Abuse Hides in the Dark. Turn on Your Light.

The Desire to ‘Fix and Please’ Is Codependency

Portrait of author on left, divided into thirds with eye section highlighted with purple. Excerpt from the book on the right.

Quietone said that she remembers me saying my desire to “fix and please” plays a factor in the abuse. She is right. If I took down this site, it would be to please Will; the more I think about it, the more I realize that removing my blog is another way to erase me. No wonder I’ve experienced such inner conflict this week.

If this blog were to vanish, then (as Erin says) our transgressions would just “go away”. It would be like the abuse (and codependency) didn’t exist.

I’m taking a different course of action.

promo for My Verbally Abusive Marriage...and what i'm doing in it

The blog stays, but I will do everything in my power to remove any trace of my “real” name from this site. In time, the only way someone could figure out “who I am” is to go to the courthouse in the county in which I live and dig through the volumes of documents to find me. And I really doubt that anyone’s curiosity would extend to such extremes. I’ve had this site privacy protected in the whois directory since its inception. If you go to whois.com and look up this domain name, you get NOTHING about me.

Will said that when he typed his name into Google, all kinds of crap turned up about abuse. Well, I just typed in his name, and guess what? There is nothing about abuse there. In fact, there’s precious little except an offer to find him in the white pages. He lied to me.

Under my real name, I get hits on my volunteer work here in town and contributions to Wikipedia concerning that work…nothing about this website or domestic abuse.

“Kellie Jo Holly” is the only name that turns up hits on abuse. Interesting, no?

I think it says a lot about me that I took his word on this and tormented myself for a week about it when I could have done the Google search in the beginning and put my mind at ease immediately. I want to do a better job verifying facts when it comes to our relationship. I’ve been with him for so long that I don’t fact-check him anymore. Why should anyone have to fact-check their lover?

Maybe I’ll change my view on fact-checking everyone. From now on, if I can’t verify your feelings on Google, I’m not paying attention to them. I’m kidding. Feelings cannot be fact-checked, but proclamations of fact can be verified! Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.” I think that’s a great idea.

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