Support for those in abusive relationships - thread 6

[ItsMeAndMyPuppyNow]

Welcome!

This is the latest instalment in a series of threads for those who are in abusive relationships, those who have left abusive relationships, and those gearing to leave.

Come vent, share, give and receive support.

The first question you may be asking yourself as a new visitor to this thread is:

Am I being abused?
Verbal Abuse A wonderfully non-hysterical summary. If you're unsure, read the whole page and see if you're on it
Emotional abuse from the same site as above
Emotional abuse a more heartfelt description
Signs of Abuse & Control Useful check list
Financial abuse Are you a free ride for a cocklodger, or supposed to act grateful for every penny you get for running the home
Women's Aid: "What is Domestic Violence?" This is also, broadly, the Police definition
20 signs you're with a controlling and/or abusive partner Exactly what it says on the tin

Books
"Why Does He Do That?" by Lundy Bancroft - The eye-opener. Read this if you read nothing else
"The Verbally Abusive Relationship" by Patricia Evans ? He wants power OVER you and gets angry when you prove not to be the dream woman who lives only in his head
"The Verbally Abusive Man, Can He Change?" by Patricia Evans - Answer: Perhaps - ONLY IF he recognises HIS issues, and if you can be arsed to work through it. She gives explicit guidelines
"Men who hate women and the women who love them" by Susan Forward. The author is a psychotherapist who realised her own marriage was abusive, so she's invested in helping you understand yourself just as much as helping you understand your abusive partner
"The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing" by Beverley Engels - The principle is sound, if your partner isn't basically an arse, or disordered
"Codependent No More : How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself" by Melody Beattie - If you a rescuer, you're a co-dependent. It's a form of addiction! This book will help you
But whatever you do, don't blame yourself for being Co-dependent!

Websites
So, you're in love with a narcissist - Snarky, witty, angry, but also highly intelligent: very good for catharsis
Dr Irene's verbal abuse site - motherly advice to readers' write-ins from a caring psychotherapist; can be a pain to navigate but very validating stuff
Out of the fog - and now for the science bit! Clinical, dispassionate, and very informative website on the various forms of personality disorders and how they impact on family and intimate relationships
Get your angries out ? You may not realise it yet, but you ARE angry. Find out in what unhealthy ways your anger is expressing itself. It has probably led you to staying in an unhealthy relationship
Melanie Tonia Evans is a woman who turned her recovery from abuse into a business. A little bit "woo" and product placement-tastic, but does contain a lot of useful articles
Love fraud - another site by one woman burned by an abusive marriage
You are not crazy - one woman's experience. She actually has recordings of her and her abusive partner having an argument, so you can hear what verbal abuse sounds like. A pain to navigate, but well worth it
Baggage reclaim - Part advice column, part blog on the many forms of shitty relationships.

Too many posters already today with not so DP who are hitting them, calling them mentally ill or just being Twunts of the first order.

This thread is here to help. Use it! Read the links, lurk a bit, but be sure that you all deserve a loving kind home where no-one is hurt or frightened.

Happy Christmas!

How is everyone? Hope you have come out of it all reasonably unscathed x

Happy Christmas to everyone. Bit late I know but hey, better late than never.

Just came off the phone to my family in germany who I haven't spoken to in years and it was really good.

Feeling belatedly happy & christmassy now :)

Hello all, had a good Christmas, nice pressies, nice meal cooked by me and OH(for the day) harmoniously, DS back for the day, DD fine.

AOH has been ill in the run up and during, makes a change from starting decorating which is how he used to get out of cleaning the house before Christmas.

This year I had a relaxing Christmas Eve out and about delivering presents, and thinking 'usually I would have been rushing about with a toilet brush etc'. When I went out, our living rooms were a crumby tip, when I got back he had hoovered, ready for DS coming back I guess!

Today I have mostly chilled on my own, nice rest day. So I guess I've had the sort of Christmas I wanted, all in all. Sorry should you not have been so lucky.

Well despite everything Christmas went off ok...I donned the teflon overcoat. OH raided the (still joint) account and despite his insistence that all the presents that I had bought came from us jointly, managed to triple the amount we spent with his few "extra surprises" for his Christmas eve and Boxing day "Christmases" with the children. he left me with no fuel for Christmas day having "borrowed" my car to take the DCs to his newly rented cottage...luckily i spotted it and managed to find a station open late Christmas eve.....BUT reasonable and "good" behaviour for the very first occasions in 2 months since I asked him to leave. So that's something I suppose....

So why do i feel worse, shaky and desperate today???? Have braved all sorts of terrible behaviour from him before and after split, to the point where i honestly cannot stand the sight of him and don't miss him at all.

Think I'm scared of the hoops to be jumped through in 2012. Don't quite know what to do next. Been fire-fighting so long I've forgotten how to plan and sort things out.

Best wishes to you all
xxfool

fool you know I find it easier when TF is being an arse, it's a reminder, a resolve. When he's being nice I get very confused.

Well done Rudolph, sounds like progress.

And just wanted to say - if anyone HASN'T forgotten how to plan and sort things out it's you. It just feels like it right now, with adrenaline going etc.

Have you ever been in an amateur play or any public performance? Just reminds me of that dreadful feeling minutes before you start where your brain is convinced you have forgotten everything, then the minute you start it all comes back and it's fine.

A touch contrite in my comparisons perhaps but you are so strong, really you are and you will have the necessary tools in when you need them.

The same ones that have kept you going for his benefit all these years will now be used for your and your children's great life.

In the book, 'the gift of fear' he author talks about how worry about the future doesnt serve us (easy said, I'm very attached to worrying for example) but he says that the very fact you/we worry about something because it hasn't yet happened and when the time comes for the actual situation to occur we will know and have the reserves to do what we must (when in that moment I mean)

Not making sense here probably, too much sparkling Christmas wine

"when he's being nice I get confused" bigbuttons that's so true. Nice from him doesn't compute with me. I think he's after something, and usually, he is. But generally his nice is forced. He does 'nice' things, like fixes stuff and buying things for the kids, but there's no directly nice behaviour towards me that's genuine and heartfelt, like I get from friends and family. Yet I'm so used to it, I hate it when he's nice. I guess it's part of the whole normalising thing.

Yeah, nice means something nasty is about to happen, the forced joviality, slightly manic smile. Then of course I come out looking like a misery for not joining in with it all. It ropes the kids in though.

I just looked at the 'verbal abuse' link at the beginning of this. He does nearly all of the things on the list. I wonder if there is such a thing as communication abuse because it's body language as well. The site mentions turning their back, walking away from you when you're talking, rolling their eyes. I get all of that (less of the rolling eyes because he knows that's too obvious - it's been substituted by a kind of guttural grunt, not something you can pinpoint).

So last night after being warned not to 'mess up' the new tablet pcthing, he is actually downstairs before me (v.rare) and hardly says a word. When I ask what he's doing today it's a 'hmmm?'. Then 'nothing really'. He may be sulking because I'm in the spare room and it's dawning on him that I'm planning on staying there. I asked him why he was being quiet. 'Dunno just being quiet'.

Don't get me wrong this wasn't all within the first 5 minutes of coming down, it was a leisurely half an hour over coffee and pottering. I wasn't pushing him, or grilling him, just trying to assert that he's part of the family, not a lone wolf. Perhaps this is the beginning of him playing the part of seperated partner. I wouldn't put it past him to deliberately go quiet just so he can say 'you won't like it when you're all alone'.

Anyway, going to do my sorting now, find a way of clearing the clutter he has bought for the kids over the years but won't get rid of 'because it's worth a lot of money to collectors'. They've got tons of toys but no space to play.

gorse - disengage. It's your best counter TF tactic. If you show him that really you are ambivalent about his sulking, whether he is there or not, he'll be more perturbed than YOU ever will be.

YOU need to detach from HIM. Don't ask him why he's quiet, don't ask him if he's OK, just get on with what YOU know needs to be done.

He is NOT part of the family. A person who is part of the family wouldn't abuse you and the children now would he?

sorry, that was to HORSE! not gorse....

horse definitely DON"T ask him. I am sometimes itching to ask, just to goad, but I don't now

Hi All, Don't know if you remember me?? have posted on this thread in the past...well the previous one. I have been reading and lurking since then, for support and guidence.

Can i join in again please? 2 weeks ago I threatened my abusive dh with the police if he didnt go and he left!!!....i would have rung them aswell... Its taken me nearly 2 years to get him to leave, since i found out about his affair.

Really am going to need help detaching from him though. He stayed over christmas, I asked him too, slept in dds bed she in mine. He really tried to get me into bed kept smiling at me all puppy dog like, tried holding my hand, brushing past me so we touched. I nearly fell for it!! GOD its just so hard. I don't think i love him its just he has such a hold over me. Years of controlling just doesn't disappear over night...does it??

when will i feel free? I need to get him out of my head. but how??

thanks in advance..

Jeez scream, what a creep. What kind of man keeps on and on trying to get a woman into bed when she's made it perfectly clear she doesn't want it! Mine was the same until very recently but I'm not counting my chickens.

Bigbuttons and Houdini, yes you're right I need to disengage. I did do, for a long time, and I think I'm kind of testing him out to see if he dares to try and be nice. He's being nice when he wants to, but not when I need him to. "fool" is the word I sometimes use (in my head) to disengage.

If anyone's wondering who the hell I am, I was Barbie (about 2 threads ago). x

Years of controlling do NOT just vanish overnight, no.

Good for you for the separate sleeping arrangements, but don't allow that situation to develop again. he fucked someone else, he abused you. Therefore he loses the right to expect YOU to put him up, for any reason. he gets to sleep in a B&B.

You don't love him you are afraid of what you think you will be without him. He has told you in a billion and one ways that you can't cut it.

But you can!

Get him OUT of your home and keep it like that.

IF you let him back into your life, your bed, exactly how long do you think the puppy dog eyes will last?

Do you really want to go back to how it was AND WORSE?

Find your deal breaker, find a last straw, and cling onto it for everything you are worth.

Today I found a text in an old phone that I sent to a friend of mine the day before he left, I was telling her that he'd asked me to go and get some wine so we could have a drink together the night before he was flying back to his country. The following day he went ON and on and on about why I didn't have sex with him, how long it had been etc etc etc. What a muppet!

I told him that I would never have sex with a man that told my best (only) friend that I was in a mental institute for 5 years, so that she would think I was a loon and break the friendship.

You CAN break yourself of this addiction. You HAVE TO!

Hi horse,Thanks. Yeah he's a prize nob, of the highest degree... Haha how odd!! i use the word' fool' in my head too.

Horse, love, give up. The nice is not nice.

I realised recently that the NICE stuff we all fall for at the beginning is not aimed AT US per se. It's got nothing to do with us. This is proved by when we try to get that back, when we call them on how they used to be with us that they look do perplexed. WE are not involved in this nice phase at all.

The NICE phase is THEM pouring NICE in, only to get it back from US. THEY need the validation that THEY are lovely, kind, attractive etc, so they try to bounce it off us. Not a bit of the NICE is meant purely for us, they want it ALL back, and eventually MORE.

'Twat' was the word I used.

barbie! Hello I was wondering where the devil you'd got to! How's it been going in the getting out/work steaks?

Thank HoHo....wise words. Hes gone back to where hes staying now so am ok for now...

As for telling your friend such private stuff..how awful for you! really.

My dh slept with mine...( twat ) then told me 2 years later 2 weeks after id given birth to our 2nd child. ( we werent together at that point but it didnt matter to me, i just felt soooo betrayed by them). It ruined my close friendship but i stayed with him ??? I had too I had two kids under 2. I was too weak or so i thought at the time FFS

Private stuff screamadelica? Oh no! I wasn't ever in a mental institute!

He just said I was....

Oh I see....thats worse really, Isn't it.

My dd Is with him today...im waiting for her to be brought home( can't go for her as hes taken our car, calls it his car now) Its getting late, im getting all anxious...WILL NOT RING...this is just part of his control, manipulation.

Big Fat Tickets with extra holes punched to the far side of fuck needed again I see!

Just bursting in with a spontaneous realisation because this is the place I feel safe sharing them.

I'm going to see my family in germany next May for a long overdue and possibly awkward and mixed emotions catch up but needs to be done (for my sake as much as anyone elses)

My happiness stems from the fact that even though I won't be going for another nearly five months, I've been able to pick dates, book flights and go to see prospective catteries for the furries, all without the indecisive bell-end of an ex dragging his heels at every opportunity and doing all he can to stop any activity from being planned with any certainty.

Such a wonderful relief not to have to ask and cajole and sell the virtues of this trip only to be met with 'hmm's' and all the things that could go wrong until about four minutes before departure when it's too late to budget properly or book anything cheaply.

Liberation continues in Bibi's house :)

Strenght and the same happiness whatever happens to be the catalyst to you all!

Hello Bibi nice to see you, and Barbie known as horse and welcome scream from the lurking zone.

I had a totally relaxed time over the weekend, with all my favourite people. Seventeen of us in a house for Boxing Day and night and not one cross word or grumpy outburst even from the teenagers.

I managed to cook for H and his brother with the DC on Christmas Eve because I am a nice person and the DC wanted it, then on Christmas morning we all met for presents and H cooked lunch with DD2. It was interesting watching him trying to control her and my lovely strong girl standing up to him and his nonsense. I was happy to go home later but DD2 really wanted me to stay on. I think she was pretending things hadn't changed and I still live there.

How much easier it gets as time passes - fool you will honestly not care in a couple of years time, you will watch him with the DC and smirk inwardly.

Now I need to get tough and start the divorce and sort out the finances. I know that will be upsetting and difficult and I will need a hot solicitor to guide me.

Looking forward to 2012 and all it brings - strength and joy to us all!