I just want to say a quick thank you this morning to everyone who has posted on these boards over the past few years.
I started looking at this stuff about 5 years ago, and really think that is when I first realised there was something really wrong with my marriage.
I bought the Lundy Bancroft book after seeing it recommended on here. It was then I decided to end it. Although it took 18 months for him to move out - he never hit me but his behaviour became so much worse and the aggression was more and more on the surface.
When I’d been reading these pages, I was fascinated by the posts about “healthy relationships”. Reading about men who came home from work and helped bath the children, who didn’t shout and swear at their wives, who treated it like an equal partnership and not as if women were there to serve them.
I’d never seen a relationship like that growing up and all my relationships (I realise with hindsight!) have been abusive.
When my ex used to rage at me “I’m better than 90% of men in this town” (and his friends are misogynistic wankers as well), I felt some kind of quiet confidence, knowing that there was a whole big world out there, where men did NOT behave like him.
Three years later, the divorce is still not through and I have seen a side to him that is so much worse than I could ever have imagined. That lies he tells (often to my face , about me!) leave me shaking sometimes because it is just so hard to get my head round.
He has made my life as difficult as possible, both by hiding finances and by stopping /changing contact time - because he does not want me to have time alone, we have three DC and really think his aim is to “break” me psychologically.
It won’t happen. I now have a caseworker from a domestic abuse charity (though it took me a LONG time to accept the word abuse as it thought it wasn’t “bad enough). He will not get custody of the children (which is just a threat anyway) and I will be more free of him at some point when the legal stuff is sorted.
There are still days when I feel like giving up as it feels like I am living in a psychological war zone no-one else can see. I am trying the “grey rock” approach, and, to be honest, it seems to be making him worse as he is trying more to get a reaction.
But it will be okay. I have real friends now, I have achieved a lot (after being told for years I couldn’t cope without him 😂) and I see him for the weak man he is.
But I would never have seen or accepted how bad it really was, without reading what women here had written.
People can say there is too much “LTB”
on here, but I needed to read posts on other women’s stories, and those responses, and still do. He made me think that his reality was correct and mine was wrong. Reading posts here helped to counteract that.
So, thank you 