I Am About 98% Sure This Is Currently Happening.

I am about 98% sure this is currently happening.

One day I will find a good one. And then I will chase them away with my crazy.

NO

I’m crying so hard.

I was desperate to hear him say this for years.

I can’t explain how I’m feeling, but I don’t feel good about any of it.  

I hope he says something horrible tomorrow.

During the first nine months of my therapy he controlled my sessions remotely. He told me what my issues were that week, I wrote it down in this book, discussed them with my therapist and wrote her responses as talking points. I then discussed with him.

Aside from being entirely ineffective as my actual issues were not being addressed, the discussion was always horrible - tense and fearful.

I rarely reiterated what my therapist actually said, because she realized, very quickly, what kind of person he was. She was very skilled at asking me questions in an attempt to wake me up without alienating me.  Her focus was always on me. 

I twisted her words when I spoke to him about it. Told him things he wanted to hear: that i was mixed up, and the decisions I made stemmed from a darkness inside me that had nothing to do with him. I told him how she advised me to fix myself, put him first in all things.

This was a lie. But it kept me alive.

If there was even a hint of something he didn’t like during my “session” he would threaten to pull me off of his benefits - which I got to keep for 9 months - the only thing i got out of our separation. He also accused me of painting him as the bad guy. This was always a dangerous time.

One time he wrote my therapist an email, saying he could not be a part of my mental health care anymore. I was mortified, because I had to explain to her what i had been doing.

She told me to continue to do so. Soon after she started to ask me about limits; what line would he have to cross? I really REALLY hated this line of questioning.

I can barely understand the nonsense he made me write above. It’s a sickening reminder of where my head was at.

It seems worlds away.

Learned Behaviour

His dad was abusive. Violent. And his father before him.

Once he asked his dad for money for a field trip and his dad threw him into a wall so hard he went through the drywall and ended up in his sister's closet.

He wasn't born with these skills.

His mother told him when he was in highschool that regardless of what happened, she would always back her husband over him.

He wasn't born cold.

I know exactly where he comes from.

Nothing tastes as good...

TW - for ED perhaps?  

He was superb at exacerbating issues and insecurities I already had.

I have a love/hate relationship with my body.  Rationally I can say that I am an athletic woman and even at my heaviest I was not overweight. And even if I was, I personally do not find a person’s size has any bearing on whether or not they are attractive.  But when I look at myself in the mirror, all I see are problems that require fixing.

I’ve talked a bit about anxiety, magical thinking, and my propensity for self harm as punishment. These seeds I believe were planted before he came into the picture.  However he kept them well watered.

First it was about food:  There was the nonsense about me doing all of the cooking.  Following that, he would get angry if I did not have dinner on the table exactly when he wanted it regardless of how unreasonable that expectation was. So the solution was to go out to eat a lot (and wait for someone else to cook the meal? Just one of those illogical things I didn’t question).

I like eating out - variety is great, and I can usually find something tasty that is at least marginally healthy. Yeah, that often means salads, but I promise you it’s not a bad way to go if you know how to order.  

However he wasn’t having it.  Salads tend to be about the same price as an entree, or as he put it "expensive for nothing." Money was always a concern for us me, particularly at the beginning of our cohabitation when we were broke.

So I had to start ordering food that he deemed appropriate. I put on a bit of weight.  And, boy, he loved to tell me about it.  Sometimes it was direct, like when he told me it looked like I'd  had a baby knowing fully that my stomach was the part of my body that I was most insecure about.  Other times it was a bit more subtle - checking out women, or sending me pictures of women he thought were outrageously attractive who were all quite thin and noticeably thinner than me.  

The worst by far was the sinister and vindictive things. Like when he would grab some “fat” during sex and wink at me.  Or talk about how guys in his industry have it so rough because their wives let themselves go and then wonder why their husbands turn to escorts for satisfaction.

My reaction was probably not shocking:  I went through a very destructive phase of extreme calorie deficient eating.  

It was the perfect way to hurt myself.

Can confirm that that my dislike for kissing was him only.

No progress on part 2 yet.

This worries me.

I can’t tell if I don’t like kissing in general or if I just don’t like kissing him.

Hazard of being with someone who crushes you every day of your entire adult life.