Abusive relationship 30 years ago

[DorisTrellis]

In counselling now about difficult relationship with grown son I realise his father was abusive to us both. How to feel strong and powerful now when I was so manipulated and powerless then? I need to forgive myself for not protecting my son as a child to move on with him now. Anyone recognise this?

I’m afraid I can’t be of a massive help here, but I feel some of what you feel. I walked out of my office and sat there listing to myself what I have managed since I left, and who I am now.
Please remember that you were in a very hard situation, one that it is not easy to escape from. How are you and your son now?
Forgiving yourself is not easy. It takes one step at a time and we all cope in different ways.

Thankyou so much for this reply. There’s lots to mend. I can’t believe I let his power continue so long. Well done to you for your good life, and thanks.

Yes a bit. I think I've been in denial about how bad DD's F has been to both of us. I think it's really useful to be able to recognise and talk to your child about the impact, for example I'm quite honest with DD about her anxiety not being about her now but more than likely comes from feeling unsafe as a baby / child when her F raged and I cried (I thought I protected her from it but I probably didn't as much as I would have liked). Also I recognise that I did get out and I have created a good life for us since. It's tough. I guess I stayed because I didn't want DD to have her parents split up, so also I was doing what I thought was my best at the time, even though I see it differently in hindsight. The Body Keeps The Score is a great book explaining the effects of trauma and how to heal it that might be helpful.

I'm still unpacking my previous relationship. Using online resources like the freedom programme and hidden hurt has helped with an insight into what happened.

www.freedomprogramme.co.uk/

www.hiddenhurt.co.uk/index.html

Arming yourself with information and using your counselling should help you find peace, or at least knowledge that you aren't alone.

I think it is very difficult - but let me put something to you.

The law on domestic abuse has changed very, very recently. So coercive control became an offence in 2016, I think. This means that understandings of coercive control are very, very recent. Evan Stark wrote a ground-breaking book on it in 2007. The point about understanding coercive control is that it sees domestic abuse as systematic, and as integrated into every day life - it is not necessarily physical violence although it can include this, but a whole way of controlling someone which includes indulgences and nice times so you do not know which way is up. It is worth reading more on.

One of the points about coercive control is that it is a kind of creep, the relationship starts off normal (otherwise you would not enter it), and as the perpetrator gets to know you, the strategies are tailored at an individual level to control you. Because the perpetrator knows what works. Most domestic abuse involves some form of coercive control and the point is that it is very hard to spot when you are in it because you are spending all your time responding and surviving and meeting the controller’s needs (plus looking after your house and child(ren) to the standard expected.

Now think about this - Women’s Aid was set up about forty years ago, when domestic abuse was still seen very much in the framework of battered wives. Even then, it was very hard for women to leave because of the need to make arrangements for the children (concerns that dad would have the children alone) and how to support themselves. There is a lot of writing on the ‘why does she not just leave’ myth.

So if coercive control is hard to notice until you are stuck in it, and domestic abuse was only beginning to be properly understood and provided for thirty years ago (and there is still a lot of work to do), don’t you think you should be a bit kind to yourself that you did not see what you know today? You are doing something amazing by going to counselling with your son now and engaging with what caused your difficult relationship. That is really brave because it must raise old trauma and many people would close off because it would be too difficult.

I hope your son does not blame you because I imagine you did all you could to raise him and help him be himself in the world - you are still supporting him now to do that. The blame lies with the perpetrator.

Try and disentangle what you know about domestic abuse now (and being out of the situation, I hope) and what you knew (and could have known) then. It is really hard to look back and see that you were abused because you have to reappraise everything you thought about your partner and your marriage. On some level you probably knew at the time but had no wider narratives about your experiences to understand. Your son does have these wider narratives and is trying to understand, and he is doing that with you. I think that is worth a lot and I hope being open with each other and kind to yourself as well as him will allow you both to start to heal.

Please don’t think I’ve done anything amazing. Its just little things like having a job and a home.

These replies are totally my experience- Evarard and Katara especially- I will read and re read them. I have been in denial - and because I wanted to see myself as powerful took responsibility for all the damage. Your replies make it easier to see myself as evolving. I needed to be perfect too! I wish my son was in counselling with me - but my journey has already helped our relationship- I’m less a heap of guilt. But it’s useful to recognise his anxiety as related. I am treading carefully. I KNEW mumsnet would be good! Squall, I’m impressed, and you reached out to me, thanks x ps I started looking at FP last night.

PS should I read the replies in tears

And PPS I was 30 then, 66 now - how did I let it go on so long???!

Thats what we all ask. It was so hard having someone say to me that it didn’t happen because it happened for seventeen years.

I am sorry I misread the point about counselling with your son. I still think looking at what happened and how it has affected you and your relationship with your son is a brave thing to do. And as you say, it is helping, so you should be proud of yourself, not beating yourself up.

Someone said to me - when I asked a version of why did I stay - she said to me where else would you have been? I had married in good faith, there were DC, I was doing my best to make things work. That is what we are expected to do. So where else would I have been?

The question is not how did you let it go on for so long, but why he did it for so long? (But you will never find an answer to that question, so it is a rabbit hole). You ‘let it go on for so long’ because it was your marriage, you believed in it and tried to make it work, surely, as we all did. I don’t think there is one lightbulb moment where you realise and end it, leaving is a process and of course, the perpetrator has put a lot of work in to making sure you don’t understand and that it is hard to leave.

And how you saw yourself as coping at the time, that is what helped you survive until you were able to leave.

And yes Squall the ‘it did not happen’; the perpetrator has also put a lot of effort into maintaining their sense of self as not an abuser. I went through a phase of thinking if ex acknowledged it, it would make it real and that would somehow be better - because he carries on like somehow everything was fine (whilst still crossing boundaries at every opportunity and pretending to be Mr Nice and Reasonable). It is still just a way of distorting my truth and gas-lighting. Whereas I know it happened and to an extent, is still happening. I have a very physical reaction of aversion at handover, because my body knows it happened and is still happening.

I was involved in a WA support group for a while and there were ladies there who came for support but were not going to leave, that was their choice. Maybe one day they will, but equally, marriage can be a tie which people feel strongly bound to, for all sorts of financial and social reasons, and those values can also be used to keep someone in a situation. The truth is that leaving is hard, and a massive step, and that is when the healing can start (aside from when you have to see the person and it gets a step back).

Anyway, I wish you well

Big Huggles to you Doris Trellis xxxxx

Thanks both and big hugs to all of you too what wonderful women xx

Katara Jean - that’s such a good flip- not why did I stay but why did he keep doing it - and then letting go of that because the only interest in that is how in general society needs to change to make better men and protect women and kids better. I can’t say enough how useful your posts have been to me. I’ve printed them out!

[Edited by MNHQ to remove name]

now you will make me cry! I think you are right about it being a societal issue, yes.

Hi Doris,
I just wanted to offer you some support and say that I think I can relate to some of the feelings you might be having. I was with my ex-partner for 7 years and looking back I wish I'd left so much sooner, and for this I punish myself for the time I wasted with him, it feels like I've lost a chunk of my life. I'm still, only now gaining more insights into just how controlling he was, and unfortunately in some ways it reinforces just how he tried to make me feel with his constant put-downs, as it makes me feel like an idiot for allowing it to happen. I'm angry at myself for not enforcing boundaries, for letting myself become isolated and tip-toeing around his moods, but I also know that it's so difficult to see what's happening when you're in the middle of it, if you haven't been raised with knowledge of this kind of abuse, and haven't been taught the skills to stand up for yourself. If your situation was anything like mine, there were also the good times where you would be lavished with affection, which of course is also part of the controlling behaviour, inducing feelings of guilt and confusion for wanting to get away. The important thing is that you got out, and you're working on the healing process now. I try to remind myself that it's inevitable to go through some lows during the counselling process, it's a process of grieving, but through it you will find ways of coping with what has happened to you and come out stronger. Good luck x

Thankyou that is exactly how I feel. I struggle with guilt, even thinking about myself rather than my grown up son ( who of course has his own battle with the impact of his dads bullying) gives me guilt- but the counsellor is good and, tbh, all your Mumsnet comments have been incredibly supportive and helpful because it stops it feeling like a private, personal thing which I attracted or facilitated, but a phenomenon, a systematic behaviour which many women experienced, I can’t thank you all enough.

It is not a personal thing that you somehow attracted at all. If you are able to get a copy of Evan Stark’s book on Coercive Control (I think the subtitle is How men entrap women in personal life), you will see there is a chapter which looks at the history of the way men have controlled women. It used to be through laws and restrictions on their behaviour, education and opportunities; now it is at an intimate level. It makes a lot of sense to me, anyway.

The other book which is often recommended on here is Lundy Bancroft ‘Why Does He Do That: inside the minds of controlling men’ or something like that (going from memory here). Bancroft too situates domestic abuse within wider inequalities in society.

That said, not all men are abusers so it is a choice on the part of perpetrators to abuse the social position they have and not work with women towards equality and freedom from abuse. This starts in the private sphere. As a woman, you probably took it for granted that your husband believed you were equal and deserved the same freedom from abuse that he did. That is what society leads you to believe. So you have a double whammy of abuse being perpetrated against you but also the difficulty of seeing this or expressing this because we think women are equal. So of course you think it is your fault. It is not until you are in a situation of domestic abuse/coercive control - or even more, once you get out of it - that you realise that it could happen to anyone, it is not just something that happens in the papers or on the TV but to women in all walks of life, because it happened to you and not some other person. And you did nothing wrong.

I am not explaining myself at all well.

On top of that, of course is the wish that it had not happened, that everything had been fine (and maybe you could have done just one more thing to make it fine...). Whereas it was not going to be fine, no matter what you did/do.

Underneath the guilt is probably a harder emotion which is sadness and grief at not having the marriage you thought you had and wanted. In a sense, it is easier to hold on to guilt because that implies some kind of agency, that you could have done something different or better. Whereas it was what it was and there is no chance for it not to have happened as it did - and there was and is nothing you can do about it.

Well, there is something you can do, I think, which is live your best life from now on, being the person you want to be. Speak loud and clear (or softly and gently) about what you have learnt so others are not afraid to walk in your footsteps. Embrace the life you have now, the small things which mean you are in charge (so sitting here on MN instead of making sure the dishes are all done neatly, though I need to do that too). Be kind to yourself

I guess the corollary of what I am saying is that perpetrators are from all walks of life and do not come with a label on their foreheads.

My experience of growing up in an abusive home and having two abusive relationships myself is that the abusers didn't have an active campaign of abuse, they were just fucked up for various reasons (own experience of abuse in two cases) and their fucked up-ness and emotional dysregulation resulted in them being abusive rather than them seeing out in a planned way. It was easy for me then to fall into the "rescuer" role of my childhood in thinking I could help them change rather than walking away as someone with better boundaries or without the pressure of female socialisation to be nice and help others might have done. I constantly instill into my DD when someone shows you who they are, believe them. I wish someone had said it to me.

Yes, he constantly said to both of us, 'But I love you'.

I was in a controlling and emotionally abusive marriage for 17 years and finally got out 2 years ago. I have also struggled with the guilt that my children could have enjoyed a better life if I had just been stronger.

My counsellor put it this way... she pointed out that I was incredibly strong to stay in the marriage. I was strong when I encouraged him to seek help, when I challenged him, when I accepted my punishments. when I protected my children from his abuse as much as I could, when I held down a job while doing everything else. I was so strong in that home because I was dealing with so much - more than most people could ever stand. I was strong - really strong. I kept trying.

Then I was strong to leave. I did something that many women never have the strength to do.

Now, we have the strength to rebuild our relationships over time - to take the steps necessary to make up for any failings (and yes, there are some understandable failings) and to show that we can be reliable and loving.

Your ex does not have the ability to rebuild relationships because he does not have the strength to admit his mistakes. In the long term, you will be the one with a good relationship with our son and he will not. because you have the strength to try.

My experience allowed me to see my own mother's failings toward me as a child. I realised her head was filled with my father's abuse, to the point she couldn't always function well. I now admire her for the times she stood up to him and the way she did all she could understand intense pressure. I am sure your son will recognise this too.

I think one long term relationship I had would fall into the category of being so emotionally dysfunctional as to cause outright harm to me, rather than systematic abuse. I had to actively ignore my ‘rescuer’ socialisation there, but it took years.

I think growing up, I would be hard pushed to know if it was parent’s own dysfunction or planned, both I think. There is surely a point when you pull back if you see how much your behaviour is distressing someone and to continue is an abuse of power when that person is not able to leave for whatever reason.

My ex-husband, that was and is clearly about control and gas-lighting. It is very calculating and determined to the extent that it was quite scary in the attempts to smear and undermine me, when I started to stand up for myself. There was that added element of trying to really wreck my credibility and mental well-being which was concerted and sustained and I do not want to experience again.

The ‘but I love you’ is emotionally loaded. If you love someone, you do not harm them, and if you are harming them, you actively seek to change your behaviour. Those are my thoughts anyway.

and here on Mumsnet, women need to hear your story. Telling it will help you to deal with the emotional fallout, but also it will help women in the earlier stages of their relationships to understand what is happening. That's a gift.

Since the end of my marriage I have walked away from two other relationships - simply because I saw red flags in the very early stages. I am so proud of myself for that. I learned something new and important. There was a positive from my marriage - the ability to know how to protect myself.

Yes I love you women on mumsnet !!! - it's the first time I have used it and I feel supported and also new, valuable insights.
Rememberatime - guilt at not protecting my child has distorted our relationship, but that's what I am working on with the counsellor now. As you say, we were strong in many ways and it was too difficult to think about that time after we left and unpick it to recognise the manipulation and bewilderment engendered, tailored over time. I can now recognise that it wasn't weakness, although I did feel weakened. Already losing the guilt has improved my ability to hear my child's painful memories or current distress, which I couldn't bear previously - and we have had some really good, honest conversations that have really helped me (and I hope him). Many thanks and good luck!