Going no contact with ex - advice ?

[piperchapman44]

I left my ex a year ago. He was abusive in the relationship and badly assaulted me in front of dc after it. He is now on a perpetuators course and hasn't been violent since, but his verbal and emotional abuse is steadily escalating again. I've had a lightbulb moment where I realise I am still in this cycle of abuse. in fact it's been so bad the last few days i would say that mentally I am right back in the place I was when he lived with me.

I am going to send him an email tonight saying this - just wanted advice on whether this was a good plan?

Dear fuckface.

The current situation is unmaneageable for me and the dc. dd has anxiety problems at night which stem from her anxiety over seeing you react when you are in contact with me when she is with you.

Therefore, I wish to proceed with divorce asap to sort out our joint assets (house) and I also wish to now have no contact with you, save for essential contact by email only over the dc.

I will no longer answer any texts or phone calls from you. I will not read or reply to any emails that are not solely about the dc. Your phone calls to dc can be at xx time. You are no longer to come in the house at handover time, this must be done at the door and if I carry on being upset by these they will have to be done via a third party. These are the times you have the dc xx and xx we can arrange these more formally as part of the divorce.

piper

It's very unlike me to be so hard but I feel it's about time I laid out some firm boundaries.

More to the point - will this work? Will it rescue me from incessant bullying and abuse or is this my life until dc are grown?

I can;t afford a divorce but I figure I can get a cheap loan and then repay on settlement? I just can't take another day of this anymore. he came in today and was vile as I had;t washed up so gave him a chipped mug!! Said it showed everything about my respect for him. FFS.

Have you contacted your mobile provider to see if you can get a transcript print out of all his text messages? Might be worth giving a copy to your solicitor for a cease and dissist letter. Also if you need to go down the contact centre route in the future it will be more evidence of his abuse.

Well done in standing up to this nut case. 'I only hit you because you refused intimacy'..... well that makes everything all right then, isn't it! Twat.

Please don't be guilt tripped into trying to white wash him to your dd. It won't protect her. She is going to have a life long relationship with a difficult man with peculiar morals and standards and by him showing her horrible upsetting behaviour towards you and you trying to reframe it to protect her image of him is just going to confuse the hell out of her. Particularly if he likes to manipulate her to put pressure on you. (poooor daddy's so sad that nasty mummy does so and so...) She needs to learn from you that because someone pulls the sad card on you doesn't mean you're obligated to forgive everything and immediately give them their own way.

She is going to need to learn strong boundaries with him, and to be clear that some behaviour is never acceptable or excusable, that people's feelings are their responsibility and not hers/yours to 'make better' and she needs to learn those boundaries from watching you have them and be willing to explain simply and gently why. You also don't want her learning from him that this is the right way to treat mummy.

Thank you rumble that really resonates with me.

Rumble has a very good point.
I always drum into my 18 YO DD that she is NOT responsible for anyone else's happiness.
The only person's happiness she is responsible for is her own.
Thankfully she ended her recent relationship after this revelation. Bless her.

On an iPhone 4, to block someone go to contacts, go to his number, scroll down and at the bottom it says Block this caller. Job done.

Make it your absolute priority to shut him down. You've told him you will only read emails re the dcs. That's it. No responses to any other thing he says.

I'd certainly keep the message where he says he 'only' hit you because you withdrew intimacy. This is a CRIME. No matter what he thinks justifies it, nothing actually does.

OP, you said that your DD witnessed him hitting you.

If you try to whitewash his behaviour to her, you are doing her a grave disservice and teaching her that hitting people is okay, if they're not doing what you want.

Can anyone at the DV hub help with how to talk to her about what happened? Not sure how old she is but sounds from your posts like she's fairly young, so this is a really crucial development time and it will affect her future relationships greatly.

Once you stick to your boundaries and no longer allow him to control you through her, I wouldn't be surprised if he loses interest in contact with her, which will be by far safer - emotionally and physically - for her.

DD is 7. I don't think I whitewash his behaviour to me. She knows that the hitting was wrong, we had police, social services, and I asked the school to help her. So she knows that. But she does worry about his sadness and I find it hard to talk to her about that so I think I will have a chat with her about how adults are responsible for their own happiness, no one else is. I find it quite a hard thing to convey to her , as she really understsands empathy and is also naturally very empathetic and sensitive, and it's hard to switch off worrying about someone that you love. She feels so sad about the day he hit me in front of her as well, she's told me a couple of times recently that she thought i was going to die.

I don't want to let her down, and I have considered a psychologist, but she has no "issues" that would make a referral obvious, she is doing really well at school, has friends etc, although this term has been a bit wobbly but that could be related to other issues. But I don't want her to get some sort of ptsd in the future because I haven't handled it properly. For e.g., I recently had an accident at home, I was ok, just very hurt, and she came to me and asked if I needed her to call 999, I reassured her I was just hurt but nothing that needed the hospital, i just needed to cope for a few minutes, and then she disappeared to her room and got dressed. I couldn;t work out if the getting dressed was being helpful, because I was hurt, or if she was withdrawing from a stressful situation, iyswim.

On another note, I've just watched the film "About Time", which has had me shedding buckets of tears, mainly about how i can't go back and make decisions differently (like not leaving me the first time he hit me, when I was pregnant, or just before dd would have remembered any of this) and has completely resolved me to press ahead and not live in this limbo land anymore, where I worry about changing the house/booking holidays etc cos of what he might say. I need to be completely free to make my own decisions regardless of what he will say and just not have him make any impact on my life.

Weirdly also the novel I'm reading has domestic violence in it - unexpectedly so. So things are conspiring to help me along this route!

I've just heard through a mutual friend that HE has filed for divorce - a fortnight ago?? WTF

Do I need to do anything right now?

Is there any way I can check this?

I have no idea about divorce but wont you get a letter in the post about it and if he has filed is there ay way to contest his reasons behind the divorce if you feel his reasons are untrue?

I'm not going to contest. It's just that he's told one thing to someone and then outraged that i might file.

If he really has filed then you should get paperwork soon.
Check everything.
If you had police etc.. involved you could be entitled to legal aid so look into that.
Then you can get a solicitor on board to check everything for you.
If you just want the divorce and it all seems fair then fill out and sign the paperwork.
If it doesn't seem fair then you can always counter this with your own petition.
Don't panic though. It's just paperwork.
Be glad he is doing it and covering the costs.
Just don't sign anything until you have had it checked over properly.
If he's an abuser he will trying to pull a fast one somewhere along the way.

Do you know which court he is likely to have used? You may be able to get some help from your local county court if he has filed there.

With his track record, ignore the idea he may have filed until you actually receive the papers. Go ahead and file yourself. He may be just stalling.

Good luck

Ive just rung the court but without a reference number they won't give out any info. Just want to know if it's true. I don't mind what reasons he gives - he's so outrageous anyway that I just want it done - as long as him doing it doesn't give him the opportunity to string it out?

Person he told he is very unlikely to lie to. He is very likely to lie to me.

Have an appointment with my solicitor in late Feb - as she is going away - just spoke to her and she said if I get the papers I should go and see her colleague covering her work while she is away to check over the forms and reply.

just

aaarggh. He's such a prize twat.