Yes. You Are Still In There.
He has fragmented your life with newly discovered lies, deceit, harm, hurt, cruelty, disrespect and contempt. For a while, you can’t believe this is your life. It can feel like you are looking at someone else’s life, and you aren’t where you were the last time you looked, at all.
Trauma symptoms keep adding to those feelings as you lose skills and traits that have always been your fingerprints on life. When we don’t recognize ourselves and don’t recognize the life we seem to be in, we can become terrified and immobilized. Trauma is real, and it does layers.
But you are still in there.
One of most heart-breaking moments when I talk with women is when they speak their deepest fear—not that he doesn’t love them or than he will never stop his secret life—but that they are afraid that they, themselves, are lost forever. They are not lost forever. But we know what can make us believe that we are slowly and steadily disappearing and that it’s an unstoppable force:
We are disappearing through ongoing lies.
We are disappearing through a most thorough contempt.
We are disappearing through the carelessness of the one who held our heart, body, spirit and mind.
We are disappearing through being made his biggest fool.
We are disappearing through a covert cruelty.
We are disappearing through time gone forever and wasted.
We are disappearing through a core level lesson against trusting love that we don’t know how to battle.
We are disappearing through the silence of practitioners to our abuse.
We are disappearing through the noise of practitioners talking over our agony.
We are disappearing through the distancing of family and friends.
We are disappearing through our hopes and dreams for a family that we didn’t know he put out every week with the garbage
We are disappearing through a portal we didn’t know was there, and we have no idea how to save ourselves.
All this and more. And yet, as I speak with women from all walks of life and hear heinous stories of their situations, I also hear stories of their courageous resistance to being a victim to him or his treatment group, and their persistent search for truth, respect and reconciliation even when it may be impossible.
One of the most important things I do is to honour every act of resistance they have mentioned. Sometimes they tell me about it without realizing that’s what it is. I affirm their efforts to solve the problems their husband or boyfriend was causing. I underline every single thing they did trying to protect their dignity and self-respect. I praise each step they took to find safety and seek help, however it turned out. I repeat how I’ve heard them describe trying to do what the treatment industry suggested they should do. And anything I think they did right, I tell them so, especially any act of self-respect and self-care.
You may wonder why it’s so important. In fact, it is a critical healing and empowering strategy for all women who have been abused. The Women’s Emergency Shelter in my city discusses how important it is in their online resources. Maybe yours does do. Such affirmations are an intentional reminder to us that we are, in fact, still “in there”. We are actively resisting our victimization even when we don’t understand how it’s happening.
Every question we ask that he punishes us for asking, every instance when we challenge his moods and distancing from us and children, every chance we take to demand more from him as a co-parent or life partner, insists that we have not disappeared and that we did try to find some way to manage an abusive person even when we had no idea how deep the abuse went. Every survivor of systemic covert and/or overt abuse in the relationship needs to know they tried to stop it even in the face of more of it that followed.
You were always “in there.” You are still “in there.” When you were completely on your own you tried very hard to enact your core values for yourself, your children and your relationship. You gave him many gifts in those acts of faithfulness. You stayed visible when there was a lot to lose. But these you were your gifts, not anyone’s entitlements. He does not own you and neither does the treatment industry. They don’t get to command you to become invisible, after all.
The longer I have to be with women like us, the more signs of ourselves that we uncover and celebrate. Along the way most of the women reveal their sense of humour, albeit as survivor humour which can dark but is still funny! They express their core values so many different ways, but most often when they tell me what matters most. Their sense of justice and fair play, their concern for others, their determination and commitment, and much more tell me they are most definitely “in there.” It’s a privilege to make those things clear to them as we go along.
This crucial first response is how we to begin to gather up the scattered pieces of ourselves and see what truly remains of us. It’s more than we think. And it’s more than these men and their treatment industry want us to think.
At first, so much of our thrashing about after discovery is based on trying to put him and our relationship all back together, even when some of us aren’t sure we want either! But the call to “hard work” (see Blog for Feb 25, 2020) confuses us and the core values of loyalty and promises continue speaking to us even when they never spoke to him.
And then there’s a whole treatment industry selling a long line of recovery hype with not a single piece of credible research to support it. But their marketing is everywhere, splashing out hopium for “better than ever” marriages (and really, when you think about how low that bar is to start with he doesn’t have to do a whole helluva lot to make it “better than ever!”)
Chances are, you won’t find him or many of his treatment group too interested your personal devastation, trauma symptoms, health problems, and other results of such a deep level reality destruction. They won’t be searching for signs that you’re still in there in spite of what’s been done to you. You won’t find people ready to affirm very much about you at all. That would require complete professional attention and trauma-informed care, and that has already been allocated to your husband or boyfriend as the priority care client. Apparently there’s not enough to go around. Too bad. So sad, partners.
It’s crucial that women like us receive the skilled attention that can help us to remember who we are, recognize the proof of that, and stand in our truest selves the whole way through this time of trauma, challenge, healing, and growth. We need everything we are from our survivor humor to our defining core values—the very things our abusers counted on being there for their own purposes.
So, if the practitioner you are seeing isn’t spending time honoring your resistance in the stories you share from your life with this man and helping you to see the consistency between who you were in that relationship and who you still are, as well as the inconsistency between who he was in that relationship and who he presented himself to be, it’s time to make a professional change. Because you’re still in there. And you are going to need every precious part of yourself to survive this nightmare, minimize the damage, repair and renew your life, and offer as much to the children you may have.
You’re in there all right. But after all the years of his covert and/or overt abuse, it’s time you gave the best part of yourself—to yourself. If your marriage or relationship can’t bear that much positive mutuality, then you need to consider if that is good enough for you.
You’re still in there. And you have what matters. Don’t let anyone disappear you.
With you,
Diane.