by Band Back Together | Nov 4, 2015 | Abuse, Date/Acquaintance Rape, Emotional Abuse, Passive/Aggressive Behavior, Psychological Manipulation, Sadness, Teen Dating Abuse, Teen Rape, Teen Sexuality |
I remember my hair sticking to my lip gloss as we walked across the street to the courthouse.
I remember thinking that one day, I would start a story with this sentence. My mother added the following line: this isn’t where you think your relationship will end up when it starts.
What still gets me is that, deep down, I did know. I knew the entire time that things couldn’t end well.
I knew it was strange that he never seemed to have any close friends – and that he didn’t know anyone in my friend circle. I knew it was immature that he didn’t take our music teacher seriously; I knew that, eventually, he’d need to grow up. I noticed how it made me uncomfortable when he started asking me personal questions after we’d only known each other for a few weeks.
But I consciously ignored all of it, and thus began nine months that ended in that dreaded courtroom.
The first of those nine months was May, when we started dating. I turned sixteen the day after it was made “Facebook official.” He was seventeen.
I was happy; he was happy.
We texted and talked on the phone, we spent every moment of free time together. The warning signs seemed to fade away from my sights, and I enjoyed maybe a few weeks of bliss.
He took my virginity in either the late spring or early summer. He was gentle about it, and I was confident in my choice to give it to him. He was caring. He loved me, and I loved him. That’s how it’s supposed to be when you share something so intimate with someone.
I’m not capable of saying exactly when the abuse began, but at some point, it did.
He would pin me down and pinch the backs of my arms until he drew blood. He’d lay his 200+ pound frame on top of my 125-pound one, which bruised my hips and stifled my breathing. He got angry any time I told him to get off of me; that he was hurting me. He got angry because I was “lying” when I said those things. He could see things in me that I didn’t see in myself:
I was tough, he said.
I could handle him.
The emotional abuse started around this time, although it’s harder to draw a hard line around it. I will never know what our first fight was about – it was pure nonsense; they always were. What I do remember was the yelling, the way his eyes would narrow at me, his voice would deepen dangerously, the way he broke things.
But I wasn’t weak.
I could handle him.
Over the summer, I steadily learned to be afraid of him. I learned not to deny him sex, because if I did, I was rejecting him. I must’ve been in love with someone else. I learned not to wear skinny jeans to work, because that was the one place where he didn’t get to see my fine piece of ass.
I learned not to correct him about anything – whether it was whether green was a primary color or if being gay is genetic – he hated to be wrong. That’s why he was always right.
I learned not to fight when he held me down and pinched me, when he held me under the water in his friend’s pool. I learned to go limp and deny him the satisfaction of overcoming me. I learned not to panic, because that only made it worse.
I learned how to act like everything was okay in front of my friends. I learned how to let him pinch me and slap me in front of them, because I knew he wouldn’t stop if I told him to. It would only make things awkward to draw attention to it.
It would confirm what I knew deep down; something was terribly wrong in our relationship.
I learned to take out my frustration on my family instead of him. I learned how to yell at my parents instead of listen to them; I learned how to never cry in front of them, in case they asked questions.
My boyfriend didn’t like my parents – he blamed them for everything he didn’t like in me. If I let my guard down; if I acted weak, it was because I’d been raised that way. If I told him I couldn’t stay out past three o’ clock in the morning, he asked me if I always let them control me: when was I going to grow up?
When I told him my mom started noticing the yellow-and-purple bruises on my arms, he asked if my parents disapproved of harmless roughhousing. Did they coddle me? Was that why I was weak? This was why, in the heat of the summer, I didn’t wear tank-tops. It was easier to change my wardrobe than to change the way he treated me.
Late in the summer, I received the four scars that will stay with me for years to come.
The one on my forearm was from a ride at a county fair, when I was so offensive enough to “crush” him against the side of a spinning-ride. By this point, it was already established that I was weak, so of course, it would make sense that I was unable to stop physics.
And I was severely punished for it. He gripped my arm and refused to let go, tearing his fingernails into my skin and holding on until his hand was trembling. My arm bled, and for weeks after, it hurt to touch it and it turned a horrid color of yellow.
Now, I have a pretty little gray dot the size of my pinky nail to commemorate the event.
The other three scars are on my back.
They look strange, and for months, I was convinced that I would never wear a swimsuit again. There are three quarter-sized grayish-pink circles in a straight line.
I want to say two things before I go on.
One: it wasn’t rape. I never told him to stop.
Two: it was four letters away from being rape. I knew that he wouldn’t stop if I told him to. I knew that the moment I let my emotions take control; that the moment I felt the pain, that I would panic. I knew that I would try to get him off of me, and that he would force me back into it.
Call me naive for dating him, call me stupid for staying with him, call me whatever you want, but don’t ever tell me I didn’t know him. I knew what I was afraid of.
And I will never be convinced that it wasn’t four letters away from being rape.
We were having sex in his basement. He was on top. As soon as it started, I knew something was wrong. I could feel the carpet starting to rub against my back – and not in a good way.
I will never know for sure if this happened or not, but I swear I remember telling him something was hurting. Of course, I was tough. I could withstand the pain. So I waited. I closed my eyes, I gritted my teeth, I blocked it out like I always did. When he was finished, I sat up and saw what he had done.
My spine had rubbed against the floor like a cheese-grater, giving me three bloody, gaping holes in my skin. I was horrified to see it. I still have the shirt that has the blood spots on it. I had to hide it, should my parents find out.
Of course, he thought this was hilarious, and insisted that we have sex against a door right after. The next time you skin your knee, rub the bare wound up against a piece of wood. That’s more-or-less what this felt like.
When a boy pointed to the marks at the pool weeks later, my boyfriend laughed.
He made jokes about what the marks looked like, about how the scars would never go away. He humiliated me, showing me off to everyone.
But I didn’t cry; I never cried.
I was tough.
The only time I ever stood up to him about his abuse was when he hit me hard enough to knock the wind out of me – twice in a row. He slapped me in the back and taunted me when I sat down to catch my breath, because I was acting weak.
As soon as we got into his car and out of earshot, I told him to never hit me like that again.
He was quiet for a long time, but I could see the signs of his anger that I knew were only there to psych me out. He clenched his jaw, he tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and for a moment, I wondered if he was going to get us into an accident. But finally, the explosion came when I told him to man up and tell me what was wrong.
“It’s like you think I abuse you,” he yelled. “You know I would never hit you out of anger!”
And there it was.
There was the moment when abuse was defined by my abuser: If it wasn’t out of anger, it didn’t count.
All he’d ever done was foolishly roughhoused with me; all he’d ever done was belittle me to get his way. He’d never slap me across the face. He would only slap me on my legs, my arms, my stomach, my chest. But never the face.
Imagine my relief to find that I wasn’t in an abusive relationship; just a complicated one.
By the time school started again, my boyfriend came to me with news. He was in love with my best friend, Anna. He wanted to date us both and decide which one he loved the most.
I’d put up with a lot of pain at this point, but this was too much. As long as it was just the two of us, I could withstand any emotional or physical torment. I had given him my soul and the rights to use my body as he wished. But now, I was learning that it wasn’t enough. He still wanted someone else, and he wanted to share me with her.
So I said no.
He broke a window; he yelled at me, he demeaned me in every way possible.
But I said no.
And the feeling I felt after that; the pure, shaking abandonment, was the most painful thing that ever happened in our relationship. It felt like every bone was breaking.
Only when he left did I see what he had truly done to me; the destruction he’d caused in my life. In order to be with him, I’d silenced myself. I stopped standing up for myself, I no longer understood what it meant to have self-respect. I, as I knew me, was gone. He’d filled that hole for some time, but now, he was gone, too, and I was the only one left to blame.
All of this happened in late August, maybe early September. If you remember right, we still have four or five months to go. And any abuse I’d suffered from him couldn’t compare to what he did to me next; what he did to my family.
He decided he loved me more than Anna, but they were still “together,” whatever this meant at the time. So he cheated on her with me. I hurt her by doing it, and I knew it. I justified it by saying that she knew what she was getting into with him; that she’d hurt me first by dating him.
But I knew I was just being selfish; that I was intoxicated by him. Before this, I never understood why women stayed in abusive relationships.
As it turned out, that wasn’t the thing that destroyed my friendship with Anna. That came later, when the court got involved.
He wanted to take me back after he broke up with Anna, but he’d already made his mistake. He let me go for at least two weeks, maybe even a month, without him. It had been tough, but I had started to wake up and come to my senses. I turned him down; I told him I needed time.
That was when things truly got bad. He’d always told me when we were together that he had an ugly side he hoped I never had to see. I should’ve realized at the time that I one day would.
He threatened me. He threatened to ruin my life in every way he could imagine. He threatened my family; he told me that he didn’t know what would happen, but that I shouldn’t be surprised if his mom or dad showed up on our front porch one day and “did something.”
He told me that I needed him to protect me, because I would only fall in love with another abuser in time. He told me that I would get raped if I slept with anyone but him. He publicly humiliated me at school, yelling at the top of his lungs personal things that I’d only told him; how I’d felt broken after being diagnosed with ADHD years before; how I no longer felt like I could trust anyone.
At this point, I’d come clean about many secrets to my parents, and they stepped in. We went to the principal’s office and told my ex that he was no longer allowed to contact me. I’d wanted space before, but now I needed it. It wasn’t just for me. I knew what he was capable of, and I wasn’t going to let him hurt my family.
So he stalked me. He followed us home in his car, he skipped class and kept his eyes on me at all times during school. He ambushed me at our home and screamed at me in our driveway, blocking the door so that I couldn’t get inside. I had an anxiety attack after that happened.
In December, we had the first court date.
We’d filed a restraining order. Here’s a piece of news I didn’t know at the time: if you file for a restraining order and the defendant doesn’t show up to court, it’s immediately granted.
If he does show up to court, he has the choice to either agree to it, or to contest it, meaning he would come back at a later court date to dispute the charges.
Guess which one he did.
The next court date was set for late February. We hired an attorney and a private investigator. I was forced to pick through every text, every email, and every Facebook message we’d ever exchanged, looking for proof that he was a danger to me, and that I’d been clear that I didn’t want anything to do with him.
Everything that was supposed to stay private about our relationship; our sex life, our fighting, our most intimate moments, was torn open. The story of how I lost my virginity to him is now known by countless people who have a copy of the full restraining order; my boss, an attorney, police officers at my high school and college.
That’s why I’m okay with sharing my story with the world. The people I wanted to keep this a secret from are now the people who know everything about it.
And in the end, it wasn’t enough. We didn’t get our restraining order, and at the advice of our lawyer, we dismissed the case.
I lost four of my best friends in the world after this happened, leaving me with one.
I lost Anna when I read over her testimony that she’d given to the private investigator. She didn’t think I had anything to be afraid of. She knew that he slapped me, that he hurt me, that he taunted me. But I never told him to stop in her presence, and in her mind, that made it okay.
She saw the mess I’d become after dating him; she knew that he’d threatened my family. But she was on his side; under his spell. If she’d said that she thought he was a danger to me, we could’ve had a shot at a restraining order. I knew that I would never trust her again.
I lost a third friend a few months after the whole thing happened. He’d had a crush on me for some time, and we had a very close friendship, texting 24/7 for months. I’d told him every detail of what my ex had done to me, and he’d been supportive.
I started college in January – at the age of sixteen. I had a job. I was stressed and emotionally wounded. I stopped talking to him every day, and shortened it to just once or twice a week, until eventually we were hardly talking at all.
He always wanted to hang out, and when I did agree to do something, I was exhausted and not as “playful” as he wanted me to be. So he gave me an ultimatum: either put in more effort, or don’t bother talking to him again. I knew better than to think that giving him more was the way to make things work; that was the entire nature of the relationship I had just escaped. So things ended.
And, lastly, I lost a fourth friend; my boyfriend. Before this, I never understood why women stayed in abusive relationships any more than I understood why people did drugs.
Both things were harmful and had potential to ruin your life.
But they have another thing in common; people run to them when they’re week. Just months before I started talking to my now-ex boyfriend, our house had been burglarized while we were home. I couldn’t sleep in my own room for months without the light on.
I had also been diagnosed with depression. I was unhappy with school. I lacked a sense of purpose.
No one talks about the good side of abusive relationships. He was my best friend in the world. We shared everything together; opinions, thoughts, feelings. When he wasn’t tearing me down, he was the most supportive friend in the world.
When I admitted to myself that his abuse was worse than his good side could ever be, I lost the best friend I had in him.
Getting out of that abusive relationship was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
It was painful, and I haven’t even begun to imagine how it will affect my future relationships.
It made me stronger than I ever was, but I will never be thankful for it.
by Band Back Together | Nov 2, 2015 | Abuse, Child Abuse, Childhood Bullying, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Fear, Passive/Aggressive Behavior |
Not a word I ever thought I’d associate with myself. And yet here I am, writing this post.
It’s a little confusing; it didn’t always feel like it does now. I’m the eldest of four kids, and I remember my dad, for the most part of my early years as a different person. He was sweet and funny, he taught art and gave us drawing lessons on weekends. We lived on one farm, then moved to another. He sang this song about a little baby duck. He watched movies with us. He bought us watercolor paints.
Unfortunately, that’s ancient history. And it stops somewhere – I’m not for sure of the date, but I do know that it stops around the time I was seven.
It’s been a long time coming, or it feels like it, but that’s not my dad anymore.
These days, he has almost constant migraines, he treats his kids like something that should be “useful” to him, is critical, cruel-worded, and dismissive.
It’s eggshell territory – I’m always stepping on them, can hear them crunch under my feet when he’s around. He’s not friendly and there’s no camaraderie and joking. There’s only what we’re supposed to be doing, and that we’re not doing good enough.
I don’t know if that was always his personality or if it’s a new thing. I do know that he’s gotten progressively worse, so much so that now, if I didn’t know him before, I wouldn’t realize it used to be different.
My sister, who’s 12, doesn’t realize it. And I remember what it was like the first time I realized that not only was he being abusive in an emotional way, but that I was scared of it.
It was Father’s Day, 2014.
He had a headache, which wasn’t news, and everyone was done with breakfast and scattered around the house. Some tiny thing flipped him out – and it was my fault. I’d been in my room, reading quietly out loud because it helps me concentrate.
My family calls me out on it and doesn’t like it, so I try not to do it often, but for the most part they ignore it.
This time he didn’t.
I guess it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or something. He blew up, stormed around, slammed stuff on the kitchen counters, screamed his fucking head off at my mom.
Normally when he’s angry, critical, trying to correct something, or give us a job or order, he doesn’t shout. He uses this *reasonable* and patronizing tone that says he’s disappointed in you, that you’ve really just been incredibly incompetent and useless THIS time, and he hopes you’re happy with yourself.
It’s the worst thing in the world.
Well, the shouting was worse.
My sister ran into my room and we hid under my desk until he left the house and my mom found us there. She was half-laughing, half-crying, like she wanted it to not be as big of a deal as it was.
I ran out and hid in the field crying for the better part of an hour, not wanting to be in the same airspace as him. When I got back, he was waiting on the front porch. I remembered that he wanted to talk to me. I sat there feeling sick as he went on and on, this self-victimizing speech I couldn’t stand hearing.
I wanted to tell him it didn’t excuse his actions, but I started crying instead. He put his arm around me, which just made it worse. I wanted to get out of the entire situation, and he wasn’t trying to comfort me. He was using me as a way to comfort himself.
Since I’m at school, I don’t see as much of him. I think my second-youngest brother realized that, because he got a job away from home this year and his own apartment. I don’t have a license, so I couldn’t make that happen, and when I’m not working I’m home all the time. It’s not much different that it was that day or before that day, except that now, I notice it.
Today, it was towels in the bathroom. He called all of us in to see how there was a towel on the floor and another one *improperly* draped over the rack. He gave us this lecture on the *correct* bathroom procedures, and as we were leaving I said something to my sister, which I’ve been using to comfort myself and get myself through the constant tension in my household:
I’m a spy, just witnessing and gathering data.
He heard it and asked me what I said, so I said I hadn’t spoken. He told me I was being childish, acting like a “whipped puppy.”
And the thing is?
That’s EXACTLY how I feel, and I can’t stop it.
I don’t even know if it’s as bad as I think it is. Nobody else in my family goes on crying jags about it. My sister’s a feisty little fireball and fights back. My younger brother doesn’t give a shit. My mom doesn’t like his attitude, but also she defends him and sympathizes somehow.
It’s just me, hiding in the bathroom choking on tears. Because every day in this house I feel judged and afraid and anxious. I don’t like to go anywhere with my father.
I don’t feel I HAVE the same father I did when I was six and loved him. I don’t feel like I love him now. I don’t respect him anymore, and I don’t even particularly LIKE him.
And for some reason the same thought keeps going around and around in my head.
Someday, if I get married, he’s going to want to walk me down the aisle, this person I don’t respect or even particularly like.
And I won’t be able to tell him “no.”
by Band Back Together | Oct 26, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Bipolar Disorder, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Grief, Loss, Murder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder |
I had a younger aunt that was like a sister to me.
My sophomore year in college, I took her on spring break with me. When I moved out of state, and I would come home to visit, I didn’t stay at my parents, I would stay at her house. We were that close.
Then it all was gone. I got a call from my mother at 1AM one morning and my world stopped.
My aunt had been brutally tortured, murdered.
She was gone.
Murder brings out intense emotional reactions.
The emotional pain and anguish of murder seem unbearable. I feel an overwhelming sense of loss and deep, deep sorrow. I constantly experience thoughts about the circumstances of her death.
I relieve what I think happened and I see her being tortured and killed. I imagine the pleas for her life she was making.
Grieving for a murder victim is unlike any other grief. The murder of a loved one results in the survivors grieving not only the death, but how the person died.
I have intrusive visualizations of the murder and I see her suffering. I have flashbacks of the moment when I was notified of her death. I have flashbacks of the last time I saw her alive.
I dream of her knocking at my door and, when I open it, I see her, and she tells me, “It was a mistake! It wasn’t me.”
I never got to see her dead body, so I think part of me has denial about her gruesome death.
Her life was cut short through an act of sick cruelty. The disregard for human life adds overwhelming feelings of anger, distrust, injustice, and helplessness to the normal sense of loss and sorrow. Sometimes, I cry like I am never going to stop.
I don’t think a person can rebound from this.
I have suffered lots of childhood abuse, both childhood sexual abuse and childhood emotional abuse. I suffer from bipolar disorder and PTSD. My mother has narcissistic personality disorder.
I’ve got my hands full, but dealing with a murder is a baffling head game.
I don’t think I will ever come to terms with it.
by Band Back Together | Oct 20, 2015 | Anxiety, Childhood Bullying, Depression, Eating Disorders, Restrictive Eating Disorders, Self Injury, Self-Esteem, Suicide, Teen Depression |
Hello The Band,
My name is Sarah and I am 22 years old.
When I was 13, I was bullied, and in response I began my nine year (so far) journey with depression and self-harm, followed by a seven year journey with a restrictive eating disorder.
Until now, The Band I have never written or spoken about my story in complete, honest detail. It’s more important than ever that I come to terms with how that individual made me feel.
I still don’t feel brave enough to open up this much to people who know me, so opening up to you, The Band, is the first step.
I was always a shy child growing up. I first found myself a victim of bullying at the age of five. I can’t remember much, apart from trying to hide from those two boys in my year and their cruel words – even then, I never told anybody about what was happening. Despite that experience (which was thankfully short-lived), I always had a good number of close friendships and grew up as a happy, quiet, attentive, little girl.
I moved through the next eight years of my education without any significant hiccups. During the usual childhood friend tiffs, I’d always find a new handful of friends right around the corner. I enjoyed school. I guess the only problem I had (although I didn’t notice it at the time) was that my family was not particularly open.
My parents had been together throughout my childhood (and are now celebrating their second year of – finally – being married) and I had an older sister. Both of my parents worked full-time throughout my childhood, so my grandmother would often walk me to and from school, and look after my sister and I at home.
I have few memories of spending time with my parents but those I have are happy ones. I wouldn’t realize until years later that the emotional distance between my family and I made me a very closed person.
For the record, I’m beyond the blaming stage – we are all consequences of our experiences and we can’t change the past. Now we just have to try to learn how to move forward.
I made it to secondary school without too many problems. My first year was similarly successful – I was in the top sets for everything and had a close group of friends. About halfway into my second year of secondary school, not long after my thirteenth birthday, the bullying began.
I remember the first time so vividly.
I was walking home from school with a girl who I didn’t usually talk to much, and the boy in question (let’s call him B for “bully” for convenience) was walking with his friends some way behind us. There was nobody between us.
The next thing I knew, I heard him shout “Sarah, get your tits out!”
Instinctively, I turned around, stuck my middle finger up at him and continued walking. The girl I was with asked me what he’d said, but I pretended that I hadn’t heard the exact words.
I still remember my heart dropping a beat when he’d shouted, but I went home and got on with the day, not thinking much of what had happened. I didn’t know that it would change so much.
The next time it happened, I was walking home alone with B walking with his friends behind me. This was the start of countless occasions almost identical in content:
He would, on an near-daily basis, shout three words down the street at me: “Sarah saggy tits.“
I was (and still feel) so ashamed but I didn’t feel I could tell anybody. I’d never even judged my appearance until that point. I hadn’t noticed that I was developing faster than the other girls my age, and it made me feel like I was disgusting.
I hated my body, because (in my head) that was the reason this was happening. It didn’t take long for the self-hate and anger to kick in.
The first time I purposely hurt myself was following one of these incidents. I got my mathematical compass out of my pencil case, took off my trousers, and dragged the tip over my thigh several times. It felt so good to actually DO something, because I’d felt so helpless.
The next day, after B had done exactly the same thing, I tried to self-harm again. Problem was, I didn’t have quite so much anger and self-hatred built up, so had trouble making myself do it.
I was desperate for that release. I started drawing lines on my legs with pen and methodically scratching at them with the compass until all the pen had been scratched away. It didn’t take long before I didn’t need the pen, or before I used more harmful instruments, and moved to other parts of my body.
All the while, I was doing whatever I could to avoid walking in front of B on the way home from school. I would stand around the school gates, until the number of people dwindled so much that I was almost sure that he’d already left (sometimes it succeeded, other times it didn’t). I also started slowing down to the pace of a snail if I saw him ahead of me on the path.
After avoiding B on the way home for a while, he started bullying me in other ways, although he never used those words anywhere but on the walk home.
He began trying to trip me up around school. Having to see him in classes every day was torture. For the first time in my life, I hated going to school. I’d be anxious every morning and would feel sick at the thought of going in.
Then, the bullying started on the Internet, too.
We all had these “websites” and he would use his to bully me further – publicly. He’d post comments on his page, pretending to be me, saying horrible things (the most memorable being that I masturbated at the image of this unpopular guy at school).
Everyone saw it.
Nobody said anything, but I knew they had.
And B was relentless in his bullying, both in person and cyberbullying.
The first time I tried to be more aggressive to stop the bullying was after the online bullying had begun. Apart from what he’d said about me, he’d also followed a young teacher home and posted her address online. I used this to report him to the site host and his account was deleted.
For a short while, the bullying paused. However, my friends told me that B knew I was the one who’d gotten his site taken down, which meant that he was clearly still saying things about me.
After a few weeks, the three word harassment on my walk home began again. The next step I took was to tell my head of year about what he’d put about that teacher online. My friends were called into the head of year’s office and she asked them about what he’d written. They told her about the teacher and that B had written things about me on there, too. This teacher didn’t speak to me again, but B was suspended for a grand total of three days.
He never bullied me again, clearly knowing that that had been his punishment without me mentioning what he’d put me through.
About half a year after it started, the bullying was over.
However, the damage was already done.
I was depressed and self-harming on a daily basis. Self-harm became my way of coping with every negative feeling I had. I tried to stop a number of times, but always ended up self-harming worse when I gave in. It was also around this time that I learned my closest friends were talking about my self-injury behind my back. Everybody knew about my self-harm, but nobody approached me about it. Again, I changed groups of friends and, thankfully, was not alone.
I was 15 and just about to start my last year at that secondary school. My appetite was greatly suppressed by my depression and I’d often only eat one meal a day.
It was just before starting school that I consciously decided to stop eating. I began weighing myself every morning, before putting a few drops of milk into a bowl to make it look like I’d eaten, throwing away my lunch on the way to school, and reluctantly eating dinner with my parents each night. About three months later, I was at a BMI of 16% and my parents had noticed something was wrong.
I spent a few days pretending to be ill so that I didn’t have to eat anything, when my mother told me that they thought I was starving myself. I laughed it off and went back to eating properly. I lasted a week (and a 5 pound weight gain) before my emotions caught up with me.
It was then that I became trapped in the cycle of trying to lose weight and self-harming. Sometimes, I made myself sick, I over-exercising, one or two times of laxative abuse, quite a few minor overdoses, and lots of self-harming and cutting.
Since this started, I’ve seen quite a few different therapists.
The longest I’ve been without cutting is four months, and I’m currently coping better with the eating disorder than ever before. I’m still struggling quite a bit, but without this experience, I wouldn’t be where I am now.
I’m 22 and I’m on my way to my dream career as a researcher. I am just starting my PhD in psychology, with my research topic greatly inspired by what I’ve been through. I’ve come a long way since the first time B shouted at me. I still have problems with depression, anxiety, self-harm, and making myself eat enough, but I’m so much more confident, knowledgeable and open than I was back then.
I have a massive way to go, but I’m encouraged by how far I’ve come.
There were a couple of times that I came really close to telling a teacher what I was going through, but I never had enough courage to do it. I can say now that things may have be a lot easier if I’d been brave enough to say something.
Please, please consider reaching out to someone if you know they are being bullied.
by Band Back Together | Oct 14, 2015 | Asperger's Syndrome, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Childhood Bullying, Divorce, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Suicide |
I did it again.
While I didn’t yell at my wife, or make any physical advances, No, what I did was worse.
I made her cry and hide in a corner. My own wife.
And it keeps happening; it’s becoming more frequent.
I grew up in an abusive household in the United Kingdom. My mother, sister, and I lived under my father’s proverbial gun. My mother and sister were sexually assaulted by him.
His control ruled my life and dictated that anything I ever did wasn’t good enough. When I’d get straight A’s, I was told they should have been A+’s. Eventually, I rebelled a little which was for my own good.
We’d gone out for a walk in the forest and I needed a rest, so I hung back and sat down to catch my breath. He came thundering down, and with no no one else around, he knocked me down, and started to kick the living daylights out of me. I lost all control. I began to bleed from my head. Then, he picked me up and dragged me in front of a crowd of people.
Not a single person tried to stop him, not a single word of dissent.
From that point on, I decided I should be alone. Beside my mother, no one cared about me, and eventually she began to abuse me as well. It was a vicious cycle that eventually broke down when he divorced her and moved away with his mistress.
But after the incident in the forest, I just wanted to be alone, not exist at all. It was compounded by the fact that I was bullied every day at school at school as well. When I went to counselors or my mother, I was usually told, “you’re just being stupid,” and was written off.
Eventually I went to University, during which time I almost managed suicide with an overdose of painkillers. The next morning, I went to the doctor and was sent straight to the ER. It was no comfort when I was told that the amount I’d taken was enough to kill a “normal” person. Around this time, I’d disowned my father and there were threats that he and some of his brothers planned to descend upon the University to “correct” me.
I saw killing myself as the only option.
My now-wife has stood by me no matter what. We met playing games on the Internet, and eventually I moved to the USA to marry her. We’ve been married over a year, I’m doing the job I always wanted, and we’re expecting our first child.
She suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and sometimes, as is the case with autism spectrum disorders, doesn’t know how to act or respond appropriately. It feels like I have to organize our daily lives because she can’t or won’t.
I love her to pieces and wouldn’t give her up for the world. Recently, however, I’ve started to make snide comments to her or vent at her about stuff over which she has no control.
For example, we’d just had our apartment building set on fire by some careless fuckwits, and while the apartment wasn’t damaged, it did smell like smoke. The Red Cross had us stay in a hotel, and when we returned home, we both set about organizing our apartment.
When I ask her what else we needed to do, she says that we need to grab CDs from the car so she can rip them onto her laptop. I’m thinking,
“What the fuck? We need to inspect the apartment in case we need to make any claims, and you want me to go downstairs and grab CDs? Seriously?”
Then I say it aloud. I berate her. I berate her because I now have to be her eyes and ears. That I have to organize her day for her. How much it all stresses me out.
And then it hits me like a ton of bricks.
The one thing I swore I’d never do – abuse my own wife or kids like I was abused – I’m doing.
And now, I feel like scum for breaking such an important promise to myself and undermining, hurting her.
There’s a big part of me that feels I should leave quietly and not return so I don’t hurt her anymore. Maybe go somewhere, be alone, and die in a corner quietly. Because that’s what I deserve. And she deserves so much better than me, a broken person who doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.
I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know whether I should fight it, give up trying to change my fate, or remove myself from the equation permanently.
