How I ended violence in a relationship
Talking about relationships of this kind, it's hard not to slip into accusations. and do not hit the pathos. I'm not sure that I will succeed. It is also hard to talk about this because this story concerns my loved one. Nevertheless, I am convinced that my experience should be recorded. If only because of a dozen articles I have read on the topic, only one was devoted to the description of the victim. More than six months ago, in a secret psychological group, I asked the question: "How do I get away from the abuzer?" - and could not get any intelligible answer, except: "Run without looking back and stop any interaction." In practice, this is not so easy to implement, especially when a person managed to become your family and you have common children with him.
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Until the beginning of this year, the word "abuzer" was not in my vocabulary, I did not know anything about co-dependent relationships and did not understand the intricacies of narcissistic disorders. The fact that next to me is a reference abuser and perversity narcissus in combination (Perverse narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism: a person is completely deprived of the opportunity to see the causes of problems and failures in his actions and transfers guilt to circumstances and other people. He parasites on attachment and conscience others, and becomes the aggressor in a relationship - physical or emotional - Note ed.), I guessed only six months before the final denouement. Most of all, the process of awareness resembled a detective story, when a complete picture is made up of a set of disparate facts.
I am a patient person, and therefore what has been happening for a long time was considered anything but an abuse: a punishment for past "sins", a test of strength, humility, the service of great love, and so on. I do not want to go into the details of our relationship - I will only say that the development of events The screenwriters of the film “My King” described the level 80 narcissus with Vincent Cassel with suspicious accuracy. It is a pity that he came out only in 2016 - I could have shot back before.
At the beginning of our novel, only a lazy well-wisher did not compare my elect with Blue Beard. But does anybody believe well-wishers? Even when a galaxy of young unfamiliar girls began to scribble sympathizing letters for me, I laughed at them from thirty-two years old. Our relationship at that time was powdered with such a layer of sarcasm that, I suspect, even the most keen psychotherapist would not have seen him despair and resentment.
Unconscious, meanwhile, desperately sent me alarming signals in the form of nightmares, and my body was hinting at the problem of psychosomatic disorders. I stubbornly did not notice ugly dreams, frequent headaches and strange sensations in the lower abdomen, and the general depression I attributed to postpartum depression and professional lack of realization. The only thing that was embarrassing was the "blackened" face: the features sharpened, and eternal tension appeared in the look. A comrade, with whom we had not seen for three years and met the year before last December, asked: "What happened to you? Do you look like a losing battle. Who do you fight with?"
I stumbled upon an article on perverse aggression in a Facebook feed. The terminology there is rather strange and the general mood is too aggressive, but the described situation repeated our communication model to frightening details. Then for the first time I thought that everything that happens to me fits into a certain pattern. There were double standards here: I was not allowed a tenth part of what my companion did, just because I am a mother and a child - my responsibility entirely, my time and my personal space. For example, when asked to sit with a child so that I could work, the answer most often was: “I don’t want to.” For three years I could not make plans for the weekend, because at any moment I could hear: "I changed my mind." Out of plans for the weekend, there are plans for life, which, in general, I too soon disappeared.
I became a wife whose only task was not to annoy my husband and prevent his outbursts of anger. The trick is that it is impossible: if you have put things in order in the house, you will surely hear that you are a bad mother, and if you are too passionate about the child, they will hint that you have missed your career opportunities. The emphasis was always on the fact that I did not do something, any efforts were ignored. At some point, I began to mentally add the prefix "inadequate" to all of my actions and almost believed that I was absurd on all fronts. I felt some glimpses of self-respect only when I managed to be useful to my husband. On my own desires and aspirations, I simply did not have a resource left, and motherhood on this background turned into torture in general. At the same time feelings of guilt from my companion was not observed.
At first, I was elated: I managed to bring my man to the clear water and realize that his influence on me is not the result of any special hypnotic abilities, but a completely clear set of repetitive actions. All subsequent quarrels, deceptions and manipulations from that time looked programmed. I dug them in two accounts, which we then laughed together. Moreover, this perverted pattern was much stronger than the man himself. These were unconscious schemes that, with a certain amount of pedantry, were applied to every woman of Bluebeard. Then for the first time I really got bored - I didn’t want to be the heroine of a recurring script. And sadly - because I have ceased to understand whether there is at least some love behind these actions. I realized that I no longer feel in myself the strength to continue relationships on such terms.
We turned to a psychotherapist. I must pay tribute to my abuzer: he also wanted to change the situation (for the desire to change, I was ready to forgive a lot for him) and agreed to an outside view. At the very first session, the words “passive aggression” were heard - they explained my desire to disguise problems with irony, when in fact I most wanted to hurt the offender somehow. I must say, the irony gradually began to refuse me, and with me more and more often there were nervous breakdowns, which had happened once in ten years.
I came alone for the second session after the next such breakdown. For a couple of months, the psychotherapist helped make two more discoveries, which were the last parts of my detective puzzle. First: the person next to me has no empathy. All the situations in which I once could not find an explanation suddenly became clear. The thought about the lack of empathy undermined my already unbalanced picture of the world: what about the fact that we understood each other from a half-look? And why do we equally perceive films? And why do we read human emotions so well? Later it turned out that perverse daffodils do not feel emotions in the generally accepted sense, but they perfectly imitate them.
After this discovery, “clues” began to pour on me from all sides. In the beginning of spring, for some reason, I twice revised the film “The Apocalypto” by Mel Gibson. There is one spirit-lifting moment: the main character stops running from the chase, when he finally feels his territory, and shouts to his pursuers: "I am the Paw of the Jaguar. This is my forest. And I am not afraid." I watched this scene until I learned these words in the language of the Indians, and, shedding tears, put them on my userpick. Then I did not particularly understand what exactly I was not going to fear and where my forest begins.
The psychotherapist helped me again. I complained to her that lately I can’t think of anything at all, that my creative flow has long dried up. She said something like this: "There is love, and there is fear - the more fear, the less love. Creativity is born out of love. And you have been living in fear for the last three years. Creativity just has no place to take." What I took for a long time as an existential longing turned out to be fear. It is still difficult for me to explain its nature: no one threatened me with physical destruction, but I felt that if this relationship continued, I would just end.
For the first time in three years I felt sorry for myself. I no longer wanted to keep my face - and I allowed myself to experience any emotion and live it to the end. For example, I learned to really be angry. And in the most inappropriate situations, I wanted to confess feelings - and I confessed, hoping in this way to somehow conjure outgoing love. If I was hurt, I talked about it and cried, finally ceasing to be ironic about the situation that was disturbing me. I stopped lying, but I still didn’t have the strength and courage to finish it all.
My therapist brought a metaphor from Russian fairy tales that fairly accurately described my state of the time: a warrior, hacked to pieces, was first brought dead water to grow together, and only then alive. Best of all, I grow together in Bali - from one ride on a motorbike along Ubud rice fields, I almost physically feel my emotional wounds heal. In May I went there with my child to celebrate his three-year anniversary. Bali became my dead water: I collected myself in pieces so that I could finally crawl out of the battlefield. A week after arriving home, I packed up and moved.
The first three months after leaving, it seemed to me that I was joking. Never in my life did I go away from a person whom I continued to love or fear. And although there was a euphoria from the fact that everything was finally over, the sensations were strange. I really felt like a warrior who won some senseless battle and absolutely did not understand what to do next. The fear gradually disappeared. At the same time, my child also began to change: the boy who used to cry from gusts of wind was now desperately fighting for shovels and cars.
I'm not in a hurry to forget everything that happened to me. I decided to be sad until I was sad, to cry as much as I wanted, to confess my love until it ended. Now sadness, more like mourning, has come to the place of all powerful feelings. I do not want to be distracted from this feeling, I do not want to make lovers, I do not want to get drunk or dance to exhaustion - I know that I need to be crunched.
We still communicate, if only because we have a common child. Our correspondence is again full of irony, and the whole situation is affectionately called the "abyuzerskoy merry-go-round", with which I "cleverly jumped off." Recently, my abuzer himself sent a link to an article on perverted daffodils with a comment: "Jackpot!" This is the last and most accurate that I read on the topic, and I hope to close it with this material for myself.
Watching how your own person consciously chooses to be bad, creepy. Seeing how the self-destruction mechanism works, and being pulled into it is creepy. To know that you cannot influence this is the worst thing. Seeing a man launching the same mechanism again with other girls is just sad. I do not know what will you need to have to break this pattern. And I endlessly sympathize with my blue beard.
I believe that our psyche seeks to overcome injuries and puts us in such conditions that we have overcome this injury. In almost all previous relationships, I was a victim and I made many important decisions out of fear (fear of being alone, fear of making the wrong choice, fear of losing opportunities), but no previous experience made it so clear to me that the path of fear is a lie .
Following this gap, all my work projects that have been meaningless to continue have fallen off, superficial relationships with uninteresting people are crumbling, values that have been instilled in me in my childhood and with which I have not internally disagreed with are crumbling. I don't want to be afraid anymore and I don't want to lie. Because I am the Paw of the Jaguar, this is my forest, and I am not afraid.
