My Needs

• Sleep
• Eat
• Relative Safety
• The right to have feelings that are my own
• 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?

1. I’m not always sure the difference between regular conversation and mind games.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

1. 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. ↩︎