Easter Sunday. Is it me?

[IndianaEagle]

I haven’t posted or been back here for a week. A week of reading and trying to learn and denial and trying other things. Today is Easter Sunday. My son is back with partner. I feel like everyone is judging me. My partner’s silent treatment is worse when nobody is around. However I’ve been looking into this grey rock method of dealing with abusers and I suddenly wondered if this is what my partner is doing to me? I’m just so confused and upset. I’m about to embark (well I’ve started!) cooking on a b****y great Easter Sunday roast and honestly, all I want to do is cry. I’m just so confused and if I could cease to exist and my kids not have a memory of me then that’s what I would do but sadly that’s not an option is it? My only option is to carry on but I feel like you’re d****d if you do and you’re d****d if you don’t stuck in a situation like this. Holidays are definitely the worst. Thank God we don’t even go through the pretence of going on actual holiday anymore. What memories will my kids really have?

[EbonyRaven]

Holiday times can really put the pressure up, we’re surrounded by the media hollering their ‘perfect family’ nonsense at us everywhere we go, and it can really get us wound up.

The fact that you are even questioning whether you could be the abusive one shows you’re not. They don’t have that sort of thought process and have no empathy at all.

Toward the end, I used to bask in the silent treatment, as it meant the spiteful, nasty words were taking a break. I’d hum and sing to myself when I was doing things, and I could see it drove him potty because he’d backed himself into a corner of not being able to say something to bring my (on the surface) good mood down. It wasn’t always easy, and many a time I would rather have just curled up in a corner or shouted in his face, but strangely, acting in that positive way, even as a pretence, would sometimes have me feeling a little cheerful. The best thing about it though, as I said, was that it trapped him in his own silence.

Taken out of context I guess my doing that could be seen as abusive to him. I know it wasn’t, it was a survival tactic. We as survivors, do all we can to protect and nurture ourselves. That isn’t abusing him.

I do hope you get the chance to spit in his gravy.

[AlwaysSorry]

Ebony I can’t begin to explain what it means to read your line: “The fact that you are even questioning whether you could be the abusive one shows you’re not.”

I can’t begin to describe the amount of time I spent each day thinking and wondering if it was me and if my behaviour could and should change so the abuse would cease. My ex would of course encourage this thought process and literally tell me that everything was my fault, so I really did – and to some extent still do – wonder if it was me. Seeing you write that… it struck something in me. Thank you for that.

[Doris]

I love ‘spit in his gravy’. Marvellous.

[EbonyRaven]

You are very welcome.

My ex also blamed me for all his ills, he had found out many years ago that people gave in to him if he mentioned mental illness, and claimed to suffer from this including depression. He wouldn’t seek help though, claiming doctors had said he was such a bad case he couldn’t be helped.

Reading that back, I wonder to myself how I could have believed that, but there you go, they really do blind us. Anyway, I was always the one to blame. His ‘mood’ was because I didn’t show enough affection, or I was cold, or I didn’t say I love you often enough, at the right times or back to him every single time he said it. I wasn’t ‘there’ for him when I was working 12 hours (including travelling), and going into the hospital every day to help feed and care for my dying mother. So on, and on, and on, always a reason that was my doing.

So I’d try to be more affectionate, to say the words more often, and the result? He would lambast me for it, saying he was going to put it in his diary, write it on the calendar. Stating that I hadn’t really meant it, that I was only doing it because I was feeling guilty about something (the imagined affairs usually), etc. etc. etc.

Stating that because he knew I didn’t mean it; because he felt that it wasn’t real, that made him more depressed, and made him drink more to blank those feelings out. That I was the cause of his thoughts of self-harming and suicide, the cause of his heavy drinking, the reason he stole money from me to buy alcohol.

For a long, long time I thought I was this horrible, cold person who was unable to show love sufficiently.

Now I remind myself every day that I am kind, that I am loving, and that I was never the abuser, never really to blame.

Begin small but show yourself that tiny jewel in odd moments through your day. You are good-hearted.

[Iwantmeback]

Grey rock is a way to protect ourselves from his abusive behaviour. It doesn’t make us the abusive one, though he will tell you sooner or later that he’s sick and tired of one word answers or how you don’t really answer him at all. When my oh gets to that stage, I tell him it doesn’t matter if I talk to you or not, I’m either answering back, so have to shut up or I’m abusing you by not talking, so which is it? Then I go back to being as boring as possible. I’m accused of being cold, withdrawn, he’s sick of it, feels like leaving etc etc. Because I’ve read so many others posts, I see it for the cycle it is, it no longer bothers me, I’m at the acceptance stage of the leaving process and I’m nearly, totally at peace with it and myself.
LOA is working for me, things are happening the way they are for me, because of my end goal. They might not happen in a manner of my choosing, but I know things are happening fir me to be free of him.
It’s knowing how and who your partner is, that’s making doing’ normal’ things so difficult. It’s your brain’s way of rebelling, trying to get you to face up to the danger you’re in. Your heart, mind and body will be in sinc soon, once you’ve totally accepted enough is enough.
Take care, be safe
IWMB 💕💕

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