My Verbally Abusive Marriage

I think I stumbled across the difference between true selfishness and protecting my self-interests.

If I am acting selfishly, I will do what makes me happy and take no responsibility for the outcome of my choice.

If I am acting out of self-interest, I am willing to take responsibility for my choice. Self-interest does not interfere with my ability to cooperate; it allows for mistakes. I can respond constructively to any situation my act of self-interest produces.

If I am acting out of selfishness, then I don’t care that someone else may be hurt, and if they are, I blame them for feeling the way they feel in order to diminish my influence and responsibility for the situation.

So when I “make myself happy” it isn’t that I don’t care what happens because of my decision. When I make myself happy, I do so from an inner point of what will help me retain my balance. Then, because I’ve maintained my inner balance, I can handle any consequence of my action compassionately, honestly, and with an inner willingness to change something if it needs to change.

If I act from a point of selfishness, I give up the ability to change. If I give up my ability to change, then I lose the opportunity to grow as a person. If I don’t grow, then I may as well be dead.

So, self-interest keeps me alive, keeps me moving forward, and ideally guides my decisions to help me become a better person.

I was listening to Rush the other day, and he said that it is self-interest that makes our country so great. In other words, because we have the freedom to look out for ourselves, because our destiny is in our own hands, then each of us can rise to the occasion and provide for ourselves with our own God-given talent and ingenuity.

He was making the point that if it weren’t for self-interest in the form of private business ownership, then the United States wouldn’t be what it is today. If everyone were a non-profit, there would be no where to get the money for which the non-profit needs to provide its services.

But this isn’t political. It’s about my website.

On the page “Why I Went Public” I wrote “I am dying in the shadows. I don’t want to die. So, I’m taking my story public to save my Self.” The point of my website is three-fold, and two of the three points serve my own self interests.

1. I want to save myself
2. I want to fund my emergency account
3. I want to help other abuse survivors recognize their abuse for what it is, and then either do what I do or don’t as I muddle through to a hopefully wonderous conclusion.

I’m not braver than you or stronger than you or any different at all from you…I’m not going to stay in this relationship just to prove I can any more than I would leave it to prove “everyone” is right. What I am doing is entirely self-serving. If you want to ride along, or if you find value in this story, then I am grateful. But I’m not doing it for you.

So, along those lines, I’ve decided that I want to catalog different aspects of my abusive relationship with “tags” such as the ones you see on this blog. For example, the page “Angels, God and Spirit” collates all the pages in which I refer to, you guessed it, angels, God or spirit. Over the life of the site, these tags will catalog the “mini-stories” that underlie abuse. When I’m ready, I can use them to discern patterns, remember what I’d rather forget, and make decisions that will affect the rest of my life.

In the meantime, maybe the tagged pages will help you decipher what’s going on in your relationship. Maybe you’ll be able to come to a quicker decision than I can; maybe you can be healthier than me.

But the pages aren’t for you. They’re for me.

Marc decided to try the medication. (The Abilify the doctor prescribed.)

Unfortunately, I think he also tried some sort of other “medication” last night. This morning he has the spittle at the corner of his mouth, some “delayed” response time in action and word, and something I can’t quite put my finger on is “off”.

I can’t find any missing OTC medication in my closet, so I’m wondering if his friend maybe brought it over. I don’t recognize any strange behavior from his friend, but then, I don’t know the boy as well as I know my own.

Isn’t that term scary? Borderline personality disorder? Isn’t a personality disorder something like schizophrenia? Something serious?! Come to find out, BPD is just a fancy word for someone who’s emotions or moods are out of control.

The Mayo Clinic says,

“The name arose because of theories in the 1940s and 1950s that the disorder was on the border between neurosis and psychosis. But that view doesn’t reflect current thinking. In fact, some advocacy groups have pressed for changing the name, such as calling it emotional regulation disorder. “

I want to talk about BPD for two reasons. One, the psychiatrist my son and I visited today thinks that this may underlie some of Marc’s current emotional issues. In fact, after reading up on it, I agree. I also think that most every teenager may have trouble regulating their emotions…there are SO MANY biological based changes in an adolescents’s body that any number of chemicals can cause moodiness and extremes in emotional reactions. At least, that makes sense to me.

The second reason I want to talk about it is because the symptoms of borderline personality disorder closely resemble the symptoms of abuse victims. In fact, many people with BPD were abused as children – usually physically or sexually, but neither of those types of abuse apply to my son. (I strongly disagreed with my husband’s use of the belt to discipline the two or three times he used it, but I do not think those episodes were “abusive” as described in the BPD literature.)

Along the same lines, the symptoms of BPD also closely resemble my husband’s behavior. Again, from the Mayo Clinic’s website,

“Your relationships are usually in turmoil. You often experience a love-hate relationship with others. You may idealize someone one moment and then abruptly and dramatically shift to fury and hate over perceived slights or even minor misunderstandings. This is because people with the disorder have difficulty accepting gray areas — things are either black or white. For instance, in the eyes of a person with BPD, someone is either good or evil. And that same person may seem good one day and evil the next.“

Now, I don’t know if that is how my husband feels or thinks, but it is certainly the way he acts toward me. And increasingly, that is how my son is acting toward me.

The Mayo Clinic also admits that the causes of BPD are under investigation. However, genetics, environment, and body chemistry can all contribute to this love/hate feeling that causes such emotional turmoil (and in our family’s case at least, seems to result in anger).

At this point, I can hear my husband saying something negative about me even discussing this topic with myself – even considering it. To him, all psychological research is rubbish (but yet he employs this “rubbish” in his work and at home). And then I hear him telling me that these people are only telling me what I want to hear, or what will keep his insurance money pouring into their pockets. And don’t forget the snide comments about how I “believe everything” anyone tells me, whether it’s from an educated professional or from some other credible source. I believe some of his exact words were “everything those fuckers who write those books want you to believe!”…

Ugh. To get that voice out of my head so I could hear myself think would be a blessing.

Although I cannot pretend to diagnose my son (or anyone else) with any mood or personality disorder, I can read the symptoms, supposed causes, et.al. and line them up with my son’s behavior and see that they’re a pretty square match. Nevertheless, like the doctor we spoke with today, BPD is not a diagnosis at this point. Right now, it’s obvious that Marc is having trouble regulating his emotional reactions and emotions in general; the doctor wrote a prescription for Abilify, but left the decision to take it or not with my son.

The next step is a series of psychological tests, MRI’s, and blood tests during a two-day period at the hospital (outpatient, not overnight). Basically, any chemical imbalance, abnormal brain activity and/or cognitive issues that could affect Marc will be discovered during these two days. This is what my husband and I wanted – physical proof of any issue, or confirmation of lack of proof.

I don’t know if Marc will take the Abilify or not. We didn’t talk about it after the session because we were accompanied by Eddie and because the session itself was pretty intense.

BTW, I really liked visiting a psychiatrist instead of a psychologist. There wasn’t any “touchy-feely” talk (God knows we’ve had a LOT of that!). It was simply a factual reporting of events and a sharing of ideas between my son and the doctor about the medicinal uses of pot. (Note to self * look up “amotivational syndrome”)

Well, he’s back in the house, so I’m going to go talk to him before I go to sleep.

I am not willing to blame what I don’t like about myself on any abusive relationships I have tolerated during my lifetime. My marriage has been mentally, emotionally and verbally abusive; although that fact is saddening, it is not a “reason” to continue cultivating the bad habits and faults I’ve developed in response to it. It is not okay to stay the way was the day I realized my relationship was abusive. In fact, most of the conflict following that day has been due to my effort to change.

First, I wanted to change my husband. Then, I wanted to change our relationship. Now, I only want to change myself.

I want to change…

• How I take care of myself, physically, mentally, & emotionally (I like the spiritual path I’m on!)
• How I view my “place” in the world, my nation, my community, my family, and my marriage
• My thoughts concerning “what is possible” for me and my family
• My marriage by changing myself into the person I want to be
• My fitness level, my body, and my “look”
• My preconceived ideas about what I “should” be doing and work on what I can do – what I think is best, even when it takes energy I’m not sure I have

In short, there are many many many things I hope to change. And I’m scared.

Yes, I’m scared of change itself, but what I’m really afraid of is that my idea of what my future will look like is not possible. What if some of the people I love don’t want to be with me in the end? What if my “perfect future” doesn’t include everyone that I love? What if I have to let them go in order to be happy? What if I change so much that they don’t love me anymore?

The word “selfish” keeps running around in my mind. I think I’ve been called selfish so often that it’s hard to know when I’m being selfish and when I’m being true to myself.

Well, I finished updating my pages, and then I finished fixing all the broken links (which I didn’t expect, but maybe should have?). In the interim, I learned about .htaccess files and THOUGHT I was going to have to take a crash course in MYSQL, but fortunately, I did not have to do that! It’s coming, but not today…

And now that I’ve bored you to tears, I’ll tell you what you’re dying to know… I ate General Tso’s chicken for dinner! No, I’m just kidding. What you may be wondering is why did I call this entry “Drive”? (Or more likely, you’re wondering something else…but I don’t feel like pulling out the tarot cards to discern your innermost thoughts, so I’ll just slide out of neutral and move on…)

Drive. I’ve been single-minded for the past week, and I met a goal I had set for myself. I am so proud of myself! I have thought for the longest time that I “needed” an external motivation or deadline to complete a project. In fact, I’ve spent lots and lots of time dying for someone else to tell me what to do. If that someone didn’t like my idea or wasn’t interested in it, I let the idea die.

I have thought that I needed someone else to believe in my idea for it to be worth working toward. Turns out that the only person who absolutely must believe in the importance of any of my ideas, any of my goals, is ME.

If and when I believe in what I’m doing, then there is no stopping me. I can do anything, with or without support, when I believe it is the right thing to do…believing that I’m doing the right thing requires a lot of thought and a lot of intuition and a lot of faith. Fortunately for me, those three things are powering the creation of verbalabusejournals.com.

Thought, intuition and faith are powering me, but they’re not created by me. It’s a synergystic feeling…I’m drawing from them, but I’m not creating them; even though they seem to come from inside of me, they’re coming from something outside of myself. But without me, they have nowhere else to go…so we need each other.

I’m a conduit. But I get to add pieces of myself to the final output. I feel like I’ve been given the opportunity to pass along a message or create a new thought form or…

Now my filters are on. I’m filtering out all of the grandiose possibilities that my guides are feeding me because I’m afraid I’ll sound too conceited and full of myself. Please understand, and it may sound crazy, and maybe I am crazy (only time will tell) but I feel plugged into something big.

I’ve been putting off writing since yesterday because I really wanted to write something happier! I thought that if I waited, it would be a better. I mean, since talking to Will about my blog entries, I wanted to show him that I “could” be in a good mood.

A really wonderful thing that happened on Tuesday is resulting in some unexpected anxiety. First, the good news.

I sent an email to the author of “The Crazy-Making Husband” blog asking if she would link to this blog because they’re similar. In response, she asked if she could do an article or blog on my work/this site instead. She thinks my blog would get more attention that way. Of course I told her yes! She must see something worthwhile here to offer to write about it; I’m honored.

So, anyway, my head soon came out of the clouds because I realized that if she wanted to do the article in a week or so, then I wanted to have my new .php pages up and running and the old pages redirected to welcome some possible new site visitors. I’ve been working on this for some time now, chronologically, and was up to the year 2007. Now that I have a goal date for completion, I’ve been working like mad to get it done.

But that isn’t the bad stuff. (I really DO love to work on my site!).

Unfortunately, the end of 2008 and most of 2009 includes a LOT of very stressful, anxiety-causing events. I mean, journal entries from 2002 may make me sad in hindsight, but ’08 and ’09 are very fresh in my mind. Reworking the pages has stirred up feelings that I’ve tried to put behind me as I choose to become mentally and emotionally stronger and healthier in my husband’s absence.

It’s strange how time can magically make fear less relevant and anguish more palatable. It’s strange how the past 3 months of not dealing with the silent treatment, explosive anger, snide comments, etc. can make it all seem like it happened so long ago that it shouldn’t matter anymore.

I think this recurrence of anxiety is what you call post-traumatic stress. It sucks. I almost took two of the Effexors I’m weaning myself from just to keep my heart from racing.

Well, I’m going back to work. I’m focusing on the good, dealing with the bad, and moving forward.

I almost forgot to tell you about the outcome of Sunday’s little adventure. After Marc and I sat down and talked, one thing became very clear. He is confused over this “new” Mama who says what she means and does what she says she will do. I guess it’s taken a crisis of this nature for me to realize that I’ve never set a “Mom” boundary.

I talk to my kids a LOT. We talk about everything. Marc talks to me about sex, drugs, alcohol, the economy and politics (to name a few things). We always share our ideas; when there are differences, we respect the differences. But finding out that Marc was experimenting with pills and pot turned our relationship on its head. Marc doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact that I can “respect” his opinion while “denying” him the opportunity to act on it. To him, if he thinks it, it should be so.

Granted, a lot of this rebellion has to do with his age. Fifteen is a tough time, and rebellion is expected.

During our conversation regarding the “it’s just a beer!” incident, I became aware that being 15 in addition to having a “new” mom who is setting boundaries for herself leaves a lot of room for confusion.

So, and these were both my very intelligent son’s ideas, we agreed on two code words.

• When I am exerting my responsibility as “mom” and I expect him to DO and then ask why if needed, I’ll say “This is MOM.” (I’ll also try to work on one of those cool “looks” most parents have!) If he is confused or frustrated with my reluctance to hear him out, he’ll ask, “Is this MOM?” If so, then he’ll DO then ASK why.
• If, God forbid, we ever get to the point of non-communication that we reached Sunday afternoon, one of us will say, “Let’s stop it!” We’ll take a break and come back to the discussion calmer and ready to work out the problem. An important aspect of “Let’s Stop It!” is my younger son’s participation. My younger son (who has not been a part of the loudness in the past weeks and months but has suffered stress and stomach aches because of it) can also call a stop to our “conversation. “

My father-in-law opened my eyes to another possible action for my youngest son. Eddie can simply go to Grandaddy’s place in the “back forty” and escape the confrontation entirely. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before! Hopefully, the “This is Mom” thing will halt a lot of crap before it goes too far, but having a backup plan is a wonderful thing.

I am trusting that my teenager genuinely wants to respect my role as mother. He said he did, and the fact that he’s the one who came up with the code word idea says a lot. Now we will have to wait and see if the agreement we made on Sunday works. I hope it does, and I think it will.

We all agreed that our ultimate goal is to not “need” the code words at all. We hope that by using the code words as tools, they will help to reshape our behavior. I really don’t want to be 75 years old and still having to say, “THIS IS MOM!”

On Friday, I was shocked to hear my son say, “You lie to me all the time!” When I asked him how I lied, he didn’t have a response…until Sunday night after our ugly incident. Then he sat in his room and wrote it down in black and white.

At first, I felt indignant. And then, I noticed that everything he accused me of doing I had accused my husband of doing. Fortunately I didn’t say anything until after the indignant feeling passed.

Then we started going through his list one point at a time.

“You say you want to help me with my depression, yet you discourage me to express my emotions.”
 - He believes that I should always consider his emotional state regardless of what is going on at the time.
 - I believe that I should always be sensitive to his emotional state, but there are times where it doesn’t matter how he feels about taking out the trash or doing his homework. I honestly believe that I am very sensitive to his needs. I’ve even gone so far as to CONSIDER allowing him to use pot to self-medicate for depression. The kid almost had me convinced. (He’s that good!) Fact of the matter is that I cannot control how he feels about anything and changing my expectations of him because he’s not feeling up to par doesn’t do him any good, but it sure does leave a shit load of trash in the kitchen and “god i hope he passes civics!” panic in my heart.

“You say I try to control the conversations we have, but you use the phrase to stop me from talking. You do it to Dad as well.”
 - When we got to this point, he wanted to disregard it as irrelevant, so we did.
 - I, however, see his reluctance to elaborate on it as a sign that he didn’t really mean it, but threw it in the list in hopes of making me worry about being a controlling bitch.

“You use what I tell you against me, or to benefit yourself. Then you deny doing so.”
 - I think it’s pretty clear what he meant by this.
 - I reminded him that yes, this situation did happen last week, and when he pointed it out to me, I did at first deny it. But then, I asked him to remember that as soon as I denied it, I had a change of heart. I told him, “I can understand how you would feel that way. I’ll do my very best never to do it again.” I meant it and I haven’t repeated that mistake.

“You tell me you want me to leave, then you trap me here.”
 - Self-explanatory if you read the entry.
 - I feel that he took what I said and twisted it into the statement above. He probably did it out of emotion, but whatever the reason, I had made it clear that if he wasn’t going to follow the house rules, then he could stay with his grandfather or in the tent I put outside for him until he found a better plan (i.e. decide to follow house rules!)

“You say you want us to have two way conversations, then you don’t provide me a chance to speak.”
 - He’s referring to what JUST happened when he was trying to convince me that “it was just a beer!”
 - I reminded him that we have hundreds of two way conversations. I already KNOW he feels entitled to a beer and to use pot to ease his depression. I know his opinion. However, the rules are no drinking and no drugs. There’s no need for further discussion.

“You say you love and care for me, yet you neglect to provide me a way I can live contently.”
 - I asked if he meant that I neglect to allow him to use alcohol and drugs, and he said no, that he’s not content because he feels as if I take his opinions for granted.

“You say you listen to my opinions and take them into consideration, then you completely deny how I think and feel.”
 - He said this one is similar to the last one.
 - I said that I do listen to his opinions and consider them (the pot thing is only one example). I just do not always agree with them. I said that he’s entitled to his own opinion, but I am entitled to set the rules and guidelines while he lives at home; disagreeing is not the same as disregarding or denying.

So, in short, there is obviously some “confusion” about what a parent does in and for a relationship with the child. It is my fault in not setting clear “I am MOM” boundaries early on. It is his place to know that I recognize my mistake and that I am now trying to fix it. He doesn’t have to agree, but, if he wants to live here in this home with people who love him entirely, then he does have to respect house rules.

It would be nice if my son would also respect my desire to improve my self as a mother and as a person by setting clear boundaries and rules for what I will and will not tolerate…but seeing that he is 15 going on 21, I don’t see that happening. I don’t have to pull out my tarot cards to know that this road is going to get rockier.