(bear for introspection and protection)
This is another one of those rare early morning blogs. Usually I am rather like a mute beast in the early morning, shuffling and groaning, but once in a while a piece of insight comes bubbling to the surface in my sleep in surprising clarity. Clear enough to wake me up to write about it! Even though I may still get frustrated about the ways that I think my life is not coming together, (moving again, tight money, stuck somewhere in an abyss of career change), I had some clarity this morning on a part of my life that has come quite a long way in the last five years of transition. I want to talk about my perspective on a certain situation because, well, I never have before, and the weight of not talking has sometimes been a burden that I want to let go of now.
Once I was in a bad relationship. I was with a partner who often disregarded me and regularly made me feel bad and small. It didn’t start out this way at all, but slowly over the years the more em-partnered we became, the less I seemed to matter. I think that when people basically feel bad about themselves, they sometimes have a desire to make something or someone else feel bad too, and under these circumstances for my partner I was the safest, easiest target because I was there, and as my loyalty became more proven, I became more and more a chosen recipient of bad feelings. I’m not saying that I am at all without blame here. It takes two and I was never able to make this person feel better about himself. In foolishness, carelessness and youth I often made him feel worse. Also I don’t mean to paint my ex-partner with the mask of a monster. We were very young, inexperienced, passionate and sometimes unbalanced in our early, relationship building years together. He may well have regretted treating me with violent anger, apathy or verbal cruelty sometimes, and I’m sure that he did because we all do those things once in a while and then feel bad about it. The difference between an outburst of frustrated anger or a verbal dig and an ongoing, corroding, abusive situation lies in what happens after the anger or the hot words. If there can be an apology, a conversation about what deeper emotions were really at play, acknowledgement of a misstep, then the hurt can be quickly resolved for the time being. Pretending that it never happened though, that it didn’t mean anything, or worse, sticking to the conviction that one has a right or is justified in treating another in this way, that’s when the painful web of lies begins. And it is a web of lies. It keeps one person tied in the position of perpetrating abusive behavior again at will, because it’s been established that they can, and it keeps the other person stuck on the receiving end because it is established that they will.
The saddest thing for me now is that I let this happen to myself. I don’t generally believe in spending much energy on regret in life, but the fact that I let myself live in that situation for as long as I did is a small tragedy for me. I chose to believe, because it was somehow easier and less painful for me at the time, but worse in the long run, that it must really be my fault somehow. I complied with the justified act. I chose to believe that he wouldn’t really treat me like that unless I deserved it, because a lot of the time he was such a good guy, and he was really so nice to everyone else in the world. I was the only one that he was cruel to, and only in private, so it must be something about me like he said. I know now that that’s never true though. Nobody deserves to be made to feel small by the people they love most. I transgressed myself deeply by thinking that, and it has taken years and some help and a lot of luck to recover.
People who have never been in an abusive situation may not be able to understand what I’m talking about here, or may wonder for the umpteenth time why other people are foolish enough to let themselves be treated like that when they don’t have to be. For those who know though, these situations build slowly over time with the right combination of neurosis, manipulations and blind spots. It’s incredibly insidious and disorienting from the inside. If you have been in an abusive situation, then you probably don’t even need to read this, you know what I’m talking about immediately. I now realize that some pretty nasty things go on behind closed doors all of the time, and really smart, sane, normal or even extraordinarily wonderful people are sometimes taking part in them. If you are wondering if your relationship is abusive, and believe me I know that convoluted headspace well and climbed those walls for a long time before it finally ended, the answer is probably already there in the question. Human rights are a part of our biology. We instinctively know when we are being treated unfairly.
My final realization is that this is not some secret I need to keep anymore. I don’t want to talk about it all the time either, but I don’t need to not talk about it. When we broke up and my social world shattered I felt like I needed to keep my lips zipped for some reason. I guess I didn’t want anyone talking about me any more than they were already. I also still hadn’t fully realized that this wasn’t my fault, and quite honestly I had let my ex-partner assume such a role of power in my head that I was quite afraid of him and of the ways in which he could hurt me with words. I even found out about some ridiculous lies that he was spreading about me, and I still didn’t want to talk about the truth. Once an ugliness has been planted in secrecy it is hard to dig up. That plant is withered and gone now though. It was quite a while ago, and seems far away because I think that I finally understand it enough now that it will never happen to me again. I don’t think that I will ever be in that same dark place again, because I would never do that to myself now. And that is a huge step that my life has taken, with help from my loving husband and family who I thank so much.
(I just want to say thank you as well to my Aunt Judy here who by her example and subtle encouragement helped me a lot! Thanks Aunt Judy! Oxoxo)
Never say "never", because that is how it can happen again. Confidence can blind as easily as any other emotion, and it is so tempting to be confident that we will not make the same mistake once we have discovered our error. We are all a work in progress. Nothing is decided until we are dead. With any work in progress, it is important to remain aware of changing cause and effect. Constant navigation with an eye to the horizon.
ReplyDeleteHi love. I miss you. And I want to say in response to your beautiful writing that I think you did not at all betray yourself. And to illustrate, I'm going to invoke an experience that is both like and unlike yours with your ex.
ReplyDeleteI recently went to a rape trial wherein the young victim truly seemed to acquiesce to the violence. And, liberal as I am, I was truly puzzled. I mean, here we have a girl saying she was raped, but admitting that she did what she was told to get it over with. While I've had some experience with that kind of mentality myself (ugh), I didn't know what to make of it in a legal sense.
I did some research and learned that this is a common protective mechanism for victims of abuse. In the case of the rape victim, she made herself mentally unrapeable by submitting to the violence. This was, in fact, a way of shielding herself from the real violence that she may otherwise have been unable to process. I think all of us do this to some extent in order to go on with our lives; we mentally soften the blows life deals us. It's a faulty mechanism, but it has its purpose.
And all of this is just to say I love you. I am so happy that you are in a safer space. And you are not alone in trying to wade through this difficult stuff. xoxo melissa