How on earth can I keep us all safe?

[cherrycrumblecustard]

I was going to make this post about "my friend" but honestly, I think I just need to be open about me.

How do you cope? When you live with someone who

will hit (not hard and not enough to bruise but will hityou and also shove, thump things near you and so on)
won't take no for an answer for sex, pulls your pants down as you pull them up, insists, ejaculates when you don't want them to and have asked/begged/pleaded not to
controls EVERYTHING

I need out, but I am TERRIFIED of leaving my children, our children, with him

Am I not wrecking my children's lives?

Goodness no. Your children is why you're doing it. All they need is you, you are their entire world

No, you won't be wrecking anyone's lives.
You're not responsible for being abused.
He is. He is, at the moment, wrecking your life, and of his children.
But you will get out and you will have a great life.

No. You're wrecking them if you stay. Everyone on this thread has told you that. At some point, I hope you also come to that realisation.

I'm scared of when the dust settles and I'm left alone. I know I'll really, really, REALLY miss him. I know I won't be able to listen to some songs. I know I won't be able to go some p,aces.

I think you'll miss him less than you think.

But of course he will leave a lasting impression on your life, you don't just forget someone you've known that long. But your memories and feelings will fade and change.

They'll feel insecure because you are feeling insecure

You're in the midst of this, know what's going on etc and its rocked your feelings, confidence etc

They aren't in the know but children are extremely adept at picking up vibes

You will not wreck their lives if you leave - but you will give them a chance to get to know their strong, confident and courageous mum from a stable and loving new home

Of course you will miss him. You've never been allowed to grow up. He's controlled and managed your whole adult life.

You must feel like you're gong into freefall. While this life is painful, there is safety in knowing what will happen.

I do feel in free fall. Already. Like I'm out without a parachute.

I mean, is it reasonable to still try and salvage something? Like if I make a list of what I want - money, (I don't mean in terms of grabbing but just access to family finances) and sex only when I explicitly say it's okay and other stuff?

Ok, what will you miss about him?

Is it really him or whoever you thought he was when you met?
Or the idea you construct of him so that you don't go mad by staying with him?

Look up cognitive dissonance. It's common in abused people and it allows them to process the abuse and separate it, so that life carries on as normal.
Because otherwise you wouldn't be able to be normal near him. He rapes you.

The thing is that when you do stop separating the two, you won't be able to stay.

Can you, for every nice thing he does or every nice memory, recall the worst he's done to you?
Particularly after you leave?

Let's imagine that you do leave or threaten to leave and he does give you access to money and won't push for sex.
Realistically, how long do you think it will last? How long until he slowly starts controlling your spending or changes the bank account or starts stepping on each boundary?

He can be so kind. He's brilliant if I'm ill. When I was pregnant and being sick he was so loving. Just used to stand there quietly and gently rub my back. I know it sounds like nothing but it made me feel so supported.

I feel safe somehow. I feel like when he's around things are taken care of.

I know you will think I'm awful but I'll miss sex. Not the horrible stuff but when it's good.

Hopefully someone could confirm or correct me, but if you are studying /retraining whilst a lone parent with very young children there are benefits/ grants/ state support available.

I'm sure he can be kind. BuT notice that it's when you're vulnerable and he gets to be in control.

I'm sure you'll miss sex. It's fine.

But to get those things you have to put up with being raped and isolated and not being inn control of your life.
Is it worth it?

No. It's not. I'm just frightened that whatever is out there is worse in some ways.

How can it be worse?

Have you had the feeling of going to bed and knowing that you won't be molested?

I know how ridiculous it must sound when I say that doesn't bother me, but it doesn't. I don't know why. I know it's wrong; I know it should.

I think you're maybe desensitised to it. Your conscious blocked out what was happening long ago. Did it used to bother you more?

Also when sex is nice for you you probably feel affection from him so this may be why you feel you'll miss it?

No. It's always been normal really. I've just been looking back through some old pictures. At first I had to beg him for sex, you see.

It takes an average of seven attempts to leave apparently. Two or three attempts is okay.

I remember my ex being absolutely lovely to me when I was in labour. It didn't make up for all the bad things and I wouldn't want to be in the same room as him now.

The boyfriend before that was an alcoholic who used to sleep regularly with his ex while we were together and would have these episodes where he did unspeakable things. One time I had to sit on him until he fell asleep because I really wasn't sure if he was joking or serious about putting lighter fluid on me when I slept and lighting it I stayed with him for months after that. I thought fondly of him for years. Still, in fact, do occasionally. I don't tell many people that.

I had a friend who one day confessed to me that she thought her boyfriend might be having sex with her when she was asleep only she wasn't sure. But the way she described it it seemed clear that he was. I was horrified and after going around in circles several times I pointed out "But what if he's going out and sleeping with other girls and he gives you some kind of infection?" She looked straight at me with pain in her eyes for the first time in the whole conversation and asked "Do you think it's really possible he's sleeping with other girls?"

None of this relationship stuff makes sense, none of it. It's all tangled up and interwoven and weird and we're all kind of broken with it, I think. The nice parts and the scary parts and the wrong parts all get twisted up and you can't pull them apart.

But

You deserve a good relationship, a healthy one. Even if you don't know what one is. (Why should that preclude you?) Everybody does. You don't need the abuse to get the nice parts. I think that I assumed that was the way it worked for a long time, that it was okay to settle for the person whose abusiveness I could stand, perhaps even that withstanding poor treatment was some kind of mark of strength or love or commitment, but it isn't. It's really hard to get out of that mindset but I think you're getting there with the scary thought that you don't want to look at, the elephant in the room.

I realised later that I have only ever been in love twice. I thought I was in love with my abusive ex, that's why we had a child together, but it wasn't real because he never really loved me back. He said all the right things and for a time he even seemed to do the right things but it was always slightly wrong and the biggest turning point was realising that he could say he "loved me" all he wanted and he could promise to "be a family" and "support me" but he might as well have been speaking Japanese; he had a completely different meaning behind those words and no matter how much I wanted them to match my definitions they never would. He could move mountains in his world and I still wouldn't be happy because we wanted, expected, and ultimately, needed, totally different things..

I loved the alcoholic boyfriend. He was dangerous, he was an absolute mess, but he was not abusive. It's different. And I love my DH. I feel loved back and I cannot describe how different it is to the facsimilie of love I had with XP.

Thank you Bertie for your honest post.

With DH, he's not dangerous, I don't think. He has hurt me but only totally by accident and has been mortified every time. I think being with him is like having a heavy duvet. It's quite comforting but at the same time stifling.

For me control is at the root of abuse. I've been reading and learning about it for so long now that that's what it boils down to, quite sadly.

I find it sad anyway that anybody is so insecure that they feel like they need to control another person. I can totally understand that it feels like a safety blanket at times but it's absolutely stifling.

I think the issue is that control becomes dangerous because when the person fears losing control they can become unpredictable and irrational. Imagine how you'd act if somebody threatened your life or tried to hurt one of your children - you'd probably get violent if you needed to, and it would be justified. Even in law there is a self-defence clause. Violence isn't inhuman or unnatural behaviour, it's within the capabilities of every single person on this planet, it's just behaviour that we save for times of extreme stress. I believe you that your husband wouldn't hurt you in the course of ordinary life or over everyday arguments/slights but the reason why controlling tendencies are dangerous is because a person who is controlling feels this level of fear over losing control, and will use increasingly desperate tactics in order to keep control.

Or here - an analogy which every parent could relate to. Imagine that your child was playing near a river and they slipped and fell. You grab them to stop them falling into the water, and as you're grabbing them, you're not thinking about which body part you're grabbing or how much force you're using or whether you're hurting them. Your only instinct is to grab them, anywhere, anyhow, to stop them from falling. It's necessary and it's not the important part of the question. If you happened to bend back their fingers or leave bruises on their arm or hurt their neck by pulling them up by their clothes, it doesn't matter because the alternative is that you might have lost them. Of course, you would probably apologise to them later and feel bad about the injury but you'd still be glad that you did it overall. And while your emotion would be to feel relieved that they were safe, in the immediate aftermath you might shout angrily at them about playing too near the water or running away because we don't always express fear in the most constructive way, and also, because you really don't want to experience that again.

When a controlling or abusive person experiences a loss of control it hits the same kind of buttons. It doesn't have to be about fear of losing the partner, it can literally just be about loss of control - finding that she's gone against his wishes or having her actively stand up to him or whatever it is - it pushes that button which is really based in fear, not a normal kind of fear which can be managed but the kind of fear which leads a parent to grab any part of their child - the abuser will lash out, whether with words or whether with goading, or silent treatment (with the "punishment" later) or whether it's physical, and nothing about what he's doing matters, all that matters is that she hears, she understands, she listens to the fact that he's the one in control here and he's in charge. He'll surpass his own boundaries and then tell himself that it was okay, it was necessary. The boundary might even shift. That's the problem. The other problem is that it's not at all predictable what happens when the boundary slips - sometimes it's a small increment from the last incident and sometimes it's an absolutely sudden change with catastrophic consequences. Abuse and "extreme control tactics" are not always physical but just because they have never been physical before it does not mean that they never will be. It is just, unfortunately, not easy to tell. Everybody has the potential to be violent given scary enough circumstances. The reality is that loss of control really is that scary to an abuser. You can see it in the way they react to it even in small ways.

Sorry if that's a bit too much.