There Is A Way To Get Better

In the worst moments of realizing the man you love isn’t the man you love at all, and you don’t know who this man actually is, sometimes a light turns on.

The whole thing—the relationship, the man, the uncomfortable and constant peeling away of your resilience, the realization of how alone you are, the utter unreliability of the person in whose hands you placed your life, the insecurity of your children who sit way down on his priority list, the impact of learning your love was just another thing to use, and his penchant for strategic and ongoing cruelty is running like a never ending movie trailer.

Sudden clarity isn’t what everyone wants. But we might get it anyway.

With the right support you will explore those critical observations revealed in your clarity. You will go over the deceptions and acts of contempt and cruelty, their impact, and the consequences to you. You will tell your story as many times as you need to in order to be sure you’ve been accurately and fully heard. Your experience will be received and validated. When another layer of harm is uncovered, you will do the same process again until you are ready to talk about what it means. The person you speak with will believe in you and your life. They will affirm its value and its right to be respected and cherished. Your right to uncovering the truth of your own life will not be less important than his need to hide what he did to you.

Then you will talk about what every thing that he did to you means. You will remember everything you thought your life and your relationship and your family meant. There will be grieving, such grieving. Just when you think it’s done there will another wave. You have lost so much. You will remember the core values you brought to this life with him. They will seem dulled at first by seeing how he used them to hide his secret life. But you will remember them and know they are still your core values. And you will grieve again when you start to name his core values. It will hurt to do that. You will connect the dots of seeing how he robbed your children of time, attention, money, love, in order to protect and enjoy his secret life. That will hurt more than anything. Right under your nose he did it. Your precious children. You would die for them. He wouldn’t even turn off his porn for them. He didn’t just use and abandon you. He used and abandoned them.

A focus on the wellbeing of your body, mind, heart, and spirit will allow you to learn where you are hurt, what kind of damage has been done, what kind of medicine and care you need, and how you will manage these consequences of his abuse going forward. You will learn the right words to use about what he did to you, and in using them, you will empower your healing. Your health will be a priority right from the start.

As each step is taken you will become stronger. You will become strong enough to review all your options. You will have options. As much time with each option as you need will be taken. If criminality is uncovered, you will not be urged to protect him with noises of “if he ends up in jail, how will your marriage get better?” At the same time, you and the needs of your minor children will be identified, listed, and each option assessed for how those needs are met. His needs will not be your priority. His needs are his responsibility.

You will hear truth about what’s ahead for you if you leave him, and you will explore what you feel and what you believe about that. Your core values will be brought forward again to speak into the losses, the struggles, and the uncertainty. Your additional resources will be lined up for action. The needs of your broken heart and spirit will mean you hit the pause button and are called back to safety and to grieving whenever needed. That’s okay. You will have learned that going back to it ends up being way faster that trying to ignore it and go forward.

No one will tell you that you owe your abuser and the abuser of your children forgiveness in order to change your feelings. Your feelings are holy. They are your alarms telling you that you are in danger. He may whine and beg for it, but in between that he will still lie, he will still find any way to blame you, he will still criticize you, he will still try to manipulate you, he will still try and make you responsible for saving him, saving the relationship, and saving the family. You will be shaken. And then you will remember who he is, what the relationship was, and how he treated the family. You will not be fooled again. Your life and your children’s lives are at stake. You will know you have to model exactly what you believe they should do in a situation like this. You will know that your own believability is at stake in what you choose. The truth of the core values around which you build your life, what it means, and through which it holds together---it’s all at stake.

Then you will turn your life to the uncertain and unknown life that is ahead. And you will believe in it, take your children’s hands, and starting living it. Not without trouble. But with hope and truth and love.

Real trauma treatment works that way. It looks after you and any other vulnerable victims of covert and overt abuse. Any other treatment that does not follow the most basic and known methods for trauma care is not trauma care. Relationships that can’t survive you being treated for exactly what’s wrong and what was done to you in that relationship are not safe relationships for you or your children.

The man in your life needs and deserves correct assessment and treatment. You do not deserve less than that, since you and your children were the ones he abused. At least, that’s what I think. What do you think you and your children deserve?

You only get one life. Your children only get one life. Stop sacrificing yours and theirs to pretend  he’s not as damaged as his is or as dangerous as he is. And stop paying people to teach you how to pretend. Yes, it’s a terrible tragedy. Whatever happened to him is a terrible tragedy. Don’t make it worse. Stop the cycle of covert abuse. In your life. In your children’s lives.

Get real trauma care from a real trauma professional.

With you,

Diane