And so it begins…
Today we thought we’d go do some shopping… just pick-up some silly things to send to friends and some groceries… nothing big or exciting.
One of the big problems with going shopping is that the ex-husband was a security guard. This meant that he worked at one time or another in most of the larger shopping malls in the city. Those that he didn’t work in personally, he knew the people who worked there doing security. So every shopping place has reminders of him, and every guard in a uniform looks like him when seen out of the corner of the eye – classic PTSD stuff.
Today we went shopping at Westfield. He did security there, but it is also one of the places where we know well, so are less likely to have a panic attack. We were fine at the book and toy shops – hey we’re librarians and many of the littles love looking toys… But for some reason Sophie was really upset about being there, despite her choosing to go there. It definitely had something to do with the ex-husband as she was trying to do the same nervous wedding ring twisting that she used to do to try and calm and soothe… But we no longer have the wedding ring or any ring… Because it wasn’t there, she panicked. So unlike Sophie…
Whenever he did anything to her, she’d just throw the blocks up to the rest of us and take it until it got too much… She always felt so guilty as she agreed to the marriage, even though Management said it wasn’t a good idea… Management is great at passive aggressive stuff, so just didn’t organise the wedding. She didn’t stop it on purpose, but just refused to organise it – which would usually be her role. But finally gave in two nights before the wedding and got the vows and other details sorted, but it was very much against her will.
No one blames Sophie for agreeing to the marriage, but she blames herself… She’s getting really bad flashbacks of things that he used to do. We don’t know how to stop it or help her… She’s our most emotional part, and she’s hurting…
What’s unfair is that she is the one who comforts everyone else, but we don’t have the skills to comfort her.
PDF Realisations…
We’ve just woken up from nightmares, so are sitting at the computer distracting… As far as I know the nightmares weren’t about the ex-husband, but for some reason we’re sitting here remembering how he used to enjoy our dissociation. It meant he could abuse us further, and he knew when the softer, gentler parts such as Sophie were present so that he could get away with greater levels of psychological abuse.
When we met him he admitted to having been abused by his sister and her friend from the age of 7. It stopped when he said it was to stop, which was when he was about 12-13. It affected him badly, and he was diagnosed with PTSD. But we think he had bigger issues happening in his brain, but they were never really addressed as he never attended therapy for any decent amount of time. When Management said that he was a sick puppy… well he was a sick puppy! The things he enjoyed and thought were beyond the scope of normal “kinkiness”.
Sometimes when we were bad, he would gain attention at his work by telling all his workmates the latest exploits of his wife’s trip up to the local psychiatric ward. He loved having to ring up his boss in the early hours of the morning while we were being assessed to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it to work because we were being assessed (again). This was despite the fact that we often went straight to work after these assessments. So he loved the attention that our craziness could bring… and also he hated work so used us as an excuse to get out of it whenever possible.
One of the things that we just realised… In the later part of the marriage, his time off work was starting to get him into trouble… so the attention he gained there had started to turn negative. This meant he had to try and get that level of positive attention with us. His description of positive attention involved cutting in front of us and the one we hadn’t realised until tonight… he used to mimic our dissociation and dissociative switches. We might be being unkind, but he only started doing it in the last 6 months that we were together, so it wasn’t an enduring pattern that had been with him since the start of the relationship which lasted a very long 8-9 years.
Our dissociative switching is fairly “smooth”. It usually just involves a sharp intake of breath, rapid blinking, slight cough or if there is an internal battle a zoning out for a short time. It was the zoning out, or blankness that he would mimic.
How very odd…
Hope he one day gets the help he needs… We don’t think he will as he refused to go to the court ordered family violence courses that were part of the Protection Order we were awarded against him. A big part of seeking the Protection Order was to protect other women from him. His final assault involved him attempting to strangle us, we knew from his stories that he’d tried to do the same thing to his mother before we met him. So he was into repeating patterns of violence. He was going to keep on repeating those patterns until he got some help. We’d tried to get him to go to get help for the last four years of our marriage… We gave up on that, and on us near the end.
We can breathe again…
Well ok, so we can’t breathe freely because of the stupid cold we have… But financially we can breathe a little more easily. The money to assist in paying for our therapy has come through from ACC, so the huge debt we’d been stuck with from the separation and the cost of therapy has been eased a little…
We’re still in a rather large financial hole, but at least we’ll be able to buy food and petrol when we need it. Yes, we know there are other people out there struggling more than us… We also know that the only reason we’re haven’t had to declare bankruptcy is that most of the debt is a private loan – to the mother who won’t demand it back soon, but its tied to all sorts of other issues. So we’re grateful that we are able to live in a flat and feed our cat.
On the therapy front… We’d tried to get our therapist to answer some questions via email to see where she stands on what diagnosis she is treating us for, and what experience she has with this diagnosis. Her response was a fairly reasonable “we will talk about therapy while in therapy”. That’s fine, we’d love to be able to talk about this in therapy. However, we dissociate so much during therapy that we won’t remember the answers; and we just don’t have the courage or level of trust to ask these difficult questions while sitting in front of her. Will wait to see what her response to that is…
Going into respite care…
Yesterday we were told that we should go into respite care for a week to try and keep the body safe during the period of the ex-husband’s birthday. Not sure if we can – how can we leave our gorgeous cat in a boarding place?? I know that logic probably seems off, but she is one of the reasons we have to stay safe at home, she relies on us.
Told our therapist this via text – can imagine her rolling her eyes and calling us crazy. Well to most people there is no logic to it. Ok there’s probably no logic for anyone, but it’s one of the things we use as a coping mechanism.
Pretty sure we can stay safe, just have to use all our coping mechanisms and strategies… We have to work on Saturday too. That will help.
Would love to be able to control the ideation…
Anniversaries
Today is what would have been the 5th wedding anniversary.
Today is one year since our previous therapist sectioned us because of a misunderstanding about the amount of medication we had taken – she thought it was an overdose and it wasn’t.
Last night we did something that we regret and has hurt us and a good friend.
Today we’re trying to pretend it won’t influence our friendship, but it will.
Today we can’t stand anything. Can’t stand noise. Can’t stand silence. Can’t stand the sound of the mother breathing. Can’t stand the anger that we can feel coming from within. Can’t stand the memories that are playing over and over as a movie reel in the head.
Can’t stand being a victim anymore. The pain hurts too much. We want to escape. We want to bring the people that hurt us to justice. We are just going around in circles banging ourselves as we circle. We will never be able to bring the abusers to justice. Some have now died. Some are already in prison for hurting other girls. The others we just don’t have the strength to fight.
We feel so defeated and pathetic. Hate this feeling more than any other. At least when we’re fighting we have a purpose and a hope. Now we feel nothing. Just the need to run. Run to where? We don’t care, we just need to run. To escape. To eliminate the need to have to deal with this all again tomorrow.
We’ve gone beyond battle weary.
So shouldn’t have done anything last night.
Anything that feels good at the time always feels dirty afterwards.
—————-
Now playing: The Cranberries – Zombie
via FoxyTunes
Ideation & Distraction ***Triggering***
At what point are you allowed to give up?
When are you allowed to say “that’s it, they’ve won”?
What do you do when you’re ready to say that?
Why do people put so much value on life?
Our psychologist wants us to go to the psyc ward to keep the body safe.
I don’t know if we can.
Hospitals destroy us.
They rip your soul apart and empty you all fight.
If you show any emotion you’re considered dangerous and unstable – even if the emotion is justified.
We just want to world to stop and let us get off.
We know this is because of the ACC, Police, husband, wedding anniversary etc.
But isn’t that enough?
We aren’t making any of it up – I really wish we were.
We can’t cope with all of this and keep on pretending everything is fine.
We cried at work when we found out that the husband had lied his way out of trouble for breaching the Protection Order.
We can’t sleep.
We can’t stand silence.
We have to have our back to the wall or else we imagine him coming up behind us.
We can’t sleep in the bed as that is where he hurt us soooo much.
WE CAN’T COPE!!!!
WE GIVE UP!!!!
We don’t care if it looks like we’re letting those that abuse us win – they have!
They have destroyed us.
Our soul is destroyed.
Our mind is in tatters.
Ultimate irony is that we try so hard to give other people hope cos we always think they are worth so much.
They are strong enough to get through this and get back onto the healing journey.
We can’t get that about ourselves.
We’re sick of the healing journey that is slowly destroying us.
We’re useless evil scum that deserved everything that happened.
Just wish we could step aside and let the suicidal ones take over.
But there is still some form of preservation.
But its more concern about who will take care of our cat.
Too much…
Today we got a letter saying that the Police aren’t pressing charges against the ex-husband for breaching the Protection Order because “he wasn’t aware it was still in force” :’(
So he again gets to lie and cheat his way out of something… Again he doesn’t have to face the consequences of what he has done…
We give up, there is no justice – natural or legal…
:’( :’(
Why are people so self-fish?
There’s this woman at work who is ALWAYS moaning, ALWAYS depressing to be around. We accept that she is going through a rough patch in her marriage, and it’s probably going to end. But why does she have to moan all the time??? On Monday, our manager at work wanted both her and I to go over to the graphic designers who had worked on the Institutional Repository with us to give them a gift. Well “moaner” was asked to come too – “but I have distance to do” “I can’t make it”… blah blah blah… We didn’t want to go either cos we hate fuss, but really wanted to thank the designers cos they had done a great job…
So we went over with the manager and she gave us all a $50 book voucher each for the great job we’d all done. Moaner got one as well, but she didn’t even act ashamed that she was moaning about even going over to see these guys less than 20mins before.
Then yesterday she was moaning about having to put the cost of buying new curtains onto her VISA… Good grief, we can’t even afford food this week! Another lady at work is having to deal with a dying husband! Get over having to put a luxury onto your VISA card you ungrateful woman!
I think what really gets us is that she has no empathy. On Monday one of the other ladies could hardly walk because she’d hurt her back. Moaner didn’t even notice. We noticed and we’re going through hell. In the past she’s talked about people taking marriage seriously – while in front of us going through a marriage separation! She’s told all sorts of racial stereotypes about how its usually the “brown skinned people” who do domestic violence – again in front of us and she knew we were victims of domestic violence. We’re of European descent…
Ohh the drama queens….
A day spent at the police station
Due to having NO sleep last night because of the text we got from the ex-husband, we spent the majority of today down at the police station! We decided to lay a complaint about the breach of the Protection Order because, even though the text wasn’t abusive, it affected us really badly. We went down there expecting them to give him a call and tell him not to contact us again – cos ya know it wasn’t all that bad…
Officer Dude had other ideas!
He wanted to know why they hadn’t been notified of the assault in February, why we hadn’t had the Family Violence group come visit us for an impact statement, and why we hadn’t had a call from Victim Support… Geez we didn’t even know we were meant to get all of that. Apparently the after hours clinic we went to for the injuries should have followed up on the assault – and they didn’t :/
For the first time we met a really nice policeman who cared and wanted to help. He was really angry when it looked like the police down where the ex is now living hadn’t served him with the Protection Order correctly (thankfully they had). He told us about some of the other cases that he was working with so that we felt more like this was a good thing to do. He gave the ex a moderate risk of being violent, even though he lives about 5 hours away by car – we explained that our fear is that he will get angry about something and jump in the car and get angrier as he comes up the country to get us.
I know it sounds dumb… but it’s both great and TERRIFYING when someone believes what we say and believes we’ve been hurt… it’s like if they believe us, then maybe it really did happen!!??!!??
We’d kinda like to believe that it didn’t, or it wasn’t really all that bad…
Separation Agreement
Yesterday we signed the separation agreement!!!
We’re almost free of him!!!
We can finally get rid of all the rubbish he left behind that we’ve had to look at daily for the last 7 months!!!
Here’s the clip we did to celebrate… ***Trigger warning***
Our lawyer was the first to say that we came off much worse out of the agreement, but realistically we didn’t expect to come out any better. It was more a case of trying to minimise the losses. So from the $25000 that was owed at the end of the marriage, he pays $1500. $850 of which is to pay for a hole that he punched in the wall last year during one of his outbursts. Thankfully about $15000 of that debt is to our mother who isn’t demanding it back anytime soon. Hopefully if we get any financial support from the impairment levels from ACC we’ll be able to survive in a flat by ourselves.
I know people have different financial stresses, but at work there’s this woman who has a mortgage, a partner who is working and is doing up her house – and ALL she does is moan about money, needing her next paycheck, how poor she is etc. It’s kinda hard to hear when we’re just surviving financially and another woman at work has a husband who was diagnosed with terminal cancer a couple of months ago. Suppose its all relative…
