So sad and tired

[Anonymous]

Hi, I’m feeling really sorry for myself and, as I don’t have a support network, i’m reaching out on here.

Anyone else experienced friends, family, even support workers/professionals read messages or emails from your abuser and said ‘it’s not that bad?’ Anyone else have an abuser who doesn’t swear, doesn’t make threats but just wears you down?

To this day, I don’t know for a fact if my ex cheated on me. I strongly suspect it but he would call me paranoid, crazy, overly sensitive.

He picked on me for everything I did- how I looked and if I questioned him on anything it was always the same response of ‘that never happened’.

He’s now doing the same with our children- he calls them names, they get upset and tell me, and when I ask him about it he says it never happens and turns everything on to me.

He is so good at being the steady and stable one that my family are now in touch with him and not me, and one member of my family even reported me to social services to support his custody application. They made up that I have a mental illness, and made up incidents about me mentally abusing my children which genuinely never happened.

I find though that I do need a lot of reassurance, I do find myself feeling low, tearful, like I have no friends, but I do think that’s the fall out from my marriage to my ex and then a further two abusive relationships since.

So in my long, rambling way, has anyone else experienced any of this? It’s been years now and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be seen as ‘normal’ by anyone ever again. I hate that i’m labelled as ‘vulnerable’ as I have anxiety and was in a refuge. I just want to have a good life but I battle between mourning all he’s taken from me and then doubting it was him, and thinking it’s all me, its all my fault and that i’m a terrible person.

[Wants To Help]

Hi FeltedLeopard,

So sorry to read you are feeling like this, I remember when I was living with my abuser I was a shell of the woman I used to be and nothing like the woman I am now. The words you use to describe yourself I would have used to describe me back then too.

Our abusers who are the coercive and controlling type act so cleverly and subtly that they manage to manipulate everyone around them as well as us. They can fool our families, the professionals, our friends, and really make us doubt ourselves. We start to think we are incapable of making decisions and we start to believe their assessment of us that we are indeed going crazy! If our abusers are in high powered jobs with positions of power and influence (like mine was), then they are even more believable as they are seen to be ‘credible’. After all, who is going to doubt the word of someone who is powerful and influential?

Once I fled, I started to work with the professionals in the DA world and do everything they suggested and recommended. I started to read up on Domestic Abuse, the types of abuser and how they worked, the difference between the types of abuser, and I started to see where my abuser fitted in to this pattern. I educated myself, learned the Cycle of Abuse, the patterns victims fall in to from Denial to Recovery, and I saw where I had allowed myself to fall back in to his trap every time. I attended group and individual counselling, I attended a 10 week course similar to the Freedom Programme; a course that was designed to bring back our self esteem, self confidence, belief and empowerment. I learned so much about myself too. In fact, I learned that if I’d have known then what I know now I would have nipped my relationship in the bud with my abuser within the first few weeks of getting involved with him because the warnings signs were all there, along with blatant signs of incompatibility too. However, I was ignorant of all of this because I’d never been taught it or knew such things existed.

You are not a terrible person. Why do I know that? Because you are on a forum on a website doubting yourself and wanting some help or advice to see what you can do. There are no websites with forums for abusers who are admitting they beat their partners, or are subtly trying to drive them crazy so that they can apply for full residency of the children just to torture her more, and then asking for advice how they can stop being so violent and manipulative. Those websites don’t exist because no man would ever go on there to admit that is what he does.

Believe in yourself and the person that you know you really are, not the person he has led you to believe you are. Do some reading and research and empower yourself with the knowledge of how an abuser works. This will help you understand the cycle you have been trapped in. You may need to seek suport with a DA counsellor to help you come to terms with this, you may not, everyone is different. For people who say ‘it’s not that bad’, they are not living your life. If the way he is treating you is making you feel so low then it is that bad.

Keep reaching out, keep reading, keep researching, you can get through this, it’s not a quick fix though, it’s a long journey. I’m still on mine, but the further I travel, the further the distance between my life now and my life then. I wish you all the best.

[Author]

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