At home things totally fell apart, more than I would have thought was possible, and had to be put back together. I think it was not a coincidence that things started to get hard soon after my last post, because I finally felt really secure (both in terms of my work and in terms of personal self-worth) with two grants under my belt, and that gave me the courage and the time to deal with my (now ex-) husband's behavior. Before then, I just kept my head up, being optimistic about him (as I tend to be about everything, though I've lost some of that now) and focusing on how I could change to make things better. But things kept getting worse and I finally realized it was unsustainable and unhealthy.
To explain part of what was going on at the time, here are some excerpts from a letter I wrote to him in 2015 (keep in mind that below, while trying to be realistic and clear and specific, I am putting some of these examples in the best possible light because I was trying to help him change his behavior rather than make him feel bad, and because I loved him):
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"I have been asking you to seek counseling for several years
and first asked you to not yell at me anymore at least 15 years ago. The first
few years we were married, I used to cry relatively frequently, occasionally
for hours at a time, when you were inconsiderate or disrespectful to me and
failed to apologize or acknowledge the problem. I tried to tell you and show
you how much it hurt me ... I’ve
explained how your words or actions were disrespectful and you’ve repeatedly
turned the conversation back to the original issue that the discussion or minor
disagreement was about, asking me why that issue is so important to me and why
I won’t just drop it and move on. I’ve explained that the original issue was
not the real issue and I have dropped it and moved on, but that your treatment
of me was the problem that needed to be addressed. You seemed to hear and
listen to that argument sometimes, but then a few minutes later you sometimes
would bring up the original issue again; it is not clear to me if you had
forgotten the idea I’d brought up about your behavior/words or if you simply didn’t
believe me that that was the issue.
It has been very hard for me to keep having this same series
of events occur, and I have been unsure about what to do to get you to listen
and understand. I began to feel exhausted and frustrated each time this
conversation occurred, and after the kids came, I felt I didn’t have the energy
for it much anymore and tried to not let your behavior affect me so much
emotionally. In other words, I have tried to “not be so sensitive”, both
because I was exhausted and because you keep trying to convince me that I am
“oversensitive” and I had begun to believe you. Mostly, though, the reason that
I reduced my efforts to talk to you about your problematic behavior was to
protect my mental health. Your repeated disrespectful, critical, and
disparaging comments had gotten to me and I began to think that it was partly
my fault. I felt that there were two sides to every argument and that I must be
doing something wrong that was contributing to our problems, and I was always
looking for ways to improve myself and thinking of ways in which your behavior
wasn’t really your fault. I worked hard to feel sorry for you instead of angry
at your actions, since I thought that your behavior against us was really a
sign that you weren’t comfortable with yourself and that must be very hard for
you.
I worked hard to try to work around your problems, such as making
sure you were always well fed, since you being hungry seems to make it more likely
that you will yell at us. These last few years, I didn’t cry much anymore and
didn’t bring up most instances of your poor behavior since that often seemed to
lead to you repeating your disrespectful comments or explaining why you thought
it was my fault. Even worse, sometimes when I confronted you, you would admit
that your behavior was inappropriate, and then you would say that you were a
bad person; this would prompt me to tell you how good you are and how much I
love you but still leave you in a worse mood than before and more likely to
yell at us or otherwise disrespect us again in the near future. I developed
many strategies, like trying to get you to eat a snack and taking over with the
kids without hesitation whenever I felt you might be starting to become
frustrated and at risk of snapping and yelling at us. I realized recently that
these efforts were taking up a lot of my time and energy and you weren’t even
noticing anymore. I still want to improve myself and I am sure there are many
aspects of this situation that I could and should have handled in a different
and better way. I am sorry that I didn’t know how to do that or I wasn’t strong
enough to do that. I now realize that accommodating your needs at the expense
of everyone else’s, making excuses for you, blaming myself or the kids for your
actions, and generally enabling you to emotionally abuse us may help us all on
a very temporary basis and may help mostly prevent physical abuse in the
moment, but that this strategy is not a long term solution and in fact makes it
worse in the long term. I am sorry for my enabling behavior and I promise to
work as hard as I can to not to do it anymore.
.... I think we can get past this, but we need you to understand.
Thus, I want to share stories/examples of your behavior and how it affected us. ...
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-- When [LP] was either 2 or recently 3, he did something that caused some minor problem,
maybe he flushed something down the toilet, I am not sure but I remember
thinking that even at that age he should have known better based on what we had
been trying to teach him (though I was not really angry with him). You got very
upset and started yelling at [LP]. I remember he was sitting on the mattress
and you were also crouched down on your knees on the mattress berating him in a
loud, very scary voice. You were very close to his face and you seemed very
physically intimidating to me (I imagine even more so to him). I tried to talk
to you but you weren’t listening and I feared that it was harmful to [LP]’s
mental state to have memories like that. I tried to pull you away physically
but you pushed me hard. Even though I started the physical interaction, that was
scary to me. I thought that you would snap out of it if I just made you turn
away but you didn’t. That was when I started to wonder what I would do if I had
to live apart from you to keep us all safe. [Ed. note: I learned this in Catholic school, that you don't have to get divorced, you can just live apart if it's unsafe. While technically true and somewhat comforting at the time, I wish I had learned something more specific about how to deal with domestic violence rather than focusing on whether or not to get divorced.] I remember thinking of safe houses
and I thought that was ridiculous, but I figured if I had to I would go to a
hotel. However, an incident of that caliber never happened again (or at least
not for a very long time) so I convinced myself it was an isolated incident. ...
Before this year, even though you had pushed me and
restrained me and driven recklessly (you would characterize it as simply fast,
but I indicated I viewed it as reckless and scary) with me and the kids in the
car, which are all essentially acts of violence, I believed you would never
actually hurt any one of us physically. I had felt there was a clear line that
you had never crossed. (I didn’t see that the pushing and restraining and
reckless driving were already across the relevant line.) That all changed
several months ago, when you got very frustrated and angry at [ELP] for
misbehaving. You yelled at her in front of me and [LP] in a very scary,
threatening voice, making your face red and appearing to be out of control, and
threw a couch cushion at [ELP] while she was sitting quietly on the couch
waiting in fear for you to stop yelling. I watched that couch cushion squarely
hit [ELP] and I felt helpless and scared and confused about what to do. I
think I hugged her afterwards and tried to make sure she was okay but I was
just hoping that the situation would go away and she would forget because she
is young. ... That also made me notice or be more aware of other
violent acts of yours both previously and recently, and I want you to be aware
of the following examples.
-- Sometime
last year, the kids were arguing upstairs and I thought it was well past the
point where an adult was needed to intervene, but you did not. To prevent me
from going upstairs, you wrapped your arms around me and held me in place. I
said [Ed. note: shouted] “let me go, let me go” but you didn’t. After I struggled for awhile [Ed. note: trying to decide how I could kick him to make him let go, I thought I was really trapped and I began to panic] you
began to take me slightly more seriously and let me go.
Reader, keep in mind that I had loved this man since we were 16, and I was raised Catholic, and I am not a quitter. I thought that if he would only get some help, we would be able to turn it around. I started talking to my friends about all of this, and it took a lot of talking. One of my gradeschool friend's mother died, and her and I and another grade school friend started going out together more (though they live more than an hour away). They, and later my sister, helped me realize how serious it was. Meanwhile, my postdoc was in a long-distance relationship and never made many friends in the area, so he was free a lot, and I talked with him a lot. He became my best friend in town. For a long time he tried to only be supportive of the marriage, and not say much negative, though he did mention he didn't like it when he saw me being restrained one day. One day I told him that about a particular incident and how I had to make myself quiet and small to reduce the chance of getting yelled at or worse, and I asked him to help me. He spoke up more after that, though still supported me staying married, until I decided otherwise. They'll be more about that in the next post.
I am writing this post using mostly my old words because I want to remember how it was. It was so hard and confusing. When I would ask people for advice I would often get advised to do exactly what I was doing (thinking of what his feelings were, helping him more, not "overreacting"), which was what was making the problem worse. Before I wrote the above letter, I felt like an idiot, looking up what counts as domestic violence, emotional abuse, and physical abuse on the internet. I think that if he had suddenly done some of these things out of nowhere, it would have been clear that it was abuse. But it got worse so slowly, and there was so much context of what had happened before and so much baggage about what it meant if he was an abuser. I always thought that I should be strong because he was the one hurting the most (who would want to be an abuser on purpose, after all, that's worse than being abused). But eventually I realized how much he was hurting the kids (LP referred to the version of daddy that tended to go to the zoo with us as the "yelling daddy"--I had no idea LP knew the pattern that well, because I thought I was protecting him). That's when I realized I wasn't even helping him by trying to make things easier for him, because he needed to learn to do better, I was able to write the above letter. More on the results next time.
