MP Writes;
I hate my life. I have wanted to leave my husband for the last 30 years but have never done so. He is verbally and emotionally abusive. I have recently found out from my children what affects our tumultuous marriage and family life have done to them and I have been a miserable failure of a mother. I should have never married him and now I feel like I can never leave him....I am so low in my self-esteem and I have this weight from my upbringing that you never get divorced no matter what. You married for better or worse. I have totally screwed up my life....when I look back all I have are regrets. And when I look for the future all I see are regrets. If I kill myself then that affects others negatively and if I stay alive I affect everyone negatively. I am totally at a loss...I want to just disappear.
Kim Says;
Hi MP. It sounds like you feel your life is over and it has been wasted yet you have done what you believed was right even though that was at great cost to yourself. All any of us can do is what we think is right and none of us know if that will turn out to be for the best in the long run. None of us CAN know what the future will bring!
Your children appear to have expressed the opinion that they would have been better off if you had left your husband but they are merely assuming that. Abusive people often make life a whole lot more tumultuous and nasty for their partner and children if the partner does leave them. It is very common for abusive people to use the children to try and control their partner if separation occurs and children are often very badly hurt when that happens. Your kids are only assuming life would have been better if you had left. They can't know what might have happened to them if you had broken up the family!
I'm guessing you considered leaving him many times but decided against it because of your belief the children would be better off with two parents. Your upbringing most likely made you feel it would be selfish to end the marriage just because you were not happy so you did what you thought was right.
My grandmother left her abusive husband and my mother once told me she felt her mother was extremely selfish for doing that. Your children might have felt the same way if you HAD left him!
It is very common for children to blame their parents for whatever goes wrong in their own lives. It is human nature for people in general to blame others whenever they can as I am sure you must have noticed and parents make a particularly good target.
The chances are your kids would have been just as unhappy with you if you HAD left your partner as they are because you didn't leave him. I'm assuming you love your kids and would not want to change them? Your partner was the only way to bring those unique individuals into this world so you had to be with him to get them!
You say you should never have married him but did you know that way back then?
You can't change the past but you can change the future if you choose to. You say you look into the future and see only more regrets but that is a future based solely on the present. If you change the present then you can change the future. You say you feel you can't change because you are weighed down with your upbringing and poor self-esteem and that is probably true but it doesn't have to stay that way.
You mentioned you have nobody to turn to and that is the first thing that needs to change!
One of the ways abusive people keep their partners from leaving them is to isolate them. Everyone needs support from others to be strong and courageous in their choices and decisions. Abusive people make sure their partner has nobody to turn to but them so they come between their partner and anyone they have who can provide support. Sometimes they move them so far away contact is all but impossible and sometimes they just behave so badly they drive everyone away or they force the partner to turn away from family and friends by making a scene whenever they try to see or contact them.
You can't expect to be able to change if all you have is your partner since he will do his level best to sabotage any attempt you make to grow stronger or happier but a therapist can provide you with the support you need to change in a positive direction.
Maybe those changes will lead to you leaving your husband but they don't have to. It is also possible to change your perception of yourself so you can be happier even in the midst of a lousy marriage. You say you went for marriage counselling and I take it that didn't work. Marriage counselling can only help couples when BOTH partners are willing to change. Abusive people often see no need to change and will only go to counselling to prevent their partner from leaving.
Try individual counselling. Tell the therapist you need help dealing with abuse but are not willing to end your marriage because of your beliefs. Work on your self-esteem and learning ways to manage the abuse so it doesn't continue to drag you down and see if life doesn't seem a whole lot better once you stop feeling so bad about yourself.
You never know. You might even reach a point where you start to believe you really do deserve better than what you have and you may gain the courage to reach out for it and get it!
I wish you all the best and I strongly urge you to get support somehow. If you don't, won't or can't get a therapist then try to make some friends, reconnect with family or old friends if you can but, failing that, seek out new sources of support as soon as you possibly can!
Cheers - Kim
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M.A. Writes;
My problem is that I am an abuser. It varies from physical, psychological, intimidation, the male privilege, making threats, isolation, controlling finances, minimizing, denying, and blaming.
As you can see I have some serious issues and I am desperately seeking help from all angles. My relationship with my fiancé Kim is on egg shells and I'm afraid of losing her. Not only that, I'm in the Navy and I may be getting kicked out for an incident that was finally reported. I really doubt I will be kicked out but the image that I hold so dearly has been severely damaged.
I realize that this is not the man that I want to be nor envisioned of becoming. When I think of the reasons as to why I am an abuser it all narrows down to my childhood.
My mother has always been with abusive men from my father to her occasional boyfriends. With that said I never had a male figure and the only image of a male that I had was negative ones. Then my mother out of retaliation of the abuse that she suffered, would abuse my sisters and I. Abuse ranged from being beaten with objects like wooden handles, baseball bats (plastic), to being whipped (naked) with switches and belts until they broke. In my life I always was afraid of my mother until I was older around the age of 15 or 16. Then when I no longer allowed my mother to abuse me, she would kick me out of the house for months at a time. At one point I was out of the home for nearly a year.
I'm not one to neither blame others nor make excuses for my actions but I know this has played a vital part to why I am the way I am. People used to ask me how did my sisters and I turn out so well because we were all so focused and never got in trouble when the truth was we cut the world off (well at least I did) and that's how.
Then comes along the most beautiful and wonderful thing in my life (Kim) and I let her in. Not to realize before but after it is too late that I still possessed so much baggage.
There came the different types of abuse which gradually escalated from bad to worse. I don't want to be mistaken when I stated all the various types of abuse that I put Kim through because they aren't always together but a day-to-day basis I display majority of them.
I am so unhappy because I don't know how to be happy. I have never remembered a good time with my parents in my childhood nor adulthood just bad ones. I really need help and I beg that you please tell me how I can get help. By the way I have began to talk to people about my problem and I am at step three of solving this problem, I just want to know in your opinion how long do you think it will take me to get this out of my system? Please respond as soon as you can for I am in desperate need of your help.
Kim Says;
Hi M.A. sorry about taking so long to answer you.
It sounds like you have been pretty thoroughly educated in what abuse is and you clearly know where it has come from in your case but now it is time to let go of the past and work towards a better future.
It's time to forget about who is to blame for how you became the way you are. What is done is done and pointing fingers won't change anything. You need to look at who you want to be and focus on how you can become that person.
The bottom line here is you LEARNED, during your childhood, to be an abusive person and you can UNLEARN that but it will not be easy and it will not be quick!
It took you YEARS to learn all the subtle ways of coping with life, love and other people that have made you an abuser and it could take years to learn replacement ways of coping!
You say you are at step three of "How To Stop Being Abusive" which is the help seeking stage. I am glad to hear you are starting to reach out for help as you will need someone to TEACH you all the things you never learned as a child.
Some of the things you will need to learn are called life skills and they include how to communicate properly with your partner, how to negotiate with others for what you want, how to solve frustrating problems instead of blowing up, how to control your anger when it is triggered and how to prevent it being triggered and there are many other life skills which you may, or may not, profit from learning should you choose to.
Life skills are merely ordinary things people learn in childhood through observing their parents using them to cope with life. A child raised with good life skills learns, for example, to negotiate when he sees Dad offer to mow the lawn tomorrow if Mum will make him chocolate cake today.
The child raised with good life skills learns to tolerate frustration when he sees Mum refuse a series of offered deals because she doesn't care if the lawn gets mowed, she doesn't want the shelf fixed enough to make a cake today, she doesn't care if Dad has had a bad day and needs some comfort food and so on.
As the child watches Dad come up with one offer after another until he finds the deal Mum is willing to take he learns the life skill of persistence or else he learns another important life skill, the ability to accept that sometimes in life things just don't go your way as Dad gives up trying to persuade Mum to make the cake.
If he is lucky he may then learn the life skills of self-reliance and personal competence as Dad gets up and makes the cake himself!
What you saw was Mum being forced to make him chocolate cake today to avoid being beaten. From your perspective, as an observer, violence looked like the best life skill of all because it can get you what you want, when you want it, at no cost to yourself. In this way, a child learns a negative life skill, impatience!
Violence must have looked like a pretty good life skill to your mother too since she chose to use it on her children instead of trying to teach them alternative ways to manage life.
The thing to keep in mind is how you FELT being treated with violence because that is how you are making people feel about YOU!
Think about your own feelings. Call up the anger, disgust, bitterness, resentment and boiling hatred you felt, and clearly still feel, for your mother and her partners and think of this - Kim is feeling all those things about YOU for exactly the same reasons you felt them about your mother and her partners!
Violence gets results and it SEEMS to have no cost but it kills love, destroys respect and arouses hate in those it is directed at.
You can begin your journey towards being a better person by practising some key life skills right now.
Patience - it takes time to change.
Persistence - don't stop trying just because it takes longer than you want it to or you can't get the hang of it right away or it doesn't get you what you want (Kim) straight away.
Help-seeking - you can't reach into yourself and pull out life skills that were never put in there so find the person, or people, you need who can teach you those skills and learn from them.
Acceptance - resign yourself to not getting what you want, when you want it, because you want it this time. Accept it will take time and settle in for the long haul!
Good luck.
Kim
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