@BetterFuture1985 im in the car park of Tesco, having a cry at your post. You are spot on. What he is doing to me is all that he can do at the moment. His cruelty and vitriol in the past have been breathtaking. Some of the evidence I have collated regarding his controlling will hopefully include statements from my child’s teacher, who witnessed him texting and phoning me constantly because I wasn’t where I said I was going to be, and accusing me of leaving the phone at school so I could go off and shag someone else, and that was why I wasn’t picking up. It was actually parents evening and he had forgotten, and that was why I was there. I explained that to my son’s teacher, a sensible woman a lot older than me, and the colour drained from her face. From then on she was an ally.
It was the small cuts that hurt - he threw out all of a collection of things he knew were precious to me; he pretended that he thought they were rubbish, but he knew they weren’t. He laughed to the children one morning “mummy will look silly at school today” as I left the house. I didn’t know what he meant, but when we got there I realised the front pockets of my coat had been ripped right down, the linings all hanging out, perfectly symmetrically.
He would open my car door at night so the interior light was on and this would deaden the battery - that was usually if I was trying to go somewhere. I caught him doing that, red handed. He just looked at me and smiled, he liked that I knew. He would open my post and then hide it - I found cards and letters he had taken, all hidden. If I was reading a book he’d let me get into it and then it would disappear. Again I’d find them hidden. He bought me earrings for my birthday, they were for pierced ears, my ears are not pierced, and he wouldn’t take them back. Then he wrapped them up again and gave them to me for Christmas.
He would sometimes pretend that he was “making an effort” and this used to scare me the most. There was always a twist somewhere. One time he cooked for us, he is an excellent cook when he wants to be, but mine had soap in. He swore it didn’t, but it did. Or he would make some sexual advances and yet there would always be a humiliation in there, “I was up for it tonight but you smell wrong” and then he would get off on my bursting into tears. He really liked that.
He would undermine me at every turn - feeding sweets to the kids at tea time, or if I was putting their tea out he would say things like “that doesn’t look right, I wouldn’t eat that.” And then they wouldn’t eat and I’d have to cook something else.
He never hit me though. And that’s why he congratulates himself I suspect. He controlled me totally without even raising a hand.
I realise there are posters on this thread who don’t believe this is abuse, or coercion - that it’s not that bad and why did I stay, and why didn’t I just shrug it off. I can’t answer that. If he had hit me it would have been over. Tiny paper slices are less easy to see.