by Band Back Together | Dec 1, 2010 | Abortion, Abortion Recovery, Abuse, Anxiety Disorders, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Infidelity, Major Depressive Disorder |
I can’t believe it has been 15 years since I meet him. There are days it feel like it was just yesterday. I knew his past – his Dad killed himself when he was young and he rebelled. He still did things that you would expect a troubled youth to do, but that stuffed seemed to stop once we started dating.
I can’t really complain about the first year and a half of the 3 years we were together. We were a normal, young couple in love. Everyone thought we were a happy couple. Then I got pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but I was young and “thought” I was in love.
That’s when you started telling me how worthless I was. It’s also when you started to hit me. A punch in the arm here. A shove there. Then you started with my stomach. Told me I was stupid and I wasn’t going to have this baby. You forced me to have an abortion, which in hindsight I am glad I did, mainly because I think if I had carried this baby longer, You would have made sure it didn’t survive.
I was no longer allowed to see my friends. I feel into a deep depression and was heart-broken when you broke up with me. What to do with all of this new found freedom? Take a trip with my BFF of course! Well, once you got wind of that, you had to have me back. Could it be the rumor that I was planning on moving with her to Florida, start a new life? Foolishly I agreed to meet you for lunch. I let you make me think you were truly sorry and wanted me back.
Things only got worse. I had a curfew, had to sneak out to be with my friends, could only do what you wanted me to do. The beatings and verbal abuse got much worse the second time around. I remember the time I picked you up from work at one in the morning in the city and you beat me in my own car because I was listening to a mix tape of songs that my favorite cover band played. A stranger came up to the window as you were banging my head into the car window. He said he was calling the cops and told me to get out of the car, that he’d help me. You stopped hitting me long enough for me to drive away, only to start punching me in the legs the whole ride home.
If I loved you enough, you’d stop, I told myself. You told me how much you loved me.
You were only doing this because it’s what your Dad did to your Mom.
I started sneaking out to go out with one of my BFFs. I started having fun again, feeling like myself again. I cheated on you. I found a great guy, at my favorite hangout, who I had known since high school. He worshiped me. He told me how smart, beautiful and fun I was. It gave me my confidence back.
I got the nerve to leave you. I made sure to do it when everyone was home at your Mom’s house.You proposed to me, told me you’d already asked your Mom for her engagement ring your Dad had given her. I took all my stuff out of her house and moved right in with my new boyfriend. I lived 10 minutes from you for 3 years and you never knew.
To this day I live with the scars you left me, physically and emotionally. I have been on and off anti-depressants for 10 years. I have panic attacks when I am reminded of a bad beating. I freak out when my husband tries to kiss me (like if I am leaning up against the counter & he blocks my way out). I feel trapped, yet I know he would NEVER lay a hand on me.
Luckily I found REAL love with my husband. I told him EVERYTHING you did to me and he still loves me. I am damaged goods, but he loves me anyway. You told me if I left you NO ONE would want me. I can count on one hand the number of people who know what you did to me, but I need to get it all out.
I was a silly, young girl who believed I could change you. I now know, that you were the one who changed me. Not because you loved me, because what we had WASN’T love.
You made me stronger, no I made me stronger.
I survived the hell you put me through.
by Band Back Together | Nov 28, 2010 | Coping With Depression, Divorce, Emotional Abuse, How To Help With Low Self-Esteem, Major Depressive Disorder, Self-Esteem, Suicide |
I was never going to write on here. I was going to comment and offer support… but I was never going to write about how I felt.
“It’ll go away later,” I’d tell myself. “There worse things out there in life than feeling down every now and then.” “Everyone gets overwhelmed this time of year.”
But then I wonder if it’s worse than that.
I’ve always been relatively smart. My elementary school wanted me to advance to 2nd grade during Kindergarten. I was in Beta Club and always enjoyed school. Then, in the 3rd grade, my parents split up.I vaguely remember an incident where my dad hit my mom. They got back together when I was in 6th grade. But, things weren’t going well.
We moved after 6th grade. My best friend had moved away a year earlier and I had a hard time making new friends in my new town. I was smart… and smart kids aren’t the cool kids. So, I dumbed myself down.
Things weren’t good at home, either. My parents were not happy and it showed. My mom had a meeting with my teachers my sophomore year to discuss my poor grades and my English teacher told her it was because I was bored with school. It was too easy for me, and I had given up. I had driven myself to the point that I actually told my mother that I wanted to kill myself. To this day, I cannot guarantee that it was an empty threat.
After we moved, everything about me changed. I became my mother… she gets upset too easily. She’s depressed. As far as I know, she’s not gotten help for it. She’s always telling me to stop getting “into tizzies.”
I’ve been in some bad relationships where I was used and cheated on and emotionally abused. I was called a “butterface” (everything is okay about her, but her face), ugly, and fat. I think the worst thing people made fun of me for was my nose. It’s on the larger side and now every time I look at myself in the mirror all I see is that damn nose. How it makes me far from perfect.
I’m engaged now and I love my fiance with all of my heart and I know he loves me, too…but there’s this voice that comes out every now and then and eats away at me. It says that he deserves someone beautiful and he’s going to find her and leave me. I trust that he loves me and won’t leave me… but that voice in my head won’t shut up.
The best way to describe how I feel is when you go to a store like Best Buy. And you go to the back of the store where all the TVs are, and you put each TV on a different channel and close your eyes. All those voices, all the things running through your mind – and I can’t make it stop.
I can’t even make simple decisions like what I want to eat for dinner. If I go to make a speech or presentation in class, I get so shaky I can barely stand up, let alone speak. In some classes I can’t understand the material, so I cry, and when Tony asks me what I don’t understand so he can help, all I can muster is, “I just don’t understand.”
What is the most important thing I don’t understand? Why I went from a smart, outgoing kid to someone who wants to hide in their room with the lights off.
And, then there are days when I feel great and nothing is wrong and I just say to myself, “it went away like usual. See? Everything is better. Sometimes people just get sad.”
Until that voice in the back of my head finds those remotes again
by Band Back Together | Nov 27, 2010 | Bullying, Emotional Abuse, Feelings, Trust |
I have trust issues. I have issues with everything from trusting family to trusting people too easily to others using my words against me. To say that I have trouble finding friends is an understatement. I like to think I’ve finally learned my lesson.
I had a therapist, but it got to where every session was just a discussion of my week, not dealing with any true issues. Then, I made a new friend. And while I didn’t trust her immediately, over time she gained my trust, which is great, right? So, that was among the reasons I decided to part ways with my therapist. And everything was dandy for a while. I trust my friend with a lot of stuff. She’s a great listener, and I listen whenever she needs to sound off.
You know when something happens for someone else, and while it hurts like hell for you, you have to be happy for them? You are happy for them and you just tuck the hurt away, because they didn’t purposely hurt you – life happens, it moves on even when you don’t feel it. My friend moved a few hours away. Better job, happier days, and I’m glad for her, but I miss her. Yes, we have e-mail, Facebook, etc., but it’s not the same.
Another good friend who was an online pal is taking some personal time, so she’s not in contact.
It’s just difficult for me to trust people, and it makes me feel stuck. I’d like to think I can find new friends, but I don’t really know what I want.
How do you make friends? How do you figure out who’s worth your time and vice versa?
by Band Back Together | Nov 24, 2010 | Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Rape/Sexual Assault |
It’s been 11 years.
Today, I’m a married step-mom/grandma who has a very comfortable relationship. Today, you are….what exactly? In public, you’re a poet who worships women. Back then I was dying for someone to love me. Back then you were a predator who wanted someone to bend to your will.
Today we’re “friends” on Facebook. It’s really not as big of a deal as I was afraid it would be. You’re trying to portray yourself as someone who is spiritual someone who adores women. I know that to bash me would really kill your whole “women are to be worshiped and adored vibe.” Plus, if you ever tried to hurt me again, not only would I turn you into the police…again…but my wheelchair-bound husband could still kick your butt.
Because let’s face it…your prey of choice is those who can’t fight back.
But I read the things you write and it takes everything I have not to call “bullshit” on it.
You talk about sexually worshiping women, but the only person you’ve ever worshiped is yourself. You couldn’t bring yourself to have intercourse with me because you “didn’t like it” and it was “too much work” so you insisted all we ever do was oral. Then, when you got what you wanted, you would begin to criticize everything I did. You could have physically punched me in the stomach and it would have hurt less.
What would your little followers who think you are light and love think about that?
I won’t tell them. I know how it would make me look and I know that it would start a war against me that I don’t want to deal with.
Because the fact of the matter is, I am who I am because of you. I took your list and tried to make myself into that person. I didn’t clean house enough, so I got up at 5:30 and cleaned before work. When I started gaining weight, I got up at 4:30 and exercised before I cleaned house. Then, when I didn’t help enough with the “business,” I would get home and work on the business until 9 or 10 PM. Then it was the sex. We weren’t having enough. So then I’d stay up until 11 or so and get sexually abused by you until I was either in tears or you had decided it was enough for the night.
I was wound so tightly that when I left the house I would fall asleep wherever I was. Not a good idea at work. I’d lost so much weight that people were offering to feed me. Then we had the fight and you said that you couldn’t see where I had done anything differently over the previous weeks. Then you pushed me physically. Which just happened to be a mental push as well.
Since then, no man has been allowed to abuse me. The husband is your complete opposite. You quit your job and left me to support you because you didn’t like your boss. The husband hasn’t missed but two days of work due to his own illnesses in the last 10 years and he’s in a damn wheelchair! You criticized anything and everything. He criticizes nothing. You’d tell me you love me only to follow it up by a verbal drop-kick. He doesn’t tell me he loves me very often, but he would never do anything to hurt me.
Now I read your posts and I roll my eyes because I know the truth. You lie.
You are not who these women believe you to be. Not even close. And if they get something out of reading how women are supposed to be worshiped and adored, great. Maybe they need that. Maybe that’s your purpose.
But if they ever meet the real you, then they’ll know the truth, too.
by Band Back Together | Nov 23, 2010 | Anger, Anxiety, Coping With Depression, Emotional Abuse, Infidelity, Loneliness, Major Depressive Disorder, Marriage Problems, Sadness, Self Loathing, Self-Esteem |
I have a fairly melancholy personality, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see the good things. Most days, I do see the good things. I revel in them. But I do have bad days. Maybe more than your average chipper wonder-girl, but not enough to be a ‘bad thing.’ Problem is, there are parameters around my life that make it difficult to have any bad days at all. And so on those days, I feel very, very alone. Today is one of those days. Today, I had to write. I’m not alone if I have words to keep me company. I don’t have to be scared if I can still be coherent. But really, I am alone.
I’m married, but I have no husband. He would rather spend time with his Facebook or his phone. Or his pillow. He doesn’t love me. He says he does, sometimes, but how could I ever believe him? He doesn’t like to kiss me. He only touches me when there’s no chance of anything more. I go for sex and get excuses, or yelled at, or worse, silence. Snores. When I’m upset, he goes to sleep. The self-proclaimed night owl can’t keep his eyes awake at 8:30pm if he thinks there’s something bugging me (or I’m feeling amorous). I have one bad day in months, and it’s further proof to him that we should never have kids, that I would be a terrible mother. As if I’m the one unable to care for someone else. The best birthday present he’s ever received is an email from his ex-girlfriend. At least, that’s what he told her. He doesn’t know I know that. I asked him about his favorite birthday present, and he said it was the concert tickets I just gave him. The ones I couldn’t afford, but I rubbed two pennies together to make happen. Because for some inexplicable reason, I love him, I believe in him, and I have hope for us. And for my next act, I will jump off a bridge.
I’m a sister and a daughter, but I have no family. They don’t understand me, and they put up a facade of attempt. It fails. They fail. Or maybe I’m the failure. Either way, they’ve fenced me out. And then criticize me for it. Do I deserve to be the black sheep? My guess is that if you met all of us, you’d wonder how I ended up the way I am. You’d wonder what they have to vilify me. You might tell me I’m better off being the black sheep, but I don’t feel better off. Not today.
I have friends, too, maybe, but none are nearby. None know me. Not the real me. Most days, I like it that way. There are only so many words I can share on any given day. And how do you maintain a friendship without words? Besides, I don’t even know myself right now, so how could I possibly expect someone else to? It gets a little lonely sometimes. Then again, people are self-absorbed, and they give bad advice. Last thing I need is someone telling me how they’d like to solve their problems, under the guise of my benefit.
I’m say a Christian, but I have no real faith. Belief, sure, but in what? Who is my God? I don’t know. He’s a stranger right now (he, or she, or it, or them…). As a recovering fundamentalist, I don’t understand God at all. I’d like to try better, learn more, figure out what was and what is true, but when it comes to God, there aren’t answers, just more questions. Questions, and narcissism. Funny how God’s attributes line up so nicely with your own opinions.
All in all, I have a great life. Sure, it’s lacking in some areas, but I have no shortage of things to be happy about. Most days, I’m happy. Content and smiling and good. I want more than good, though. I want more than a decent marriage, I want an out-of-the-park one. I want to be married to someone who cares about ‘us’ as much as I do. I don’t have that. I don’t have a spendthrift cheating drunk abuser, but I don’t have a true partner either. I want a family who doesn’t just love me but accepts me. I don’t have that either. I could sure use a friend, too. Someone I didn’t have to pretend with. Someone who could point out my own childish crap without making me feel guilty or condemned. Really, though, I just want some answers. About God. I used to have them, until I saw how lacking my perspective was.
Right now, during this bad day, lack is all I can see. And that is why, today, I hate myself.
by Band Back Together | Nov 23, 2010 | Abuse, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, How To Help With Low Self-Esteem, Infidelity, Loneliness, Psychological Manipulation, Self Loathing, Self-Esteem, Shame, Sociopathy, Stress, Trauma |
I’m planning on leaving my husband.
I’m running away.
Last night, after an especially bad fight, I was talking to one of my best friends. I told him what the fight was about (husband got upset at me because I was on my phone while he was asleep) and I told him that it’s my fault, because I’m such a bad wife.
My friend got mad at me. I mean, really angry, and I couldn’t understand why. He told me to search the term BWS. He said that he thinks that I have battered woman syndrome. But you see, it’s rare that my husband actually hits me. Generally he just throws verbal punches.
Since the day we met, something about this man has made me bend over backwards for him. I let go of long time friends (because he didn’t like them), I turned my back on family (because he said that he was my family now), I missed my little brother’s funeral (he thought it would be a bad idea for me to go back home by myself and wouldn’t take me).
He screamed at me and told me I was worthless, and I cried and begged him to give me another chance, because I CAN BE BETTER.
Let me give you some background information on me. Up until I met my husband my friends called me CK, or Cowboy Killer. I had a bad reputation for taking a man and turning him inside out.
Not because I was mean, because I wouldn’t be. But because they all usually told me they loved me within a week or two and then I’d have to let them go. CK rule # 1 is don’t get attached to me. Rule # 2 is I don’t take shit so back the eff off. So when my friends saw the little things that he started off doing to me, they were baffled.
To say the least, I’ve let this man run my life. Deep down there is a little voice in my cold empty heart that says that he is wrong and bad.
But everything else inside of me screams that this is my fault. After he hits me, he says things like “I didn’t hit you that hard, you must bruise easily” or “I didn’t push you that hard, you threw yourself” or “Baby I’m sorry, but you just shouldn’t push me like that”.
A few months ago he put me in the hospital because I said “I hate you” after I found out that he was cheating on me, again.
But the making up… I live for the making up. He is so sweet, and he tells me that I’m beautiful and he loves me and that he’ll change. He asks me to just stick it out, because he knows that he can be better. But a week later it’s back and worse than ever.
When he broke my nose last month another good friend offered to pay for me and my children to move back up north (my homeland) and live with him. He offered me a job in his company and a safe place for my kids and I to live, complete with 2 puppies and a fenced in back yard. I told him at the time that I would think about it.
Last night I did a lot of thinking. And a lot of web searching. Did you know that my husband matches almost every single sign of being a sociopath?
Manipulation? Check. This is the same man that says I force him to treat me this way because of the things I do, like buy myself a coffee with my money.
Lack of remorse? Yeah, we already went over that one.
Poor behavioral controls resulting in acts of rage? Mmhmm.
Promiscuity? LOLZ. This is the same man who has NO IDEA how many women he’s slept with. Since we started dating I know of at least 8.
Parasitic lifestyle? If you’ve read any of my other entries here on BB2G you would know that for the last two years I’ve supported him financially.
Apparently the sociopath’s main goal in life is to create a willing victim. That’s been me for two years. And I think I’m done. I sent an email to my friend, asking if I could still come up. I won’t tell my husband.
But I’m scared. I’m scared of taking my kids up to PA and worrying about whether I can support them. I’m scared that I won’t be strong enough to say no when my husband begs me to come home. I’m scared that all of this is in my head, and maybe I am the crazy one. I’m scared that he’ll find us.
But it’s what I have to do, right?
Because I can’t continue to live this way, right?
*On a side note, thank you all, for being the people that you are. Sometimes I just read over the comments that you leave and I cry and wish that I had people like you actually in my life. Thank you for trying to help me see the bright side, and for telling me that it will get better. A million times over, thank you…
Prankster, there’s no such thing as “abuse light” or “a little abuse.” Your husband is abusive. That’s not a question. The question is, “do you want to take it?”
You know that the answer is no. You don’t deserve it. Nobody deserves to be treated like that. Nobody.
You are loved. We will be here for you no matter what.
Whatever you do, please be safe. PLEASE.
