Supplemental Post: How it Starts

Warning: I am posting about my experiences of domestic abuse in the hope that it will help others to a greater understanding of what goes through a victim's mind when these things happen. And in the hopes that, by describing my experiences, I can help shift the stigma and provide support to those still in abusive situations to know that others have been through this and survived, that they are not alone, and that it is not about them - it is about an abusive situation that hopefully they can move away from when they are ready to do so. 

***

It’s not an easy time for anyone. I understand that I don’t have the monopoly on misery, and I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who is forced to have contact with me.

Most days, I cry before I go to work. If that doesn’t happen, you can pretty much assume that there will be tears before bedtime. Sometimes there’s both. 

If sh*t goes down when I’m at work, I’m grateful that I have a separate office, and a chair that I can turn towards the outside window. I try not to let my shoulders shake too much as the tears flow.

Then they chuck me out of my office, put me in open plan. It’s the final straw.

***

We’re on the way out to a rare evening out, Him and me, when I find out that my ex-husband has been in touch with my parents. I try to defer the irritating phone call from my mother to a later date, but He catches the whiff in the air. I spill.

“You’re all f*cking freaks,” He tells me. “You, your ex and your f*cked up family. Sort it,” he commands.

When I say that I don’t know what to do, how he wants me to sort it, he tells me that it’s not for him to comment. I’m a bright girl and if I can’t work it out for myself then I have no empathy, and zero respect for him.

We barely talk over dinner. He flirts with the waitress, or she flirts with him, or perhaps both, I’m not sure. I am invisible. I don’t object. Until I scream at him in tears in the car on the way back home. Quite rightly, and yet again, he calls me a freak.

***

I sneak into the bedroom the next evening while He’s watching TV. I can hear the ebb and flow of the show that’s on, a rush of laughter followed by a lull as someone’s speaking, then another burst of noise again. I’m remembering the feeling of lying in my bed at home as a little girl, my eyes blinking at the crack of light from the hallway, the door always slightly ajar. Hearing the same noise rising up the stairs from the living room and in through that bright line of white light, punctuated by my Dad laughing heartily at something, and then making some muffled comment to my Mum.

As I push the door silently into its frame tonight, with Him downstairs, and creep across the floor to sit on the bed, I have a strange flutter in my stomach. All this furtive movement is making me nervous, as if I’m doing something secretive, wrong, shameful. I’m feeling like that a lot recently.

I push the button on my phone and call my Mum and Dad.  I speak quietly and evenly. I get straight to the point as I don’t know how long I’ve got.

“You can’t be in touch with him anymore,” I tell them, referring to my ex. “I can’t believe you would already.”

There is silence and so I tell them that I can’t stop them but if they choose to carry on despite my wishes, then I never want to hear about it. They must never mention it to me, and they must not speak about me to him, and especially they must never mention Him to my ex.

My Mum shouts at me down the phone. My lovely Mum. My first thought is that the noise coming out from my mobile is louder that my own voice in the room, and I feel gripped with anxiety. Like it’s all a huge secret and I’m about to be rumbled.

“I don’t know what you’ve become,” she tells me. “I just don’t know you anymore.”

The flutter turns into a stab of nausea. I’m thinking that undoubtedly she never knew me but that now she knows me only too well.

***

He and I are having bigger and bigger arguments. It’s not a one-way street. I scream at him frequently these days. It seems like it’s the only way I can get him to listen to me, but even as I’m screeching at the top of my lungs I know that it’s not going in.

One night it happens when we’re getting ready for bed, the argument of the evening. The fact is that I’ve nearly got away with it for the whole day and so this last-minute spoiler seems all the more poignant.

I whip myself up into a frenzy, a childlike tantrum. My face is maroon, the precise shade of a dodgy acrylic sweater that I wore in the Eighties. But tonight I’m wearing just black knickers and a grey vest top for the whole of the event, as we stand on opposite sides of the bed, screaming insults, intermittently glaring directly at each other, our eyes firing tiny poison-tipped arrows, steeped in rage. It’s freezing and I’m shaking uncontrollably, the blood pumping through my temples, and I just want it to explode out of me, to release, relieve.

 Eventually, in a fit of drama, I turn my back on him and rush out of the bedroom door and down the stairs.

I think I know what I’m running from, but I forget what I’m running to, as I stumble into the darkened kitchen, the building site. The floor stretches before me, a sheet of dusty grey cement, like powdered ice as my bare feet step onto it, tiny pieces of grit and other debris digging into my soles.

I’m squealing and sobbing like a child, straining, holding my breath and then gasping the black air when I can hold it no more. I clench my fists and start bashing them against my thighs, and then up and into my abdomen. He arrives at my back and grabs me from behind, his long, strong arms enveloping me, crushing me until I can’t move. But as soon as he releases his grasp, I’m at it again, punching and sobbing.

“Stop,” he tells me calmly. And he pulls my arms back, so I can’t move them. I sink to the floor and feel the cold rough cement grazing my leg and buttocks. He’s down there with me, his arms around me again. At last I feel like I have his attention, his affection, that he is proving his love for me by his intervention.

“This has got to stop Kitty,” he whispers into my ear. But all I can think is how amazing it is to feel his warm breath against my neck, tickling the downy hairs that are standing on end.

***

The next day I am supposed to be having lunch with a guy at work, one of the other sector heads, to swap ideas. I have put it off twice already and my boss is now pressing me. But I’m scared about His reaction.

I don’t tell Him about it until after it’s happened, and then I phone and mention it lightly as if I’d forgotten about it. But I’m telling him now because I know that’s the deal, that he needs to know.

“Get real, Kitty,” he tells me. “You didn’t forget, you’re just hiding stuff again like the lying, scheming b*tch you are.”

“No, really, I forgot,” I tell him. But inside I know I am a lying, scheming b*tch.

***

Next time I tell him as I am in a taxi to meet a different man for a business lunch. At least I’m doing it before it happens this time I console myself.

“How long have you known about this Kitty," he asks me? "Why are you telling me now?”

“Because you say you need to know, and I forgot to mention it before.”

“Kitty, you don’t forget. You lie. Deal with it. Stop doing it.”

***

The next time I don’t tell him at all. But now I know that I am actually deceiving him, by omission, not playing to his rules. Imposing my own judgment of what is harmless and what is not. And I’m paranoid that somehow he’s going to find out. There’s nothing to hide, but clearly there is, otherwise I’d be telling him.

I think I’m going crazy.

***

Depression is a strange animal. Like a skunk, you rarely see it alive, but you can smell the stench of it, and you will undoubtedly see it dead on the road after the event. And like the fur of a skunk, I pass from white to black and I don’t see it coming.

I read a story in the newspaper about a woman who has walked into the Thames and disappeared. Apparently, she is a lawyer for a rich individual who has just been charged for fraud offences. People are suspicious, they wonder what she knew and who has gained from her disappearance. All I can think is that she is very brave.

***

It’s a couple of months later as I’m watching the Thames rushing and gushing past, hearing it lapping up against its banks, fantasising about just dipping my toes in, and then perhaps keeping going, I decide instead to go to therapy.

He tells me that I need it. He’s tried to help me, he says, but so much about me is rotten to the core, he feels like I need a specialist on the case. It all stems back to my childhood, he declares. It revolves around anger, denial, pathological lying and the inability to process emotions. He diagnoses passive aggression, and perhaps, although he’s no expert, a teeny bit of autism. It’s my lack of warmth and empathy that leads him to this latter conclusion.

“It’s all very well being a brain,” he tells me. “But nobody cares about that when it comes to real life. You remember that thing called life?” he asks me. “You do know that life is not work?”

And I tell him that I do, but actually perhaps I don’t.

Indeed, there’s something about all of this that is ringing true. Nobody seems to want to speak to me or spend any time with me these days, and maybe this analysis is explaining why. If people do call me in the evening, I tend not to take the call if He is there because it always leads to an argument afterwards.

If I call them back from work during the day, He wants to know why I won’t speak to them in front of him.

“What is it that you have to hide Kitty,” he asks me. “Are you telling them lies about me?”

“We didn’t speak about you,” I say, even though it’s not entirely true.

“No, I’m sure you have many more f*cked up things to discuss,” he says, his voice saturated with sarcasm, dripping from his mouth like a dog’s saliva as it snarls at its prey and fantasises about what’s going to happen next.

And so from there, somehow people stop calling altogether, and I don’t call them anymore, from work or home. It’s too difficult to figure out how to handle it with Him without being accused of some sort of deceit or other misdemeanour.

My family have cut back contact to a minimum since the debacle over the ex. My sister confides in me that they are doing this because they think it might be easier for me this way. She’s not really explaining why, but actually I think that she could just be bang on the money. 

I know that the therapy is my answer. My chance. The golden egg that will make me into a better person, good enough for him, worthy of his love. 
I just need to sort myself out, and then I know we will be happy.