Feeling sick. Abusive “ex” and his wife and child have moved to my small home town. What happens if I “speak out”?

[LundyBancroftwasworththeread]

I had a very brief “relationship” with this man at University many years ago. (I use inverted commas because it was very short-lived; around two months and we never actually went on a date, just visited each other a lot in halls of residence). He was emotionally abusive from the start although I didn’t recognise this until I discovered mumsnet a few years ago. He did a huge amount of damage in that very short time.

After we broke up (he ended it) he treated me with absolute contempt while I was desperate for us to get on as we lived next door to each other and were part of the same social circle. There were so many occasions when I bent over backwards to be friendly while he treated me as being unworthy of even the most basic respect. It was the most awful year of my life and it took me years to feel I’d properly got over it.

After not giving this man a second thought for ages now, I have just found out that he is living in my small home town with his wife (who I also knew) and young child. I have woken up every day since finding out feeling sick to my stomach at the thought I might run into him/them or find out that he has become friends with people I know. I thought this feeling might fade but it has been almost a month and I am not feeling much better.

The only way I feel I can deal with this is by being completely open and honest about the situation with people. I don’t want to be sitting in a restaurant and not be able to explain why I have suddenly gone quiet and started shaking were he to walk in or why I need to leave somewhere quickly if I have to. I don’t want to have the whole traumatic conversation with people under such conditions; I’d rather they were up to speed on the basics so I can just say “he’s here” and they’ll understand what that means for me. I have started telling people already and it has definitely helped and I now have some real life support but at the same time I am incredibly uneasy about the situation as this was something I didn’t ever intend to discuss with anyone other than those closest to me.

My main issue now is how to behave if or more likely when I bump into him/them? I can’t very well be civil when I’m going around telling people that this man is an abuser. And the last time I saw him I was falling over myself to be friendly and I worry that if he were to approach me he would be expecting the same. I don’t want him to come anywhere near me and I don’t want to so much as even have to acknowledge him if I pass him on the street but he won’t know this and may try to approach me any way. I would be ok with telling him I don't want to have to so much as acknowledge him and the reason for this if I came across him on his own but this would be totally inappropriate if he had his child with him or something. I can’t avoid him forever either and even if I could, it would eventually get back to him/them that I have been telling people about the abuse. I am worried what will happen when they find out. Should I write to him to make him aware of what I am saying? He will find out somehow someday any way. I am just feeling totally lost at the moment. Please could someone offer some advice?

just a reminder of our talk guidelines
and a reminder that one thing we can all do with is some moral support.
Thanks awfully

Let him think whatever he wants to think. So he thinks he did nothing wrong? let him get on with thinking that. So he thinks you had a crush on him? Let him think it.

What matters is that you're strong enough to not care about what he thinks, if he thinks. And I agree with others, if he doesn't think he did anything wrong then he certainly won't be agonising over something he did 15 years ago.

If you do see him and if you nod acknowledgement, it is not compromising your integrity, it's not a betrayal to your old self. You're safe now. He's somebody else's problem.

Gotcha, Lundy. I feel for you. Do please be very kind to yourself, but go and get help as a priority - talk this relationship and its lengthy aftereffects through with a good counsellor, someone who doesnt have any prior relationship with you, or a potential relationship with this man. Forget about his version of events, if he even remembers it - and focus on your own.

I agree with another poster upthread, that it's within the bounds of possibility that he simply doesn't remember, which might be potentially very upsetting for you. A friend had this with a school bully she re-encountered twenty years on - the bullying had a big impact on the victim, but the perpetrator remembered very differently, and my friend found that very hard, and felt it 'invalidated' her memories. She was helped by counselling, and came to feel that it was her experience of the event that mattered, not what the other woman thought.

Thank you for all the support. ThefITCrowd - your experience reminds me of one of mine, although "ex" never pressured me into sex or anything like that. We were having sex and I held on to the headboard to stop it from banging against the wall as I didn't want everyone in halls to hear and he had an absolute melt down over it; he said he did want everyone to hear and got really angry at me and said I was obviously ashamed to be with him so on and so forth for an hour or god knows how long. There was no reasoning with him and he made me out to be the most horrible person in the world for making him feel so awful. Nothing I said made any difference.

I would be delighted if he didn't even remember me but I doubt that very much. I lived next door to him for almost a whole year. My friend has run into his wife quite a few times too and they remember her despite only knowing her through me and her not really being in our group as much.

I don't really find counselling very helpful, to be honest. I've tried it before although not for this. They aren't really allowed to give you any proper advice and they just sit and listen and repeat what you say to them back to you by rephrasing it. I'm a thinker any way so I go through events over and over again in my head any way. Counselling just seems to be an opportunity to say things out loud which never really feels any different to going through them in my head one more time.

OP, this man was an utter fuckwit, and emotionally manipulative. And you were probably very vulnerable, and he hurt you badly.

That's it.

He has no power over you. Actually, he never had any power over you - although often it is hard to realise this, that emotional abusers only have as much power over you as you allow them to have.

Please don't think that I'm attacking you, but I wonder whether there are other issues at stake here. Because the reaction you are describing to this kind of event, which went on for two months such a long time ago, is not normal.

Counselling can be pretty crap, yes. You should probably try a bone fide therapist - someone who would listen to you and actually SAY something,

OP, I mean this kindly and gently. Sometimes when we fixate on something, worry about it and try to plan for it happening, it's a way of allowing ourselves to want that thing and to imagine wanting it without admitting to ourselves that we do.

It can therefore be worth stopping to consider what our worries, and our fantasies about our worries coming true, are actually telling us.

You've told us that you didn't realise it was abusive at the time. So you didn't tell people, you didn't have the experience of seeming upset and people noticing and asking why, you didnt get to tell people what happened and have them react to it, you weren't rescued.

Is it possible that you really want to talk about this, as him moving nearby has brought it flooding back, and you arent able to simply give yourself permission to need that, as you want to believe you are over him, so this has become a way to let yourself need that? The problem is you may not get the support you want if you are coming at it from this very raw, very hurt place - you may not be able to experience support as your buttons are so easily pressable right now.

And/or is it possible that you are afraid of the opposite situation? You are focusing on what will happen if you are upset and everyone notices. What if no one does? Is that what you're really scared of, maybe?

Do look for a therapist. Mine definitely doesn't just sit there repeating stuff.

Try a therapist who offers EFT. Emotional freedom technique. It has helped me move on from many past traumas. This is also a technique that you can use if you run into him. This kind of therapist will not just listen. They will talk! I believe you when you say this man was abusive. I can totally understand your fears of seeing him all these years later. Have some EFT and try to remember that you you are stronger because of the knowledge you have from reading Lundy and recognising his abusive behaviour.

I'm sorry but I've just reread the op and I'm really not sure telling everyone he was abusive is a great idea. If it's a small town you're basically trying to sway opinion although I note you say it's to explain any reaction.
Either you were infatuated and spent that year trying to reunite and in time and having discovered the forum it's been reframed as abusive

or it was abusive but a very long time ago for a short period of time and you probably need therapy if you have this reaction. I don't think it's fair to tell people he was abusive - it's subjective and likely to lead people to assuming you mean physically.

You need professional help.

If you see him simply walk on by.

OP, I think you need to focus on your response to him, rather than his behaviour. I agree that counselling of some sort would be appropriate to help you deal with the anxiety and upset over the situation, and to explore ways to cope with possibility of running into him when you are out and about.

If telling a couple friends will provide you with more RL support, then that's obviously fine but I would say don't focus on him otherwise you run the risk of becoming too invested in him and what he is doing, which is counterproductive. The goal is to reduce his importance and impact on you, not focus on him more IYSWIM.

You need decent therapy. You are still stuck in the perpetrator/victim/rescuer cycle but it's only you that is keeping you there.

He has no power over you. He may not even remember all the things he said/did but that's largely irrelevant as they were things that you found damaging.

But by going around telling people he is an abuser and you're going to react badly if you see him is keeping you firmly in the victim role, him as the perpetrator and putting your friends and family in the role of the rescuers (ie they sympathise and support you, will soothe you if you see him and start to shake, will leave somewhere with you if you want to leave because he's there).

You need therapy to step out of that game. It is not healthy to be this badly affected almost 20 years later. Therapy can help a great deal.

I'm thinking that you might need more focused support along the lines of PTSD counselling. Your experience obviously bit very deep, and has left deep scars that still leave you shaking many years on.

I think that it's reasonable for you to say you had a bad experience with this man many years ago and have no wish to have anything to do with him; people can understand that. But I wouldn't elaborate on it - don't go into the "emotional abuse" thing because as you can see, many people don't really accept that it was "that bad" without having experienced it.
There are all sorts of reasons that you could wish to have nothing to do with him - just keep the reason to yourself as much as you can (probably too late now!)

On the one hand, I do have enough faith in humanity to hope that he would have changed over the years. I would hope for the best, rather than fearing for the worst.

I did once confront a bully (albeit only a couple of years after the bullying) and was massively surprised to find that he apologised to me for the bullying the next day.

On the other, it is a huge shame that you were not able to get any help for it at the time. If a woman living in a street had a brief relationship with a next-door neighbour and he began being very hostile afterwards, then surely she could do something about that, maybe via a quiet chat from the police?

I second the suggestion to get counselling.

OP, I really really hope you do get help regarding this. You've said you think things over and over - that's not necessarily always helpful as without knowing, we can get stuck and fixed on one point, and that becomes our "truth" when the same event reflected back by a decent therapist, may look entirely different.

The way you're reacting to this, as posted above, isn't notmal. And to attempt to get people onside by describing him as abusive will backfire hugely on you. Imagine this is your brother. And some girl from nearly 20 years ago, with whom he had a short squeeze with, starts telling everyone he was abusive on the basis of what you've described above - an unpleasant row and a frosty aftermath - you'd think "weirdo, get over it!"

Clearly this relationship DID have a profound effect on you and I really hope you're able to lay this ghost to rest. But honestly, this is about you, not him.

I feel for you, OP. When you've had a very damaging experience, it can be deeply upsetting to suddenly find the perpetrator pop up out of the blue.

The fact that you feel sick every morning, and think you might suffer noticeable physical effects if you see this man, suggests you might want to seek more active treatment than the counselling you've had so far, as PP suggest.

Empathic, safe space, listen-and-paraphrase counselling has its place. It's not so useful if you are re-experiencing a deeply upsetting life event, or have developed a phobic style response to a situation (for want of a better term).

If you can look for a therapist who offers cognitive behavioural therapy, or something like EFT, these more active therapies might help you gain mastery over these feelings.

The goal would be to take charge of the situation as you perceive it, so you that you can hold your head high, go about your business, and not let this person do any more damage than he's already done.

*I couldn't get away from for far longer. I also had a really bad illness at the time which made coping with everything much more difficult and I met him at a time in my life when I was already pretty emotionally fragile. - Don't you think that maybe you are lumping all the bad things that happened in that year into one? I'm NOT saying that you weren't emotionally abused by this man, but that the whole horrid year is somehow linked to him?
I would go with a PP and IF he approaches you, sail past with head high and no recognition. IF he talks to you, 'I have no interest in talking to you'.

You may find that the fear of being cornered by him is worse than the reality. At least, I hope it is for you.

I get it... I think if you say you were raped people almost know what has happened EA people don't..

Remember you do hold the power now, you are in your hometown, you are reminded of when you were a teen not an adult.

You can handle this all differently. Also remember he is married he doesn't want his apple cart upsetting ..

You have changed he has, you are second guessing how he is thinking and what he is going to want from you..

Just hold your head up high..You have moved on and are happy ..

Oh I feel for you. Even 20 years after I left him, my emotionally abusive ex BF can still reduce me to a quiver inside. We have LOTS of mutual friends, most of whom are perfectly aware of the gist of what he did to me, if not the detail.

I moved half way across the country after we split (and later, half way around the world) I remember only too well the absolute terror and panic the first time I found out he had moved to the same town as me. But you know what? When our paths finally crossed, he was not the monster of my nightmares, but actually a sad and pathetic man who had, in the long run, not been able to keep control over me. As the years have gone by I have realised that I actually hold some power over him. I know an awful lot of about his past behaviours that don't match the carefully constructed persona he presents to the world. Should I wish, I could tell his wife about sexual assaults and financial abuse. He is, somewhere in the back of his mind, aware of this, so he tends to be on the rare occasions we meet very careful to treat me with the same polite distance I use with him.

I won't divulge this to his wife of course, but he does not know that. I will however, if she ever leaves him, believe absolutely anything she chooses to reveal about their marriage.

OddFodd - he didn't rape her.

OP - OK, I'm a bit on the fence with this one.

Part of me is thinking someone 16 years ago (who you weren't really in a relationship with but spent time with for 2 months) was pretty awful to you. So of course you are feeling a bit nervous about bumping into them again now.

But...it was a long time ago, you were both young, it's not really clear what he did but I believe he was nasty in some way. So it's rather like meeting a bully from years ago.

Best thing ever - just pretend you don't even remember him. It saves any awkwardness and letting it build up into something big in your mind, and if he does remember you and is still a nasty person, it'll get right up his nose. :-)

I totally get that slug. Might explain why my x is civil and polite in a distantly formal way to me now. He has a gf (the poor woman) and if they split then there will be two of us out there who know that he's not the suited, booted, mild mannered respectable professional......

Just read your post where you say he yelled at you during sex becuase you didn't want people to hear. Wow. Awful. He sounds horrible. That is very traumatic. You consented to what you thought would be normal sex but you didn't consent to being yelled at, or at the receiving end of so much anger. He decided everybody should hear you and there was no compromise. Just total disrespect from a bully.

it is very complicated but some people really won't see it so I wouldn't try to make them see it.

I think maybe a different psychotherapist could help. To begin with I just vented and that got me to the point where I was ready to look inwards and ask the really tough questions. I needed to vent first though but it didn't really put me in a different mindset.

I see you say you were vulnerable anyway when you met him. That type always swoops down like a predator to vulnerable prey. It is always the way. I had just been dumped by a man I really loved when I met my x. I didn't really want to go out with my X, in fact, I cried on our first or second 'date'. I really didn't care if I scared him away. But oddly, very, very oddly really if you think about it, it did not scare him away. He like the predator these types are rubbed his hands together with glee and thought hooray, a woman with a damaged self-esteem going through a crisis, yum, just my type.

Luckily though I feel like I am in a completely different place now and have been for years. My x tried to strangle me and I can face him now and it doesn't take a bother out of me to face him and exchange a minute's small talk now. I am so different, it's like he did it to a different person. You can get to that place too but you might have to persevere with counselling. I might be a bit LA but I couldn't sell the psychotherapy highly enough. It did me the world of good. Not immediately. At first I didn't really feel any different but then I noticed I was able to react to things differently, view things differently. It really helped.

Also, just to pick up on something you say, psychotherapy is very different to just going through the thoughts in your head.

For example, my psychotherapist asked me why I put up with being treated like that? None of my friends had ever asked such a difficult question. They nodded sympathetically when I told them how bad it had been after I left. I had maintained a facade of happiness until then, but the psychotherapist with her totally serious face asked me 'why did you tolerate it?' and it was the very question I'd been pushing to the back of my head. Everything he'd done to me had been doing endless repetitive laps of my head and they deafened the one most relevant question of all. why I had put up with it for 8 years. When she asked me I felt such anger! a flash of anger! But I think as I later read, gloria steinham said, 'if something pisses you off, you need to look at that''. and it was so true. So, the psychotherapist pushed through the repetitive cycle of thoughts and forced me literally to answer a new question. She forced some new thoughts in my head.

I know I can be a bit evangelical about psychotherapy but I had a good psychotherapist. Although, I didn't like her at the time! I used to sit there thinking 'it's ok for you, huh, you think it's so easy, whaddooyoo know'.

The most valuable thing I learnt in therapy was that nobody can MAKE you feel anything.

However they treat you or act around you, it's up to you how you choose to respond to it.

Hard to accept and get to grips with, but once I realised that I hold the power in my own mind and body, I became a lot more in control of things.

I agree with all the PPs suggesting you get some help for your own sake.
I would also say that it's a bad idea to start telling everyone now that this man is a woman-hating abuser who did terrible things to you. If it turns out that he either completely believes he did nothing wrong or that he is still a really nasty, manipulative, misogynistic bully and he finds out what you have been saying, he might decide to fight back - either by spreading stories about you (that you are mad, obsessed, did terrible things to him, etc) or even by taking legal action against you for slander.
(I am not saying that I don't believe you. It sounds like he was horrible to you. But getting into a he-said/she-said battle after this many years is not going to do you any good.)

Hello again, I had a really busy day with work yesterday and I was going to log on to say thanks for the continued support and I was really busy but then it turned out I was too busy to even do that . My apologies. There's nothing like a 22 hour working day with only one ten minute break and a race to a deadline to take your mind off stuff though! I felt better for a bit and then I went to a friend's tonight after getting a few hours sleep in the day and I felt happy and didn't think about him :). I even laughed quite a lot. Although I drunk wine while everyone else was on the tea. Maybe not ideal but I didn't get drunk.

Yesterday, I was thinking that next time I logged on I'd read everyone's posts again and reply to them properly (individually as much as is possible) as I'm feeling a bit more calm and the anxiety feels a bit more low level but I think I might have to leave that until tomorrow. I'm a bit overwhelmed with the number of responses and the amount of helpful suggestions and ideas but am very grateful that people are offering advice and being supportive.

I think a lot of the anxiety is coming from not knowing how I should or am allowed to react if I see him and I feel I can't go out locally until I have decided on how I'm going to approach this. But I still feel I don't want to be "silenced". That was part of the trauma the first time around. I don't want to have to pretend that I just "had a negative experience". It was more than that, no matter how long ago it was, how young we were and how short lived the "relationship" was. I'm not looking to make his life unpleasant (I'm really not - I wouldn't be saying anything if he hadn't moved here) but at the same time I want to feel I have the right to openly talk about my own life without any whitewashing for the benefit of someone I have no loyalty to. I am also a regular reader of a few feminist blogs that aren't primarily focused on abuse but do sometimes cover the issue and they are very much of the mindset that people have to speak out about their experiences of abuse if we are ever going to tackle the issue as a society and I agree with this. At the moment it is the done thing to just put up and shut up, because you probably won't be believed, because people will think you're petty and vindictive, because you weren't raped or beaten up and so it wasn't that bad, even just because it's not a fun topic of conversation. But to some degree we allow abusive people to keep abusing when we don't stand up and say "actually no, you did this and that wasn't ok". Many people can't speak openly because the person is the mother or father of their children but I don't have that restriction. I don't feel I need counselling (but I will look into it nonetheless as so many of you still think I could benefit from it so maybe I'm wrong). I feel like the problem would be solved over night if I was just allowed to say "he did this to me and it wasn't my fault"; to my friends and family and to him. I feel the stress is coming from having to pretend it didn't happen or it wasn't a big deal.