Why I Stayed and Didn’t Tell
Thursday, March 19, 2009 16:27…. exerted from a larger piece…
I should digress into secrecy, shame and humiliation because as all this was going on, I didn’t tell anyone. I barely told anyone we were physically separated until long after it happened. In fact, for 6 years. Although every now and then, it would spill out in moments of extreme hurt, anger or frustration, I was either afraid or too ashamed to tell anyone. As I write this, this is the very first time I’ve considered spilling out the entire story and it feels very much like a confession.
I knew, as everything was going on, over the years, that his cheating and other abuses were not ok or normal but I still wouldn’t or couldn’t see clear enough to label them for what they were - abuses. Even though, on some level, I knew. I also knew later that his “crazy making”, as a later counselor would call it, was an illness on his part and not mine. I knew from day one that his emotional coldness was a disconnect in the way his brain and thoughts were wired. I KNEW all of that and I knew that those things were likely ‘incurable’ and unchangeable. But for some reason, I still felt like if I could just ride it out, things would get better. And even as I knew that, I also knew that was a classic abusee reason to stay. So I kept quiet because I knew that’s what others would hear.
I also kept quiet, on that part, because when things got better, I didn’t want all of this ‘bad stuff’ marring our reputation as a couple or the way others saw our relationship. In other words, I wanted us to look like the twenty first century, hip, fun, loving Cleavers until we were old and grey in our rockers together on a front porch somewhere. The cognitive dissonance caused by holding these two truths at once - that he would change and that he would NOT change and acting on both simultaneously kept me very torn and in a pattern of justification or looking for future justification. I felt ashamed of all of it.
And then, there was the humiliation. It was humiliating that my own husband would repeatedly ‘choose others over me’, as I saw it then. It was humiliating that he called me names and talked to me like I was nothing, a low life, the scum off the bottom of his shoe. It was humiliating that he saw fit to decide when I was deserving of affection. To admit all of that to myself was extraordinarily humiliating and painful but to admit it to someone else was unthinkable. What would they think of me? I would be just like every other woman whining about the abuses and then adding that he would change. How humiliating it is even to think about the act of explaining it all away!
There were also the threats from him. There was a running argument in our home about talking about things. He abhored the fact that I talked about anything on my blog or to friends. He insisted that I not talk about him or anything related to him, including what we were going through. He convinced me that HE was convinced that in doing so, I was promoting hatred towards him. Now, looking back, I know that was his own guilt talking. Abusers often intimidate the abused into not talking about what happens because other people knowing tends to make the abuse less convenient.
His manner of intimidation was both spoken threats and unspoken but learned ‘consequences’ for my actions. He often talked about the consequences of my actions as if he were some sort of sadistic god who’s place in my life was to dole out retribution. His spoken threats ranged from him sleeping with someone else in retaliation to leaving me to harming my pets or my son and everything in between. The unspoken but learned consequences of my actions would be either being berated and minimized or completely conscious and intentional withdrawal from me emotionally. Given his obvious objection to my discussing what went on with anyone outside he and I, to talk or write about what was going on was like ‘asking for trouble’. It was to stir up a situation or event even more and to call down further consequences than I was probably already enduring in the situation upon myself.
So I never really told anyone except for the occasional explosions outward when everything built up far too much for any normal person to bear. I felt like it was for the best for all of these reasons that I not talk about it. Just like every other victim of abuse.
