Support for those in emotionally abusive relationships 3

[ItsMeAndMyPuppyNow]

New thread - will copy our library of links in the following posts

MO, you see, for all the niceness in YOUR heart, thinking of HIS feelings and trying NOT to F your DD up, HE WILL DO SO IF HE CAN.

You can't let these people paint you as the villain! For the love of god, and all things holy! you can't have DDs thinking this is the kind of man I aspire to marry, neither can we allow our DSs to think that this is how mothers/wives GF are treated.

MO, scale back the visits, insist on supervision.

BB - watch and learn.... they are ALL the same.

Honestly?! Outraged actually!

How on gods earth am I ever to be expected to relax, and allow anything with meat and 2 veg anywhere near me ever again? I despise the creatures that think this right. Even my BFF H, I thought he was a good guy, we all did. he's still ranting on at her PG with 3rd, and threatening to abduct her other 2. Whole family is beside themselves, I am gutted and down over best part of £400 now I have to cancel my holiday to see her, first time in 3 years, thanks to him.

I know they are not ALL like this, but how can you tell?, how can you respect these creatures enough to even give over a phone number?

DS said to me about getting another H. It was all I could do not to cry. I'd beat any male that came anywhere near me with a very large and very shitty stick.

I pity the poor bastard that ever plucks up the courage to attempt to chat me up.

Actually Hissy, I've been taking dirty great strides today, I feel further away from him than ever, and I'm not thinking of his feelings at all, this is just a short term illusion of passiveness/ co-operation while I enjoy the journey towards indifference.

I know I can't afford to get complacent, but DD spends so much time with me that I don't think 6-8 hours a week in his company will make much difference. She came back happy as a lark today, telling me all about her day out, and she doesn't appear to miss him too much, just the occasional "I want Daddy" nothing too distressed.

This is my way of putting him in his box. He texts with a day, I say the time. It minimises contact and lets me get on with my life without having to consider him too much. He is on probation and on an abuser programme, he has to be seen to be behaving himself.

However I'm certainly not fooled that this is the way it's always going to be, but just right at this moment it's giving me a nice headspace to enjoy my new found emotional freedom. I'll be keeping a close ear on what DD says and reacting accordingly. As long as there is no question mark in her mind over whether she is loved, that's the main thing.

Love this link you posted yesterday, garlicbutter.

Funny how different the tone is to our 3 recent support threads: the current support threads focus on unmasking Mr Hyde, whereas that recovery thread talks about the love story that existed with Dr Jekyll. Both are very important things for us to process. I think once Mr Hyde has been well and truly uncovered and acknowledged, then it's possible to go back and mourn the relationship with Dr Jekyll.

hissy thank you, you are right of course. You have really helped to clarify things for me and i feel much more confident now in moving forward
MO it's unbelievable isn't it, that they will do this kind of emotional grooming. I am fully expecting my dc's to be used as spies. But well done for moving forward, you have come such a long way in such a short time.

I realised that part of my reason for not moving forward was because I was scared of the consequences for me, scared of being punished by him in some way. You know, some subtle way I couldn't quite prove.
He has told both my other and ss that he can buy me a hose without selling this one first. So there he can't go back on that one so easily because others are now involved.
Now that others are involved I am not so scared of any 'punishments' I might receive. I asked him this morning if he thought I should still cook him breakfast in,light of what he had done? I said I no longer wished to do that.
He replied "You don't know what I have done because you haven't asked.

I do expect you to get breakfast for the children everyday including weekends and holidays. It will help you get what you want if you cook me breakfast too but that has always been the case. I will still help you find a place to live if you don't cook me breakfast. Just to remind you it's my remit to buy the food, yours to cook it. If you'd like to change the deal between us please let me know what the new deal is.

You will mention whatever you want to the social services.

I told hin that of course I knew what he had done, he had told on me, had betrayed me in the most despicable way. I knew from what the police and SS said that he had told lies. I also told him that if he intended to use me not cooking him breakfast as a reason he couldn't work hard enough to make enough money for us to leave, ( he has always used that as reason to keep me cooking breakfast fro him, the guilt trip thing. You know :cook me breakfast because it is best for the children that you do so), then I would tell SS that the reason we can't move the children out of this damaging and upsetting situation is because I won't cook breakfast. Then we would see what SS had to say about that.

He is the enemy. I didn't see that until yesterday. I always believed that deep down he had our best interests at heart, that he had some degree of integrity.Silly me.

bb "Now that others are involved I am not so scared of any 'punishments' I might receive."

You SEE? This is why they try to isolate us! They know deep in their sad little worlds that as soon as the light of normality enters our life, that they are lost. This is why they put up SO much resistance to us having our own lives.

The paragraph about the breakfast and his remit vs yours has my bile rising in a WALL of anger. Well done for handling it. Great reply straight off the bat, but stick this one in your arsenal for the next time a new deal is mentioned or I buy the food , and you cook it bollocks.

"Changing the Deal? Yes well, now that you have involved the authorities in our lives, all I have to do is present the truth to them and as an abuser, you may be removed from the house and I get help to stay here, YOU get the CSA on your back and if you don't toe the line you'll be seeing your DC (providing, after all this they still want to see you) in a CONTACT CENTRE"

Even if you don't say it to him, having it in there and, there being a grain of truth to it will give you a wee boost.

Don't you dare with the silly me, I know how you feel, that gut wrenching discovery that they don't wish the best for you, and far from it, that they will deliberately go out of their way to harm us is just shocking. Like my destroyed venus fly trap, it's tiny blip of an issue in the greater scheme of things was exactly what hurt the most. That he would stoop THAT low, to destroy a tiny plant that I liked, just to hurt me?

You trusted. That is all you did. Your trust was eventually misplaced. HE let YOU down, you didn't let yourself down, you fought the good fight, but you can't fight the inevitable. Your STBX is built on substandard foundations, he'd hold up for a while, but not forever. It's his failing, not yours.

I agree, we are all pretty much at the unmask Mr Hyde stage, and we need to. Once we realise we are not dealing with Dr Jekyll, and are dealing with someone we don't really know, who has malice towards us and determination to hurt, we can detach.

I suppose when Hyde is fully unmasked and isolated, his attempts to hurt thwarted and neutralised, we can indeed mourn the Dr. and be on our way to healing and the ability to move on.

I have no idea if this is right, but it makes sense from here! Thanks Puppy, a lightbulb moment there!

Pinemartina changed her name to PiranhaMorgana, the postings about what she told her DCs are I think likely to be under the more recent name.

I did try not slagging off XH but found, as has already been said here, that it was all one way. Thus they were believing all sorts of untruths about me because I couldn't challenge it without being rude about their dad, ie if we were saying different things one of us must be lying and he was saying it was me, most emphatically, whereas I couldn't say it was him! He said I was leaving to be with another man, I said I wasn't but I couldn't say I was leaving because XH was ghastly to live with. One hand tied behind my back the whole time. It wasn't doing them any favours though. They were confused and unhappy, since what he was saying and what I was doing didn't seem to add up but they couldn't work out why - although three of them were more or less adults by that time (boys, if that makes a difference). DS4 was 9 and the others helped their dad browbeat him because they believed it was for the best. Obviously I couldn't let that continue.

I would be roasted in AIBU for certain, but I tell them these days that I believe XH has a personality disorder probably caused by his bullying father, that he can't cope very well with reality so he tends to tell it how he wants it to be rather than how it is, that he does love them (I'm quite sure he does) but has a funny way of showing it sometimes, and that he may have his own agenda for telling them things that aren't necessarily true. Conversely I will always tell them the truth as I see it, although I can't guarantee to be always right. Any human being who claims to be always right is wrong in at least that one fundamental point. I am confident that my world view is closer to reality than his, although aren't we all...

I do insist they treat him with courtesy, eg not keeping him waiting if he's come to take them somewhere, encouraging them to spend a bit of time with him even if they don't fancy it (though not forcing them when they're genuinely reluctant), accepting that he can make his own rules in his own house, the same courtesy I expect them to extend to me or indeed to anyone else. I do not like him at all and I make no secret of that, but that is no reason they shouldn't love him. He's their father, not mine. Unlike most of the XHs and STBXHs on this thread, he was (in theory at least) their primary carer when they were small, and they all survived, so there is a bond there I shouldn't even try to break - as long as he doesn't misuse it to get to me. Fortunately he seems to have finally got the message on that one.

I suspected that pinemartina = piranhamorgana while I was reading that thread!

Hissy
liked your post about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ... makes a lot of sense.
Sorry to harp on about mediation fears, but am toying with thought that I am stuck in some kind of traumatic bonding/stockholm syndrome with ex.
Does this make sense? Given that he's used not seeing DCs as a threat at times and has kept to his word and knows I'm shit scared of doing the parenting on my own, I'm afraid of whether I approach him as Dr Jekyll ie don't go near any of the sore points, he will be nice to me or if he sees my weakness in any case carries on hurting me obliquely and so I should treat him as Mr Hyde and expose all the lies, abuse in which case he still does his worst. So am still failing to assert anything because I don't want any further hurt. Or is this too bloody complicated.
Am considering looking for hypnotist to wipe him from my brain.

Thanks wizbit

I think I've got to go as fear of the unknown is driving me mad, and going to court would be worse.
Has anyone done mediation? Mine is just contact/maintenance stuff

notsorted, it is traumatic bonding. Not "kind of", it's the real deal. Don't expect to get past in one elegant leap, it's woven into your mind and needs unpicking. But bear in mind you can't properly heal until you've removed the threat. Do avoid situations where your vulnerability can be turned against you. At times when you're under pressure to agree to things that can damage you, "broken record" is at least do-able. Example: "I cannot agree to mediation will be damaging because H is manipulative and I am frightened of him." As often as needed.

Annie, great post about your children. You are right, PM = PM :)

"I cannot agree to mediation because H is manipulative and I am frightened of him."

Sorry, I spilled cider on my keyboard and now it's sticking!!

thanks Garlic.
and any suggestions how to make first inelegant stumbles towards freedom?
I really am thinking of going to a hypnotist ...

Sweetheart, that's what everyone's doing on this thread :)
I did use hypnotherapy as part of my detachment - if you can afford it, it's worth it just for the amazingly calm, aware and optimistic feeling they leave you with! My hypnotherapist was also my counsellor, it's not a magic cure for anything, but her visualisations definitely helped me feel grounded and immune when H was doing his stuff. I still use them, so it was worth the money.

Yup, I can testify to the inelegance of my lurches towards freedom.

It's not something you can do flawlessly or quickly, notsorted. Not only is it traumatising, but it's completely outside your realm of experience to date.

Give yourself time to heal.

And definitely don't do mediation: engaging in that with a self-centered, cornered and angry manipulator is something that would rub anyone's nerves raw, let alone someone like you who is still reeling from longterm emotional trauma & entanglement with that selfsame manipulator.

Oh it was Puppy that brought the Dr Jekyll and Hyde analogy, it really helps for me to see it like that.

notsorted "Given that he's used not seeing DCs as a threat at times and has kept to his word and knows I'm shit scared of doing the parenting on my own,"

Recognise YOUR weak spots and do whatever you can to neutralise them. Adopt poker face, and front him out.. Remove the threat indeed.

Remember one thing, really important, He is driven by fear. Fear that everyone will see how spineless, weak and impotent he is. Terrified that he will be rumbled for the utterly substandard human being that he really is.

HE is terrified that YOU will deny him access. If it's on HIS terms then all fine and dandy, he'd have made up a line of shite to make you look culpable anyway. Reply that you are a single parent anyway, as he is a liability and no court in the land would fight for him to see your DC, due to his ongoing abuse.... Remind him that if you tell everyone what's gone on, that he'll have to meet at a contact centre, and everyone will know he's a loser.

Remember how they ALL say WE are abusing THEM? Beat him at his own game, turn HIS abuse of YOU around and hit him back where it really hurts!

bigbutton you are probably going through the worst bit now - I feel for you I really do. Stbex sounds very very controlling from what you have quoted - if that is the way he has been speaking to SS, I think they will be very worried about his ability to be a decent father. He's desperate to keep you in there, keep you hanging on, it's like he's had you hanging on a thread - keeps pulling and it just gets longer as the reel spins round, he's pulling harder and harder - and now he can see he's coming to the end of the reel it will just break. There won't be anyone at the end of it, if he doesn't let go he'll lose his dcs as well.

I really don't like the way he is talking. SS will have seen straight through that. Controlling fucker. He really is the enemy. How the hell do they manage to keep us hanging on for years and years? How do we not see through that?

Oh barbie do you really think so? I think I have lost so much perspective.
Like you I sort of considered that is behaviour was simply 'him'. I knew I didn't like it but I put it down to personality. Made excuses for it.
Yes I think he IS very very controlling. Whenever I tried to grab some control back, feeling that something was wrong. He would tell ME that I was a control freak, a bully, that I wouldn't be happy ever in my life unless I had complete control over everything, just like my controlling mother and that he wasn't going to let me control him and tell him what to do.
I believed him and tried to be less controlling. Slowly but surely I felt less and less in control, even of the silly things like when I went shopping, how much money I spent. He was clever he never told me I couldn't go shopping, that would be too obvious. He would make me feel bad about it in very subtle ways like "If you go shopping it will stress you out, it always does. I know this from empirical evidence, having lived with you for x years. When you get tired and stressed we all suffer, especially the children"
So that's how he would always get to me. If I wanted to decorate a bedroom he would use the same tactics, the children would suffer from my tiredness, like I was some sort of Victorian flake who needed reviving with smelling salts and was of weak constitution. So I couldn't enjoy doing stuff because he made me feel selfish for doing them. He would suggest I had a sleep at the weekends for the same reasons. Sometimes I'd comply and come down to tell him proudly about how long I had slept.
So deep deep down I was very sad, very lost. But I believed he was right because he told me he never lied.

I so hope that SS can see though him. I'm hoping that his ways are more obvious to others than they are to me because I have become so inured to them.

bigbuttons I agree with barbie - I never felt as desperate and sad as the period when I could see what he was doing but I couldn't quite leave yet. Things were very bad when I was living with an abuser, but whilst I could at least pretend to myself that everything was normal and he loved me (pah!) and I loved him etc., I could function. Once I woke up and the full horror became real to me, that was the worst period of my life.

I'm now on my own with the children, and without the constant drain on my mental energy of living with him, life is not only immeasurably calmer and more pleasant, but easier too.

It will get better, trust me.

Dear BB,
Yes, I know that totally. It was my fault for trying to do too much. One of his great ones was why did you have two DCs??? Or if you want to do that - my allotment - ie something that made me happy and got me a bit of time alone and also gave the kids some fun, I wasn't going to get anymore help. Oh and the funniest was working - I was the breadwinner, but I think he would have preferred it if we'd all been on benefits. WTF?
Has anyone read The Yellow Wallpaper? It's how I felt when second DC was born, or as I tried to explain to MiL I was in looking glass land. I do know where you are coming from.
Do find a counsellor or talk to WA or even Respect - I talked to them and they know what excuses abusive men come up with. It will all add steel to your resolve.

So now we've just had a confrontation. He said he would take whomever wanted to go to the local soft play area. i knew he expected me to get the little ones dressed and ready as I have always done. You know, he'll take them out occasionally but I have to do all the work. So today I asked him if he was still going to the soft play. He said yes.
So I said
"you'll have to get the dc's ready I'm busy, packing fir camping and getting ds1'sbirthday stuff ready".
cue stunned silence from him
HIM "But I'm doing you a favour taking them out, getting them out of the way"
ME "no, you're taking your own children out, you're not doing me a favour so you get them ready, I'm busy"
"I earn the money, you do the children, that's what we agreed"
cue more arguing along these lines. This time though I stuck to my guns. I told him I saw him for the frightened sad, insecure little boy he really was. I told him he'd been exposed and he could't scare me anymore.
He then went on about mediation, taking to any outside agencies together so that they could all hear and see that he wasn't abusive and unkind. That he was so reasonable and I was the unreasonable one etc etc. I told him I'd been advised against mediation with abusers.

I left the room, he followed me round. Somehow it got onto him having headbutted me 5 years ago. I brought it up not him.
HIM "why do you keep going back to that one?'
ME"because you did it"
HIM"everyday that goes by is a day further away from when it happened'So, you did it, that will never change"

I walk out of the room he follows
"please stop following me you are scaring me"
"boo hoo, poor Buttons is scared. Not that old chestnut again"
"stop following me or I will have to call someone"
he stops following me then asked barbed questions about whether the kids have been fed that day and whether `i'm going to do any work.

I retreat upstarts to me room and sort jewellery with dd2. 5 mins later he calls me
"buttons there's a nice cup of tea here for you"
me stunned 'thank you"
"don't forget to drink your nice cup of tea" he's all jolly now, laughing with he kids getting the little ones ready t go out.
I feel sick
I stuck to my guns though
This is fucking horrible

My 11 year old ds is really depressed and upset by the whole business. I've just had another chat with him. telling him how I've tried so hard to keep the family together , that I love him, that I know it's scary and upsetting and that this has to happen and everyone will be happier even if it doesn't seem that way now.
I feel like such a cow, doing this to the kids. I KNOW I'm doing the right thing. Why does it have to be so horrible? Why?

Buttons I have PM'ed you.
God I fucking hate him (probably not as much as you)
How dare he. Bastard.