to see the storm doors erected – her attempt to Macgyver herself to the something as stable as plumbing the way she did one NYE, in the dark basement, to ensure her safety for the night despite doors with locks removed.
Unabridged nonsense swirled – how he used them to create circles not even navigable by the expert who kept filling the void between the two, and when it became so, he became mercurial and insisted on someone new sitting in the seat across from them. These whirlpool waters, she was careful to approach — she knew, raised on the ocean and well-aware of the undertow – wild currents that sucked her under and still won’t let her go to rise to the surface and take a breath.
And that’s what spelled her into the disaster of the day. She didn’t expect it. She didn’t know where it came from. It took her more than two pages and who knows how many words to even begin to spell out its existence.
Her emotions fell in a rush, and they rushed and they rushed — in waves –until she was numbed again by telling someone and getting it as far away from inside as it could be.
When she really wanted to say how much it was killing her, she laughed instead, pretended she found any humor in it at all. She didn’t.
She knew that for the past month she couldn’t scrape herself off the floor to find the daylight of the day, she couldn’t peel herself from the ways she quieted her mind into sleep and jumpstarted it into consciousness just to maintain the façade for a few hours. She could pretend to the world that surrounded her that she couldn’t be affected and was completely numb to it, in fact.
She didn’t want anyone sense the never-ending ledge of needing to be rescued – a ledge she abhorred – the stigma of being a damsel in distress and the ways in which such a position could sell her back.
She hated it today, tomorrow, and Monday, and three days after that. If they did not see the potential sad-burden-heavy-hipped-damsel-weight that she might at any moment become, they may stay a few days longer, and she might find the blindness to laugh and feel and to bring joy for whatever short-lived time their presence might allow.
She survived for two years on this small allowance of a few laughs and two and twenty years, she was extremely grateful to be herself, even spinning back words.
pseudo mujer liberada 