The Pain Is Real

Dull. Sharp.

Two kinds of pain. I know them both and everything in between. You probably do, too. Since dday in 2009, some sharp pains have dulled, and some dull pains have sharpened. 

For me, the spirit-destroying, heartbreaking, mind-exploding, body-abusing discovery of the false reality of my and my children’s lives with my (now) ex-husband and their father was the primary wound. To have created a false sense of security in our primary relationships and to have robbed us of personal agency to make decisions for our well-being in heart, body, mind, spirit, were two acts of cruel, chronic and profound abuse. The abuse was so destructive that it has taken me a long time to learn how to carry it without wounding myself continually on its pointed contempt for our human worth.

Yes. I had to see him clearly. In all his self-centered life priorities and all utter disregard for the three people who loved, accepted and supported him. Forebearing his human frailties, failings, and irritating personal habits that we all have, we loved him every single day. We were loyal to him every single day of our lives together. He ate it all up and vomited back on our lives their perverted products of disrespect, betrayal, contempt, lies, manipulation, financial harm, physical illness, psychological damage and spiritual abandonment. That’s what he made of every good thing we offered freely in trust. It doesn’t even make me cry to write the truth anymore. Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. 

Yes, I had to see him clearly, and in seeing him clearly, I learned over time how to un-love him as a life partner, friend or colleague and found room to feel pity for what he had made of himself and the only people who knew him this well and had loved him in the only life he will have on this earth. I was surprised to feel anything like pity. Maybe you won’t feel it. No judgement there if you don’t.

Dull. Still there. But dull.

Being able to write this clearly about it is a sign of that dull edge. And I post that clarity here because so many women ask me about getting to this place, and what it’s like. And sometimes, in writing it a new way, readers resonate so that they too now have the words to describe what happened to them all. Because something did happen to us. 

Then, it’s as if once you finally get something really painful under control with coping tools, education, support, reflective and integrative work, discernment, etc., something else is in the waiting room ready for an appointment. With your new attention to it, you can see how serious this other injury has been, and how it continues to hurt you.

For some women it’s the pain of children of all ages who turn away from you, unable to see the one person they could depend on as someone needing to depend on them. Instead they may punish you for being their father’s victim. They may deny truth and embrace his lies. They may gaslight and blameshift their way through their own personal crisis at your expense, because your love is still the only love they can count on. So off they go to soothe their wounds by courting his love more specifically than they did before.  This is a sharp pain. There are women who will be defeated by this experience more than the experience of dday about their life partner.

Children launching into adulthood with graduations, careers, relationships, weddings, babies, new homes, etc. will provide opportunities to know the finely honed edge of this pain at the very moment wives and partners might have expected celebration, embrace, inclusion, joy, intimacy, etc. How does this pain ever dull? In my experiences, for those who have survived the worse of it, it is only choosing to focus on nurturing other things in your life, the passage of time, and the inevitable failing of their father to live up to the fantasy others have created for themselves, that has any real success in dulling the pain here.

For other women it’s isolation from other family members, friends, co-workers, faith community members, that becomes a cutting truth in their lives. How will this ever be dulled when, as so often is the case, no one wants to hear the truth of your experience and the harm done to you and your children?

We continue to put one foot in front of the other in our lives. We continue to try to participate in ways that add value to the world that is near to us and far from us. We maintain and express the core values that are truly in our lives that were not present in his. We provide evidence of who we really are pretty much every day.

We try to ignore that he is protected and supported and affirmed while fingers point at us in hateful gossip, falsehoods embraced, and shunning. We know how patriarchy will always choose to “save” the man. So, we will just keep living past it with truth and the core values he used in us to make himself more believable, but he no longer has to use.

Time may help here. It’s not an easy thing for some people to hold negative thoughts about other people who have not actually done them any clear offence. Eventually they may look for a way to get out of that ugly corner and even seek to rehabilitate their relationship with you. By then, you will perceive that you have choices. You can be polite to any overture and set boundaries for ongoing interactions that make them safe and tolerable for you. You can do anything you want to do with those kinds of overtures. I know how lonely it can be to be shunned, disappeared, “dropped.” But I do urge you to be a good steward of your many gifts and resources, and not let the sharp pain of this wound rise up again and cause you to act out of desperation. Scripts that might be helpful are the following:

1.     I missed you being in my life, especially when I was deeply traumatized. If you would like a relationship with me, I will need time to see what is possible, but I am open to trying.

2.     It was devastating to me when you and others set me adrift at the lowest point in my life. I would never have done that to you. It’s going to take me a while before I know if I have the resources to restart any of those relationships. I’ll call you if I get there.

3.     The time when I needed to hear those words has come and gone. We are still connected by family/mutual friends/work but I have examined many of those relationships. I grieved and accepted who I was to you. I don’t hate you. I just learned the limits of our relationship. Let’s have simple courtesy order our interactions from now on.

4.     No, thank you. I’ve accepted the new place you have in my life.

People sometimes are irritated that I continue to write about what this experience is really like. They want me and you to “get over it.” That’s because they don’t want to carry the burden of truth in the harm we endured and sometimes continue to endure, the further harm we endured in treatment models that blameshifted, diminished, gaslighted, denied our lived truth of covert and overt abuse. Do you know that mental health practitioners and coaches and pastoral caregivers are STILL talking about abused women being codependent????? They STILL will not undertake the responsibility of continuing professional education about trauma informed practices and effective clinical trauma care for people who lived through overt and covert abuse. Shame on them. Yes. Shame. No wonder they run from that word while, in my opinion, covertly heaping it upon their clients in outdated labels and guidance.

This truth is a sharp pain still for me as someone who comes alongside people who deserve so much more than more abuse from the professional care groups. And as long as that pain is sharpened by running up against a fresh or enduring incompetence, error, open misogyny, destructive religious ideologies, negligence, or ignorance that endures at our expense—I will write about it.

And your story will be safe here.

With you,

Diane.