What Happened to You?

Over ten years ago, in the dawning realization that my (then) husband had maintained a secret life that began before we were married, I didn’t even know how to talk about what he had done to me and our family. After finding an online forum where women were already rejecting the misogyny of the treatment model, we would try to tell our stories to each other.

A traumatized brain will often remember sounds, images, feelings without the chronology of events in correct order or, sometimes, even speakable. When I felt it was my turn to tell my story (at least what I knew so far) all I could say was “Something happened to me.”

Something happened to me.

In the years since those first days of discovery I persistently unpicked the threads of his camouflage pieces and slowly laid each one before myself. If I could identify it, I did. If I could give it a name, I did. It took a long time. Years. A decade. It took a long time because it had been whole lifetime in the making for him. It was like his second skin. To this day he is blissfully unaware of most of it, because it still works for him. In my opinion he remains dangerous, tragic and pathetic. My compassion for him has boundaries of personal safety well in place. The tears still can appear with longing that he could be healed one day. But never once has he asked what his covert abuse did to me. Never.

Something happened to me.

I barricaded myself in the spare room each night after discovery, because I believed he would kill me. It was the only thing he hadn’t done to me. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night for weeks and weeks. My adult sons’ best baby outfits hung in the closet. I kept the closet door open so I could see them and remember why I couldn’t just die.

Something happened to me.

His emotional and psychological abuse escalated after he got involved with his support group. I was barely functioning, trying to keep my job. And he would prance home proud with cruel scripts he would parrot at me about how everything was my fault, his needs were not met, he owed me nothing, he didn’t need to tell me anything (as if I was asking), I needed to stay on my side of the street, ad nauseum. He had a new secret life now, and he loved discovering he could abuse me with it, too. Openly. And get patted on that back for it. And no one in our circle of friends and colleagues seemed to care what was happening to me.

Something happened to me.

Meanwhile I was researching everything I could. I was discovering the deep misogynistic commitment of the prevailing treatment model with its gaslighting and blameshifting priorities addressing women partners. I was labelled with a disparaging name without anyone knowing me from a hole in the ground. I was accused of things I had never done. I was told I knew things I didn’t know. I was being treated with the same contempt that he did. This was terrifying to me. I never had been so deep in the belly of misogyny and so vulnerable. These people were dangerous to me, too. The same industry says it’s all different now. They say it without acknowledging what they did to women, and what the impact was, and that it was wrong.  Sound familiar?

Something happened to me.

One thing I did learn (second hand) from his heavily indoctrinated and codependent “sex addiction” therapist (she was 12 step grad herself) was that he was a victim of covert abuse by his mother. Suddenly things fell into place. This helped me understand his mother’s and his tag team abuse of me—the same things for which I had sought help before we married and in the early years of our marriage. I had been told the usual—their behavior was my fault—I was too this, too that, too everything. As if being a different person could have stopped them.

Something happened to me.

After separating I continued to support him in his recovery program, on the off chance I was wrong about what I began to understand had happened to me. Then one day he was visiting me and he talked about doing his step 4 “rigorous moral inventory.” He was going to some priest somewhere to work it through. “Of course,” he added, “I did one on you, first.” I looked at him and was overwhelmed with the deepest grief I have ever known. I knew then there was no future with him but more abuse. They had taught him new ways to do it and he was enjoying himself, especially when he let it drop that his group was co-ed and he was in charge of screening the new woman for membership. This was the job they gave the man who fostered emotional affairs with women.

Something happened to me.

I divorced him 2.5 years after discovery. Of course the discovery continued as his affair partners would contact me in order to reach him, and as I made sense of memories of strange calls and strange women in the congregation who treated me like I was an ignorant little servant girl. My trust had always prevailed after asking questions about these people. Now I see how his rage, his self-righteous accusations against me for asking any questions at all, his lies that I could never have imagined were his bread and butter, his endless looping one story into another—all these things were a part of the covert abuse. And finally I knew its name.

Something happened to me.

I was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting to get my full panel of STD testing. I was sick to my stomach realizing I had stupidly left this until now. The treatment industry, even ten years ago, barely mentioned the priority partners should make for this. Only in working with other women who lost their ovaries, got genital warts, and more did I realize this too, could have happened to me.

Something happened to me.

It was hard to accept I had wasted over three decades of my life to abuse that others tried to tell me I was responsible for. One day I wondered what my life would be like if I gave my own life the energy I spent dealing with him and his mother’s abuse. I decided I really wanted to know. I divorced him. And my whole life opened up. Some things were harder. But the best things have been worth it. Some things remain difficult. But I wouldn’t trade this life I’m in for anything, now. I just wish one person had said to me before I married him “Something is off in his relationship with his mother and her relationship with him. Don’t marry him until it’s clear what that is.” Or, I wish I had been raised to respect the value of my life as much as a man’s. I do now.

Something happened to me.

I was used and abused for three decades. I paid a terrible price for that. I paid a terrible price for extricating myself from it. I discovered that I had something to offer other women like me. And I’ve been doing that. I discovered the whole field of trauma work and began to study, train and work in it. I discovered I could love again. The most unexpected thing ever. And I discovered there was nothing wrong with me, sexually. Nothing.

Something happened to me. I told the truth of what others had done to me. And then I took the story of my life into my own hands.

Where are you in the story of what happened to you? Your story is safe here.

With you,

Diane.

P.S. I appreciate my readers understanding that during this pandemic I have had to use my trauma training in critical and immediate ways supporting people and organizations on the front lines. That’s why the blogs have been less regular. But then again, there is a whole stockpile of blogs for readers to revisit. I usually say too much in one blog anyways. So go back and see what you missed!