And The Scales Were Scraped From My Eyes

30/03/24 

Going to uni taught me how to research a subject.

I found I enjoy it, and think I’m pretty good at it. 

So, since I’m unwilling to sit forever in this pain, that’s what I’ve been doing – researching how to fucking start moving out of the agony. 

I find that sometimes, when you’re looking for answers, you follow this thread, then that, then all of a sudden you smack your face into a truth or reality that’s undeniable.  It shakes you to the core. 

You want to diminish or rationalise it, but ultimately you can’t unsee what’s been revealed, and so, eventually, you have to face it. 

And that’s where I am now – facing up to, and coming to terms with the fact that yes, EH was, for once, being honest when he described his treatment of me as abusive. 

Having acknowledged what he was doing to me, he then immediately, angrily, said that this behaviour ‘wasn’t him’, that he didn’t used to be like this.

That very much implied that it’s me who causes him to be unlike himself. 

Classic abuser stuff – blaming your victim for your choices and own behaviour.

He was abusive, and it was there from the very earliest days of our relationship.

During our early days together, I remember him telling me, in scornful tones, about his treatment of his ex. How he’d just ignore her, be mean to her – doing things like going off to the pub without saying anything, leaving her behind in his mother’s house. He described the way she’d still just keep on coming around, trailing after him like a “pathetic sap”. 

Believe people when they show you who they are. 

He carries aggression within him and doesn’t take responsibility for controlling his own emotions. 

His angry responses when driving, watching football, attempting a slightly challenging task – anything where he can’t control all aspects and where the results might not be what he wants – then the black mood descends, the world is populated entirely by dickheads and incompetents who are out to deliberately wind him up.

He refuses to be jollied out of it, or even (lord forbid), consider he might be over reacting.

Best of all, some how, some way, I’d be at fault for some aspect of the situation. 

Usually something I said or did just made ‘everything worse’, even though I was shooting for the opposite. 

Due to a long and winding history of types of grooming and abuse, in the very earliest days of there being an ‘us’, despite niggly gut feelings, I fell straight into the role of appeaser.

I was always trying to keep him happy and balanced (an impossible task), to the absolute detriment of my own wellbeing.   

I gave things up because he mocked them – listening to country music, certain clothing, watching soaps on TV, specific friends, drawing, writing, reading books. I’m sure there’s more forgotten pleasures yet to resurface. 

I ended up stuffing down my own needs and desires in order to be approved of, and to always be available to him. 

I know he didn’t ask me to stop doing any of those things, and he’d probably deny he even wanted it.

And yet, he created an environment where in order to receive any kind of affection, or positivity, in order to avoid the glowering bad moods, to feel a crumb of security about his love… for this tiny return I let myself be subsumed to him. 

But I was still lonely. He still showed no interest at all in my wellbeing. He still treated me with contempt. He still blamed me for anything bad that he felt. 

That, as he himself so clearly stated, is abusive. 

I can’t unsee it. 

No matter how much the ‘training’ makes me crave him, I have to see that for the addictive behaviour it is, and act accordingly. 

I know this isn’t going to be an easy path – I’m only at the very start of unravelling 20 (50?) years of unhealthy relationship behaviours and attachments,.

It’s already proving to be a fucking desolate experience. 

However, I’ve spent long enough, lonely in a relationship with him. That essentially did nothing but deplete me throughout.  I think being lonely, and actually alone, may well prove to be preferable.

I spent 20 years trying to build him up, support him, encourage him, never standing in the way of his wants, needs and desires.

He spent 20 years making me less than. 

The really tough thing to reconcile, what is causing me more grief than anything else right now, is the fact that not only did I let him reduce me, I participated.

Without even realising what I was doing, I became complicit in my own abuse. 

I’ve been physically abused in past relationships. After the last time I swore it would never happen again. 

I did so much self-help therapy stuff and just knew I could recognise, and avoid, ‘that guy’ at 100 paces. 

Hah! 

I wasn’t able to see the emotional abuse until now. 

I was like the proverbial frog in the pot. 

I can’t change the past.

I’ve clearly been wasting time and energy attempting to affect him positively. 

What I can at least try to do is bring myself to a point of healing where I never again allow myself to minimise my own needs in order to secure affection and kindness.   

Respect, affection, tenderness – these are not transactional, they’re bare minimum, basic things. In their absence, a relationship is not ok. 

EH deliberately withheld these things from me to punish me because his inner monologue always blamed me for all he felt was wrong in his life. 

That’s abusive. 

He did it. 

That makes him an abuser. 

He needs to shut the fuck up telling me, and himself, that it’s ‘not him’ to behave that way. 

He chose his actions and behaviours. 

He did it. 

It is him. 

He is an abuser. 

JP