Support for those in emotionally abusive relationships:16

[foolonthehill]

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
a check list Use this site for some concise diagnostic lists and support
Signs of Abuse & Control Useful check list
why financial abuse is domestic violenceAre 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.
heart to heart a wealth of information and personal experiences drawn together in one place

what couples therapy does for abusers

If you find that he really wants to change
should I stay or should I go bonus materials this is a site containing the material for men who want to change?please don?t give him the link?print out the content for him to work through.

The Bill of Rights
bill of rights here is what you should expect as a starting point for your treatment in a relationship, as you will of course be treating others!!

pony and betterthan those flashbacks sound terrible. Were they turning points for you? I was just thinking about some of the things H has done which makes me go . He is sports mad and so was I but less so now, anyway last year I had a breast lump. He dropped me off at clinic thinking all would be fine. During the clinic I had to have a biopsy and was fairly sore afterwards he couldn't understand why I didn't want to go for a gentle run that afternoon. He even said that i should have gone for a run before my appointment instead of risking not running at all. A week later I went back for the results and before we went in he asked if I had been for a run that morning and seemed genuinely shocked that I hadn't. I was more concerned that I may have cancer as I have a strong family history rather than clocking my run mileage for the week.

Another time I had a bad bike crash (broke my nose, bad bruises etc, etc
I had to get him to take me home but instead of letting me rest on the sofa he dragged me around shops looking for an antique watch for him. I challenged him on this a few months later and he just said that resting just meant not being at work, so in his eyes I was resting.

Sorry for grammar am on phone.

Sorry should have said that my biopsy was clear.

anyone still up?

cheeky to Silvery

Hi,hi, to everyone else.

2nd Fr.Prog tomoz... not excited atall taking plenty more tissues (and a tiny voice [hoping] )

hard to keep up with the thread here but i check in every so often and am thinking about you all

After my mum's remarks of yesterday and seeing time of the utter FWittery you guys have put up with I am starting to wonder if I have made it all up and he wasn't that bad after all. he never tried to keep me away from my friends or family or to control me financially.

he just shouted and swore a lot and radiated so much tension it was like a buzzing noise in the room.

Then again he did spit on me once so I suppose that is bad enough.

Sorry! That sounded like competitive misery. i was just reflecting out loud that although in the grand scheme of really not very nice partners he was more just a bit useless and inconsiderate that actually malevolent. i was rarely if ever actually scared of him and some of the time i was pretty angry and shouty myself.

Just a bad dynamic i guess.

mink spitting is just disgusting. Funny how we justify their behaviour.
Thankyou all for your help last night when I was having a meltdown. I have a poorly DD today but I am going to open a bank account tomorrow. I am going to collect my thoughts and put them into some organisation before I ring the counsellor again on Saturday. What do you normally talk about with them. Last time I rang I didn't admit that I was thinking about leaving but I think she guessed. I just feel like I amreading off a list if bad things about H without him getting the chance to defend himself, is that how others felt?

It is disgusting. it was a long time ago and even he realised it was beyond the pale.

I have only seen counsellor once and i did pretty much just rant about all the things that had gone on and owned up to my own failings just to get it off my chest.

This week assuming sick child is better (snap) I am hoping to talk less about him and more about moving on and dealing with all the spaghetti head i have going on just now.

I hate crying in front of people though so i find hard to be fully open.

poorly child (dd2) said today i am sad you won't see him anymore. she knows she will see him but it is funny that she is sad that I won't. although i think what she means is she will miss us all having days out together.

I should try to get some counselling for them too. there is something at their school but I am not sure how they access it.

Hi mink no level of abuse is acceptable it is all relative. The FW and his backers always talk it down too and/or justift it when there is no justification. It's how it makes you feel too.
Lahti I thought the flashbacks are my strongest memories, but I guess you are right they must have been turning points when I started to know something was wrong - the first ones esp. I chose to ignore although I do seem to remember more if I can bare to think back, which the court case is making me do - I have to say that it easier now than 6 months ago when I had to start thinking about it.
When I was pregnant we lived apart and on the way home from a family (my) function he wanted to call at his house to get something. I was feeling really unwell but it was not optional. When we were at his house I lay on his bed. After shouting abuse from downstairs he came up and shouted in my face how lazy I was and how he couldn't stand how I was handling being pregnant. This promoted me to tell my Mum things were bad - she didn't even know I was pregnant at the time so it was hard to tell her but I am so glad I did. I think that the fact one person then knew about what he was doing to me prompted him to plan his escape which wasn't much afterwards.

Aww poorly DCs. So sweet that she is worrying about you. Mine doesn't spit but I remember that we were at my cousins wedding and my mum was getting stressed hence so were the rest of the family. I tried to help H to do his tie up and he just snapped that if I didn't stop fussing over my mum he was going to slap me (how on earth did I forget that?) this was all out of earshot of my parents but they knew something was up. I remember feeling really sad in the church especially when the vicar asked us to turn to the person next to us as say I love you. This was 7 years ago prior to the EA etc but I still remember it but don't know wether to forget about it as we went to counselling afterwards. I feel like I need to ignore the behaviour from prior to 2007. Is that right?

Mink sorry our posts crossed.
Have a chat to the school and see if they can arange it for you. I think there will be a waiting list. It hit my DS hard when my ex just turned up after being absent all his life. I spoke to the teachers and they were great! I did cry, I felt like a fool but you can't help your emotions, pleae try and let it out. The teachers said there was a waiting list and to see if he settled which he has as I have cushioned all further FWery. I may not be able to do that forever depending on what the court decides. The teachers also said they would speak to the guy for some general advice which to start with was to see if it settles and see what else he may have to face and we can take it from there. I guess that is all we can do.

min mine didn't try to keep me away from my friends, at least not much. I felt free to do what I wanted. But he never wanted to do anything with me. As to finance I was free to spend my money as I wanted - which I spent on keeping us going in a frugal manner while (as I thought) he was finding work to support us properly. My money was partly earned, partly capital from DF. FW now claims to have not been looking for much work (he did do some, mostly at weekends, as I was too ill to care for kids (and it didn't stop him leaving kids with me at weekends!)) and because we were married what's mine was ours (I agreed with this view) and that therefore he could just live off my money...grrrr

(Rant ctd p 94)

missing bracket (he did do some, mostly at weekends)*

Hello all, just checking in. Had a counselling appointment this morning, couldn't really be bothered. I said to her at one point, that I'm just bored of all this. So we talked more about me and less about him (heehee!), and about how things will be after we've split. I've come out buzzing, so I'm glad I went regardless!

charlotte that's great.

I think I am just feeling guilty if I label him as EA. i mean it is a pretty terrible thing to say about someone and I never really confronted him about it and spelled it out. i did say that they way he spoke to me was unacceptable.

I am swinging between reminding myself that there really is no hope, no point going to relate and thinking what a terrible thing to say about him
...and in a way about me.

min for over 2 decades I kept going with false hope. Mine did not swing from nasty to nice, he just somehow started off OK then got nastier and nastier - I thought he'd be better once he found what he wanted to do, but it seems he didn't really want to do anything much. Like many here, the slow increase meant by the time I began to wake up, I was in pretty deep in terms of no longer knowing what normal was. I was going to divorce him in 2009, but thought my mh would not be equal to living alone, and decided on one last go. Things continued to worsen until I finally filed for divorce in Autumn 2011.

Then they started getting better again :)

I can't get my head around it all tbh. I have bought "Why does he do that?" but I can't take it home and I'm constantly in demand at work so I struggle to read it.

Last night he was home late from work and I was cooking when he came in and he could hardly bring himself to speak to me, this is on top of him not bothering to tell me when he would be home (Imagine if I did that...) and then I was looking for a course to do to keep up with my CPD and that was entirely unacceptable. "What course is this then?" "Where will that be then?" it's just the tone.

Then we had a spot of gaslighting "don't you remember I told you there was a power cut" er no, you didn't and I have an almost photographic memory but it's easier just to say "oh yes I remember".

AND NOW!!!
I'm cooking again tomorrow night & I said I would pop to the shop tonight to get some bits (he normally does the shop while I go to mass on a Sunday) "where will you get that then?" Tesco? "Well we've got enough food in the house" so now I will scrape together something shit and he will laugh at me and tell our neighbours that I'm shit at cooking again.

Sorry for ranting, it all seems to come out while I'm at work because I'm not allowed to do anything at home except sit with him and watch soaps.

aargh! mine semmed to want to nothing except watch tv of an evening (after his hard day at work - not!) I quite like reality progs about police, ambulance etc but after the first twenty or so times not so much! And then I started to notice when it was a repeat... I didn't have to watch (and as time went on i did so less and less) - and anyway he and DD liked the living room far too hot for my liking (let alone that I was paying for the heat).

^^ clearly Rant (ctd)

Same here r.e. watching TV - my FW likes nothing better than to sit in front of the TV all night watching gritty realism programmes, so he can wring his hands and complain about the world. It's exhausting watching TV with him - which doesn't even make sense!

After last night's argument about me staying with my sister for her birthday, he texted me this morning saying 'that day is fine'. I havn't responded. He think he's oh so special for being one of those people who needs to be allowed 24 hours or more to 'brood' over an issue before making a decision. Which is why he explodes at me then sometimes goes back entirely on his word the next day. Not sure why that bothers me but it does.

min - it is a real rollercoaster, especially in the early days. I remember swinging between all of those feelings (and I still do some days).

This thread is moving quick these days but thinking of you all.

thanks leclerc for empathies. Todays horror at my turning up to my first place in RL to talk (or not!) about this stuff, and I walk slap bang into someone I know, vaguely, who knows many of my friends well! Now I know this stuf is v. confidential, but today I was my own oppo! I was there professionally and introduced myself as such, andproceeded to be the person that I usually am to the world.

The rest of the women of course now think I am schizophrenic! (or just a complete fruitcake) but at the very least no longer trust me! :( I was thanked by a few on several occasions for my very valid and valuable insights [as a professional] to the proceedings. I had to visit two ladies, I felt I should, who were looking particularly unnerved by it, to explain my ruse(?). I they did confess to feeling mistrustful and didn't like having the extra 'professionals' there, and were totally flabbergasted by my transformation (a different woman, they called me).

I guess this just goes to show the 'face' we give to the world and the sad realty that we have to face of the pain and tolerance of whats gone on behind closed doors :(

I hope to be back to my emotional reality again next week (which will no doubt throw them even more as I return to a weeping gibbering speechless wreck! )

Oh gawd.. I really am crazy arn't I.

I apologise for not keeping up with the thread and only coming here to bring personal struggles rather than trying to help out, but right now this is me in a mire and not feeling up to the rest, sorry.

but much love to the LLOTT and strengths for your battles xxxxx

I am sorry Fi but your story made me smile.
Yes, it does just prove the face we put on to the outside world!
How we reach for it.
I am sure the others will understand once they know.
Look forward to next week's story!