support thread for those in emotionally abusive relationships: 20

[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!!

Night all. Am pleased to say I feel much happier now than when I logged on tonight. Must be because it's Monday tomorrow

at tis Hope you're still lurking.

has anyone tried pming? I wasn't sure if it would put her at risk but I really really hope she's alright and wish we could find her

Also waving at tis as well as maggie

breathe I considered PMing Maggie too but not sure whether it could cause more harm. Maybe a carefully worded inocuous one from just one of us? I'm worried about her too.

Yes, good idea. Perhaps under a different name to the ones we use here, so we can't be advance searched and linked to her posting?

Hey Fly no, i got a couple of those little 'slices' that won't stop bleeding! So all bit of tape and board covered with spots of blood, eeuuww. sorry! not hurt, VERY VERY shouty and cross indeed!

think it was just doing far too much, and was bit stupid really, but hadn't really quite how windy it had got

How you?

thanks bounty and pony ... what IS IT about this power balance (or lack of balance!) that can drive us to distraction, I wish I could get obsessed with gardening or something healthy (H for the umpteenth year in a row wants us to grow all our own veggies, we rarely get more than a few courgettes but spend £££ in pursuit, I used to enjoy it but I'm fed up with him taking it so seriously, he says he's doing it to save money but he doesn't even eat veges most of the time) but the clothes shopping is something totally in my territory. H looks like a sack of festering sh*te most of the time and I look (if I may say so) sort of nice, he thinks it's shallow to care about clothes.

Bounty I wish it were just the one time but it's more often. It's not (yet) created any debt or insurmountable problems but it's got to stop... clearly a symptom of something and gives me a short term feeling of extreme happiness. But also guilt. At least I've got a stockpile of lovely clothes which should last me a few years .

Going to grab my Lundy book and my highlighting pen and try to decide what to say when I call Women's Aid tomorrow, I really need a plan of action. DD's exams are over at the end of June and I so clearly do not love or respect H, I only do what he says so he won't yell at me or get 'cross'... now that isn't fair on him, now, is it?? Never mind about me!

Yes to sleep deprivation tactics and dreading the weekends. Wrote a longer post but my phone just died on me. Why do things always go wrong at once?
I am sorry for all the fuckwittery going round. Will post tomorrow properly. Am needing to talk, if I can find the words.
better wishing you strength this week, and maggie, so hoping you are okay. All the best to everyone else.

Yy to digging wrong. ex called me a c*ntt so loudly as he was throwing me out of his house one day that his neighbours heard and told his ex wife. All because i did not edge his grass properly and the kids did not know how to dead head the hydrangea (sp ?) properly.

And Yy to yanking the duvet about and huffing in bed. ex used to bang his arm on the mattress next to my head - not during argument just if he was stressed about anything. then he would go to other end of bed so i got his feet in my face. he was always stressed about something.
once when he came in and turned the light on in middle of the night to 'show me what its like' ?? I got so pissed off i reached up and took the lightbulb out. he grabbed my wrist and bruised it and squeezed my hand until the bulb broke.

Ok so i wasn't exactly calming situation down removing the bulb but he was being an annoying fucker. he claimed i had turned light on at some point when he was sleeping although pretty sure i had not and if i did e.g. to find something i would apologise. but in his books if you had done something ever that was the same as always doing it. and if you did it once for any reason that justified him doing it at least ten times to teach you a lesson.
(in the end he threw broken bulb on floor. thought i had got it all but i stood on a bit about the wk later and sliced my foot open)

Another time in a territorial dispute over the duvet he elbowed me so hard it left an enormous bruise that dsd questioned me about. had forgotten that if i was in bed first i used to really carefully get a hold of very far corner of duvet so i could not be accused of hogging it and lie right on the edge of bed. no wonder i slept better when he was on nights. he always gave it just long enough fir me to get to slept before coming up. and he was the master of starting an argument and then going to sleep and snoring like a pig.

butterfly hope you are ok?

Fi hope you are ok. although sometimes just getting on with stuff is therapeutic. hope smashed glass won't be too bad to fix and the slices (ouch) are not too serious.

Night all

fi I'm glad you're ok-ish. I am coasting along but I think I'll collapse when it's all over IYSWIM, I think it'll bite me in the arse later. Constant aches in some part of the body or other, I wonder why

mink that's awful the bastarding fw God, what are they like????

LOVING mink's flying squad advert! :o

Can you see yourself being happy, genuinely happy, content and supported, with him?

With or without him, no. Sadly. I feel like life's been - not exactly wrecked, but made so difficult by having 4dcs and moving around so much I've not made solid friendships, that I can't imagine any future I'm happy with. I'm too far away from it - it could be years before things feel better. Part of the reason I gave in, I think - the ease of the familiar, plus avoidance of that long hard road towards separation I was looking down.

:( at stories of golf clubs and lightbulb gaslighting. FWs.

min he crushed your hand till the bulb broke

breathe good you're aware it may catch up afterwards - as the settlement was being typed at the sol's I felt myself starting to fall asleep and had to pull self together and tell myself it wasn't over yet. Had various reactions when it actually was.

charlotte just don't worry about the future - whatever it turns out to be, it will be Better. And life may surprise you!

Fi ouch, glad you're OK.

Would a corkscrew be too much as my implement? Especially as I know what I would do with it. Then we'd have to sterilise it before opening celebratory .

Charlotte - Silvery's right. If you stay, you know how things will be. Just as they always have been. If you leave him, yes there's a small chance that things might not be any better, but there's an actual big and real chance that they will. You don't have that chance of things being better if you stay.
I know, I know, I know that though of all the upheaval of just awful. It's partly what kept me paralysed in my marriage for a long time, I couldn't get my head around it all.
But now I've given myself (and my kids) a real fighting chance of having a normal life free from FWittery. Life is much better out than in, regardless of all the problems I still have to deal with and overcome.

mink - am at the lightbulb story. I think you protest too much when you claim your FW is FW-lite. Doesn't sound much like it.

Fi hope your hand is ok! Yowch.

butterfly, how are you today? Ready to talk yet?

Silvery, I think a corkscrew would be just fine - it's a valid kitchen implement, and sometimes you need a bit more oomph to your elbow than a whisk can give! (Am officially wincing though...!)

lightbulb- in my general thinking the best I put it down as probably not deliberate. he was trying to get the lightbulb back not to break it he let go as soon as it broke. (it was low energy so thankfully they don't break the same way as the old fashioned ones) plus I probably should not have been holding on to the lightbulb in the first place. could have done with him not throwing the lightbulb across the room after he got it out of my hand though.

tbh the bruise was worse because dsd asked me straight out if he had hit me. so I lied and said it was just a bit of a laugh. it was the culmination of a general nudging and requests to 'shove over' in which he was shoving me feet about with his feet so i shoved them back over to his side, so he elbowed me extremely hard. fault on both sides but as usual he has to take it too far to make his point.

all deniable violence though. on one of the times when he pushed me i was in his way on purpose because he was trying to start a fight, say his piece and then walk out. so i stood my ground. the other time though i just happened to be between him and then bin.

he was an abusive twat but i was not entirely innocent in all of those. I can be pretty stubborn, feisty and awkward. don't know if he would have been better or worse if i had just submitted instead of constantly rebelling.

I doubt he would ever have out and out smacked me one. although he did make it clear that if a woman ever hit him he would not think twice about hitting them back. but he was pretty handy with his fists with other people and generally used his size to intimidate. he was not a different behind closed doors sort of person. more volatile tempered in and out of the house. (which is why no one had any trouble believing me when I said he was bloody hard work)

but he really couldn't be arsed with controlling where I went or what I did other than by removing childcare (which is a annoying enough) as that would have taken up his time.

Deniable violence, yes, but violence designed to control/manipulate/scare you.
I would say one of my problems was also that I stood my ground too often. I tried being a 'surrendered wife' once or twice, more out of fear and desperation than anything else, but I had lived very independently for a lot of my life before I met him and just couldn't do it. I am stubborn as a mule sometimes, pig-headed, etc. The fact that I argued back or disagreed with him doesn't mean he was justified in shouting at me and calling me names (or sometimes resorting to intimidation and low-level violence).

Thanks goodness you are away from him now. And that is nothing but good!

Indeed pony. that was what did it for me that there was no justification for the name calling just because I disagreed with him (especially as he was wrong ). some of the other more physical 'altercations' tbh if it was my kids I would tell them both off for being obnoxious.

but for example calling me a c*nt for helping him in his garden is just as weird as it is unpleasant. not right in the head.

pony you have not heard my plans for the garlic press yet
not to mention the parmesan grater.

I have also been called a c*unt. I had never been called it before him, and it's one of the few sweary-type words I don't use. It's particularly nasty.

There's a difference, I think. Boisterous kids are very physical with no intent other than their own fun (I am often black-and-blue from DS1's bony elbows and knees when we wrestle, and am currently sporting a split lip from DS2's sharp fingernails) and certainly no long-term malicious thoughts. But when a FW does it, it's deliberately designed to intimidate and control, even if not intended to hurt.

Have to say, my eyes are watering at the thought of the garlic press and the grater!!!! am way too empathetic for my own good... But bring it on!! It's no less than they deserve.

Your kids are clearly nicer than mine mine frequently get involved in pushing and shoving and the odd punch gets thrown. i have heard for twins though this is relatively mild. my sister and i enacted some fairly unpleasant acts on each other. Mostly hair pulling. it is just frustration.

mink I had the same thought re your comments about FW lite. Does not sound very lite to me.

I am fine physically, safe etc, no worries, just wrecked emotionally, because saw someone yesterday and today, who did me harm some years ago but who I also care(d) about deeply, and because got response to sol's letter from FW.

Will try and go out to play bingo later, if I feel up to it. That should help.

Butterfly hope you are ok and you manage to go out later.

I think.i always say he was lite because although he was volatile he was not financially controlling. nor did he control me socially. Conflict pretty much revolved around trying to get him involved with family or around food. and i did not have to make any escape plans. So compared to others who live under constant tyranny it was lite. still wouldn't wish someone like him.on either of my girls when they grew up though

mink I don't know about my kids being nicer, but I can get what you mean about twins egging each other on. There's 6 years between my boys, and even now I'm a bit worried about the 'horseplay' (mainly from the baby!!!!).
My sister and I were also horrid to each other. When boiledfrog mentioned about her sister licking her FW's cup, it reminded me of my own tiny acts of horridness - when my sis slept in my room because our gran was staying over, I'd wake up to her snoring in the camp bed, mouth gaping open like the Channel Tunnel. I'd get a bit of carpet fluff and pop it in, and watch her 'num num num' and then swallow it. Then go back to sleep feeling a bit better!

(to be fair, my sister was a bully, and this was my silent way of getting her back because I couldn't stand up to her).

But I still think there's a difference between kids and siblings doing that kind of thing, and your partner doing it. Your FW is a Full FW, not FW-lite.

butterfly that sounds hard to deal with, all of it. Hope you manage to get out to the bingo, sometimes a change of scene is what's needed.