On top of having to live in a moldy home due to a UCF tenured professor’s refusal to sign insurance checks for Hurricane Ian damage, today another electrician let me know that Mr. Grajeda also unhooked the grounding to which the electric pole connected, the pole now hanging from our house because a tree fell on it. This grounding wire was once connected to the pipe of a spigot pole Mr. Grajeda broke while staying in an RV I rented for him to stay in due to Covid after I changed the locks because he raged at me and our kids daily for a full year and almost killed me in two separate domestic violence assaults.

This in itself is just insane, and it’s unbelievable that we’d be subject to this for 4 more years after that 2020 separation in spite of my police report and Mr. Grajeda’s attendance of the Batterer’s Intervention Program at No Abuse, which he agreed to do if I dropped the charges against him. He blamed his abuse on his own mental heath issues, which he now denies having.

Last year for several months, one of our children had to walk around on a broken heel because Mr. Grajeda refused him an xray, having his attorney contact mine to demand that I was making a big deal out of nothing. Last March, Mr. Grajeda refused a CT for the same child when he had a concussion and hurt back after a severe fall at school. He first refused to take our child to the hospital. Today, I learned that it wasn’t the doctor who said that he did not need the CT, it was his dad. His dad said the CT would hurt our child, and he bribed our child with tacos to just leave the ER without. Our child has been in pain since but played it off as nothing due to his dad’s insistence that it was nothing. Fast-forward 10 months, today I got the results from the MRI the doctor ordered after I convinced Blaise that it was important enough to get checked out. Blaise has a broken back – a fractured vertebrae. He will need to be in a brace and then physical therapy.

Mr. Grajeda also had the same child removed from his therapist. Suddenly, said child doesn’t want to be labeled and is declaring that he’s all better.

Am I wrong that this is the product of grooming at its finest?

Our other child has been unable to get out of bed for months. I notified Mr. Grajeda in September and have since reminded him of my request. God forbid if there is something that is really wrong with our oldest.

Every day my heart breaks.

A lot of people had doubts about my being abused because I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell people because Mr. Grajeda manufactured a diagnosis of me of borderline personality disorder. He tells people I’m Gone Girl. I don’t have those types of diagnoses or even suspicions of that. Two marital therapist have been willing to go to court and break privilege to make this known. Judge Sprysenski has repeatedly denied their testimony.

Mr. Grajeda and his attorney Mr. Wallace have manipulated the court with lies. It has cost me my home, thousands in attorney fees, my health, our kids’ health, my education, their education, and their childhood because he gaslights them nonstop on his care to drum up drama and continue his abuse.

I’m not taking it silently anymore from a professor who was the one to teach me 23 years ago (and many other young women since) about feminism for UCF’s Department of English – which has been a predominantly female student population. He may not be ready for me to move on with my life, but I and our kids are more than ready and demanding it.

You can write UCF or submit a signed affidavit Seminole County Court on my behalf if you wish to support me and my children.

I wrote this while waiting for Mr. Grajeda to submit payment to the orthodontist so our child could get his braces fixed, but he never did submit the payment, so I made use of my time. 🤷🏻‍♀️

🤘Tori ✊

In February 2020, I changed those locks.

I chose peace and said no means no to the man who raged and warred.

I’m getting tired of getting signals from outer space.

Now, I’m learning what it takes close this portal.

To begin to understand this story, you first have to understand deeply the idea of being told for 20 years told that no one would believe you. I’ve recently came across writing from 2012, 2011, where the primary focus was the many ways a person was poised to villainize a mother of two young children and thus render her unbelievable and insane – and a whore. I wrote this sitting at Red Light, Red Light.

The second thing you need to understand deeply is is the idea of being the most accommodating at home during those 20 years so you don’t get the full unrelenting force of human wrath (which will continue until you relent anyway) so that you could spend the most amount of time becoming a strong, deeply feeling, generally kind (but no longer to the point of being a doormat — ever), passionate-about-life and finally-free-45-year old. I love who she has become, and I all the other kind human beings who helped her along the way.

We are allowed real tears and joy

and Peace on Earth.

When button-pushers push, if we fail to jump and cow’r

pied pipers collect – bones, fingers, first and second borns.

Fetal in a bed, Thich Naht Hahn played soft over smacks.

Weather’d belt half-round leather’d hand for failing to talk back.

Prayed peace but redeemed tonic immobility,

silent weeping, children playing dead, tossing turning.

When with hateful spite, whatever the sick sadist strikes,

there will be bruised thighs, broken-skinned bodies, clipped tongues.

Little children who dreamt frozen screams, quiet as kept,

stirred by wolves in sheepskin, wake full-adult, bellowing.

What’s it like to live life on the edge of memes?

I suffer from anxiety and depression that makes my insides recoil in the face of ruminating thought, which is where I get trapped because I am trapped.

I keep these little gifts and gifs because, when I know that someone understands, my stomach settles, and I can go on with my day and make it bright with sunbeam smiles.

Having had colorectal cancer and resection has left my insides like this — roiling and sick that manufactured drama becomes my drama and that it is beyond my control — nauseas, dry heaves for days.

It has become debilitating like this.

I’m not the same woman I once was who could hold abuse inside and carry on with my life as if the abuse not there.

I’m not the same woman, thankfully. The woman I was buried things deep so no one spun with me when poisoned plates were force fed.

So many people asked why they didn’t know. For them, I say, imagine speaking softly the terrible things being done to your family and watching the world drive by because there’s not much anyone can do. I drive by this way because there is nothing more I can do than actions I am already taking.

Thank you for sharing the things that we unknowingly share because my egg basket eases when my hand is held by a quote or a sentiment that screams “we are not alone” and “we are human in worlds not always humane.”

I’m not sad or mad or in a feeling. I’m dealing with reality while simultaneously praying for better days as I make better days.

Step right up…..

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 . ❤

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. ↩︎

Or, or how I became unable to escape coercive control and abuse.