Today the following entry amazes me. I wrote the truth. I drew the truth. My unconscious mind knew he abused me and I knew I walked a dark path. But I went down it anyway. I didn’t know anything about emotional abuse. I wish someone had told me when I was young, but I don’t think my parents’ generation had put a name to it.
From 1992 Journal Entry:
During our first months of marriage, I wrote,
Maybe he does it to hurt me. Maybe he wants me to be scared of him for some reason. Afraid he will leave, afraid he’ll hit me again, afraid he’ll call me whore again. He wants me totally dependent on him for some reason – so he has control.
I read that now and know that I intuitively understood the game. I knew what he wanted. I knew it was not about love. He wanted control, and he would stop at nothing to get it. He wanted so much control over me that he did not ever need to think about me again. He wanted me on marionette strings, or maybe he wanted to see a perfect reflection of himself when he looked at me. Maybe if I could wear a mirror instead of my face, then he would love me. So I tried to be him.
I tried thinking like him, acting like him. There were a few a few ideas he held that I could not make my own. For instance, he disliked anyone not white or male. I refused to play along with that. He wanted me to be like his mother; I would not. Actually, it’s not so much that I would not, as that I could not. He thought his mother could do no wrong, and I knew I could never compete with perfection of the sort he imagined.
This entry is one day out of the journal I kept while I was still in the marriage. The whole thing, in order, is the book: My Abusive Marriage . . . and what i’m doing in it. Or read the first pages if you want to see whether it’s for you.