I have one relationship in my past that I tend to make a lot of references to.* At this point I am able to discuss this person and this situation and even who I was at the time without any sense of emotional connection, which I really consider to be healthy given the amount of time that has passed and the amount of contemplation and active therapy I’ve participated in. And, while I can site this relationship for being the base of a lot of my behaviors and lasting mentalities, I don’t sit around and blame it/him for my problems or addictions anymore as I’ve gotten to a mental state from where I can identify how my choices affected me and how any outside influences could’ve been handled differently.

However, up until 7 or 8 months ago this wasn’t the case and that really really started to bother me, especially given that, not only has this relationship has been nonexistant for years now, but I’m in a much better place with a much better life and a whole new sense of self and healthy habits that I never really felt myself capable of maintaining or posessing. In fact, given how embarrassed I was by the association to that specific person and/or the actual relationship, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I had this need to keep revisiting the situation and trying to make sense of all of it. I’d exhausted myself with therapy and introspection and sobriety and even talking it over with this specific ex (who can site everything he did wrong but continues to do the same things to his partners today.) And then one of my friends suggested I get involved with an Emotional Abuse Survivors Support Group.

This sounded ludicrous to me. First of all, I wasn’t even in this relationship anymore and I’d been going to therapy for eeeeverything that was fucked up in my life anyway so surely this tiny element would’ve been taken care of already. Secondly, while the situation I was in was unbelievably unhealthy, shockingly insane and tumultuous, and had many singular episodes of undeniable abuse, it couldn’t have been categorized as “abusive” because I kept going back to it and inviting it back into my life… surely I was just as in control as the other party, if not just as much at fault. Plus, me still not getting this whole “removal of ego” thing [necessary for full recovery from major fuckeduppedness] had me still believing that I was somehow immune to having been in a full-scale “abusive relationship.” I mean, I wasn’t locked in a basement or told to remain silent in public or even beaten on a regular basis… So, sure, I was in a codependent relationship with a lot of powertrips and mindfuckery and infidelity and dishonesty and other general dysfunction but never an “abusive” one. Somehow, even though I had spent years prostrating myself and taking emotional beatings from a genuine self-loathing idiot, I still thought that that sad, subservient, grappling wreck of Me that I was was still too proud or self-aware to have been susceptible to an “abusive relationship” as if those were reserved for people far worse than me.

However, I thought I’d at least check out the criteria just so I could go back to my friend and have hard facts to back up my assertion that my former relationship was not abusive. So I checked some online literature and smiled with a sense of relief when reading first and foremost that abusive partners have real jealousy issues and control issues… actually, I laughed out loud. My former partner didn’t give a shit where I was or who I was with most of the time and he rarely bothered to call when he said he would, so he certainly didn’t fit that stereotype. But then I kept reading and I felt my stomach bottom out with the familiarity of the symptoms:
My partner had blamed me for all the problems in our relationship and even his own abusive behaviors.
(“I wouldn’t have lied to you about seeing my ex if I knew you wouldn’t get mad about it.”)
My partner did make fun of and/or belittle me to his friends/acquaintences.
My partner did treat me so badly that I became embarrassed to bring him around or even tell people when we’d gotten back together.
My partner did withold sex and emotion from me.
My partner did cheat on me repeatedly.
My partner did make me feel like I would never do any better than him and was lucky to have him at best.
My partner did leave repeatedly and then come back, begging for forgiveness.

The list went on and on, even as I moved from site to site, hoping to find one list that had little to no relevance to my particular situation. It was only when I read about the characteristics of an abuse victim that I felt my eyes fill with tears and I had to push away from the computer in order to catch my breath. All of these things applied directly to me… I wouldn’t have been surprised if the person writing these articles knew me personally.
I did take all the blame for what was wrong in the relationship.
I did contemplate/attempt suicide.
I did have clinical depression.
I was pretty much textbook in pecking-order chastization and battering.
I did withdraw from my family.
I did defend my partner’s abusive actions to people around me.
I did repeatedly leave my partner (and constantly planned to.)
I did feel like I loved and hated him all the time.

In a frenzy, I spent the next month collecting and reading everything I could about mentally/emotionally abusive relationships (and not all from the internet, either. Imagine!) and, even more than being surprised or dismayed, I was increasingly embarrassed. Mortified, actually.

I was already embarrassed that I had been so codependent with an average-looking, uneducated, emotionally stunted child for so long but then when I read words about our situation and how his manipulations were just another form of brainwashing, I felt hopeless and worthless all over again. I realized that all that time I had been the very malleable, idiotic stereotype who was just as pathetic as I’d always feared. I was “that abuse victim” who “couldn’t” leave [for no apparent reason], which was a character I’d always been frustrated and disgusted with.

And all this was even more distressing to me because I was in a great relationship with someone who wasn’t even capable of this sort of mental destruction and here I was feeling the ramifications of something I’d pulled the plug on years prior. This wasn’t relevant to my life anymore! This had nothing to do with the people I’d worked to surround myself with in the aftermath! This was something I’d worked really really hard to be fucking done with! I was pissed to have to be dealing with this already-belabored situation[/man] again, when it[/he] was never worth any of my time in the first place. And the very last thing I wanted to do was to beat the [assumed] dead horse even further by talking about it more and having to delve back in to all the wounds and emotions and shit I’d worked to fucking get over. More than anything, it just seemed unfair and unwanted.

When I started talking to other women in an online support group, I was kind of in the same mentality that I was when I started going to AA meetings; I don’t fucking want to do this, I know everything I need to know about this, how is this going to effing help me, etc. I mean, seriously, how much is there to talk about? As it turns out, there’s a lot. And there are a lot of things that I had experienced in my former relationship that I’d never even stopped to think about that these other women brought to my attention. And it was amazing to talk to other women who were on the “other side” and had all the same feelings about it that I did: Why wasn’t it so easy to just leave even when you’d known you should for months/years? Why can’t you get other people to understand the need to leave even when you’ve been in their place? When do you stop dealing with the emotional bullshit of all of it? What’s the best way to present this to your children as a life experience? It seems like the more I talk to women, the more I realize that I’m among many many women who didn’t realize they were in what would be considered “abusive” until long after they were out of it. Many of us considered ourselves empowered, educated neo-feminists and were certain we were going to be joining a support group of women with whom we had nothing in common.

And, although painfully predictable to the theme of this essay, it’s been really amazing. We’ve gotten to the point where we can talk openly about the relationships we’re in now and ask each other to keep us accountable for our actions and the situations we’re in. We’ve told our individual stories and even pulled out pictures of these abusive assholes to have a group “WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?!” laughing-fit-style cleansing. It’s been really great.

Because of this, though, I’ve gotten to that point where I can casually discuss this former relationship as just a marker in time for reference’s sake like I would with such phrases as: “When I was 9…” or “On September 11th…” or “During my pregnancy…” To me, it doesn’t come with conflicting emotions or that underlying frustration of me needing to figure it out or right it.

This became evident when I was speaking to one of my ex’s ex-friends (who still keeps in touch with me, obviously) during this last weekend. While it’s been amazingly validating to have a handful of former friends of his go out of their way to stay in touch with me (especially after all the horrible things he made sure to say about me) and hear their similar complaints (although never as intimate as mine), I’ve really gotten past that point where I’m trying to show off how awesomely I’m doing in case they happen to talk to him or where I love to indulge in gossip about how terrible he’s doing or how awful he’s treating those around him and can just enjoy having a friend that I delight in the company of who - ohbytheway- happened to be a friend I met through a former romantic partner. There’s a real sense of triumph and recovery in the simple act of physically getting our new families together and talking about everything great that’s going on with us without ever mentioning the god-awful circumstances/person that set up our friendship in the first place.

Strangely, it’s the realization that those old, tyrannical emotions aren’t even bothered with anymore that has given me the most pride and sense of accomplishment of anything else in my years of therapy and recovery. I never thought apathy could make me feel so good about myself.

*This is something I won’t be doing after this entry. Promise.