When You Know You Don’t Know Him At All

For some women it happens early on after D-day. For others it’s a cumulative gathering of information that reaches critical mass. However we get there, we have reached a crossroads. What do you do when you realize you don’t know him at all?

In the next few blogs we will build on the one I posted before this one. We will talk about the role of humiliation in preserving his secret life, building it up, and in our experiences of the “treatment” models that want our money and participation.

For me, it was his obvious discomfort at being suddenly immersed in truth and a non-delusional reality. He showed me in ongoing arrogant cruelty that he had little capacity to live without lies and rejected an urgency to do that. It was a crushing blow. I didn’t know him at all.

When his recovery program became another tool with which to exercise his contempt for me there was no going back. I did not know this man at all. He believed that he owed me and our children nothing. Ever.

I had never known this man. He had hung his lies around the security of common friends, common faith, and a common vocabulary for life. As I said in a long-ago blog “there was nothing in me to imagine what was in him.” Even now I sometimes wonder “Why did he do that to us, when all we ever did was accept him and love him just as he was?” I didn’t know him at all.

Discovering that it didn’t really bother him to do things that would hurt me and our children—that we just didn’t matter more than his secret life nearly finished me off. Remembering that if I committed suicide my two sons were left with him as their sole parent brought me back from the edge—more than once. I stayed alive. I am still alive. But I am also humiliated by how closely I live to that edge and how hard I still have to work to stay safe with that new neighbourhood hazard.

It is hard to accept you didn’t know him at all. I understand that. Until you realize that every memory you hold up to prove he was who he presented himself to be had a lie behind it (or more than one) the whole time, it’s just hard to accept.  Most of us have no real experience with such deep duplicity and certainly none so intimately conducted at our expense to serve a violating purpose. You don’t know him at all, after all. I still beat myself up about being so stupid about something so important. It’s humiliating to know that even with three degrees and some scary sharp critical thinking skills, I was always stupid about him. He was always working at an advantage my intelligence would never overcome. Only his errors would break through that advantage. I didn’t know him at all.

In that realization, however, you still aren’t safe. That’s because it usually catapults you into a crisis of your own identity and sense of self in the world. Who are we now if it turns out we didn’t know who he was? Can we trust ourselves when we trusted someone completely untrustworthy with our whole lives, our sacred promises, our creation of more human beings? I didn’t know him at all.

However that crisis manifests, you can be sure that he has no interest in it. It’s a consequence of his covert abuse so it will never be real to him or important to address. He expects you to support him in his “crisis” of truth, but spending time imagining what this means to you and how it harms you is not on the agenda. You are not that important. He was everything to you and you would do everything for him, but you are not that important and neither are your children. It’s humiliating. I didn’t know him at all.

Mostly we just get more denial, avoidance, blameshifting, gaslighting, and diminishing. Some clients receive supposed apologies and “disclosures” that are sanitized so nothing can be held against him in court. The only way we can “move on” is to realize we didn’t know who he was at all. It is not within him to take responsibility without then off-loading that responsibility by using the tactics mention in the first sentence of this paragraph. We are there to be humiliated so that his lies still have a veneer of truth to others. I didn’t know him at all.

Dear readers, when you don’t know him at all, the only predictor of future behavior is past behavior. And when that’s what you get, you can begin to rebuild trust in yourself by recognizing what he’s doing and accepting what it means about who he really is that you did not know. If, instead, we step more fully into his world of delusions and lies we can expect more humiliation—because his survival strategy is built upon it.

You don’t know him at all. He is a deeply damaged and damaging human being. How he got there we cannot ever know, and the current treatment models and their practitioners barely touch the tip of the iceberg, never mind what’s going on below the waterline. It’s a clinical tragedy of epic proportions playing out every day and recorded on your credit cards. Yes, I believe they deserve clinical care that is competent to assess, diagnose and treat (if possible). But practitioners who subversively ensure that your ongoing humiliation will be required for his “recovery” are actually bringing nothing to the table more than that.

If, somewhere in that mess of his sense of entitlement, he experiences a fleeting moment of wanting more than your ongoing humiliation, I doubt the treatment model will have any capacity to support it. It’s just not built on facts, publishable research, or positive results. Actually it seems to me that it’s based on our desperate willingness to accept the humiliation of our love and our children’s love, our worth and our children’s worth, our health and our children’s health. And oddly enough, it also means we accept that his life isn’t worth more than that either.

Someday, maybe a class action lawsuit, a journalistic exposé, or even a sense of clinical conscience (none of which is my work to do) will mean his abuse victims will be protected and supported, and he will have a choice of treatment that may lift him out of the abuser role and give him back his life, too, if he wants to live it that way.

Meanwhile, when you know you don’t know him, it’s very hard, and humiliation is usually a part of that experience.

I didn’t know him at all.

With you,

Diane.