Staying in Abusive Relationships
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I’m Home
I realized that the security I once felt there was imagined. The men I knew there were only parts of their whole. I never realized the things that went on when I wasn’t looking. My protectors were liars and frauds. Is it possible to remember the men I once knew now that I know I…
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The Universe Makes It Hard Sometimes
What if this is my smack on the back of the head from the universe? What if I’m being forced in a different direction? What if there’s a different and more reliable way to fund my emergency account? What if what I’m doing is valuable enough to warrant some other type of income plan? A…
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Lies and Verbal Abuse
I checked my page on types of verbal abuse and realized that Patricia Evans did not list “LYING” as a type of verbal abuse. For a second, I thought I had discovered a glaring omission in my heroine’s thinking. But it only lasted a second. I realized that lying is not a form of verbal…
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Between You and Me, I’m No Expert On Abuse
I am writing this blog BECAUSE I don’t know how to successfully “cope” with abuse. Not a clue. Everything I’ve tried to do, say or become has either increased the abuse or merely postponed it to another time, and that includes everything I did, said or became before I even knew it was abuse.
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Abuse Makes Me Wanna Be a Banshee
I read that victims of abuse are not abused because of who we are. We’re abused because of who we are NOT. I am NOT whatever person my husband wants me to be or thinks I should be. And because I am not (an can NEVER BE) a person who my husband has imagined, the…
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Stop Saying ‘It Makes Me Sick’
My sister tells me to stop saying “It makes me sick” because she’s afraid “it” (the abuse) really will make me sick. Once upon a time, “It makes me sick” was a kind of heart-sickness, an expression. Now I really am sick. The first time I realized that I really felt physically sick because of…
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Expectations
Like many of our “good” conversations, my husband and I talked for over three hours last night. I went to bed at 3:30am, tired of course, but also daring to hope that MAYBE we opened discussion on a basic problem in our marriage. Expectations cause us a LOT of damage – a lot of hurt…
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Tornapart
I have no warning, I huddle in the dark as the tornado howls and screams, praying that the storm will silence itself. It seems unending. And when it leaves and the sun returns, I look at the faces of my children. The ones I huddled with in the blackness, pressing myself between them and the…
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Work to Undo
I’ve got two boys that are going to be their own men in a few short years. I have a lot of work to undo. And hey – if you have a second, send a prayer or some positive thoughts to whomever or wherever you send them, for me and my family, please. I am…