As time went on, the acknowledgements of the things I was doing disappeared, and were replaced with insults. Nothing I ever did was good enough. He started ridiculing me for my thoughts. My journal, which was supposed to be a free place for me to write anything I thought or felt in, became fuel for him to fight wth me over. If I put in something like he had confused me, or said something which hurt my feelings, I would find myself in a fight over my not being submissive enough, or not accepting him, or being "irrational". I couldn't understand the change because when I first got there, he could read my journal without getting upset, no matter what I said. Instead, he would notate the areas he wished to discuss more verbally, and we'd sit down and have long conversations about what i had written, and why I wrote it. But after a few months, that all stopped. INstead, anything I wrote could be used to berate me, or hurt me.
I started out basically helping out around the house and with the kids. Becuase the fusion had broken in my pelvis, there was little I could do comfortably without landing in bed for a few days. So mostly I just pitched in where i could. He eventually gave me a list of things that I was supposed to do every day. Things like wear my hair in a pony tail every other day, take out something for dinner, dust, fold laundry, and other things like that. At first, he told me how much he appreciated what I was doing, and that his wife Doe really liked having my help. Eventually this turned to "You don't do enough around here!" and "you treat Doe like a maid". This made me do even more in an attempt to please him. The more I did, the more disatisfied he became and the more desperate I became to please him like I used to. It got to the point where I completely ignored the limitations set on me by my doctors, and forced myself to do the things he wanted me to do. Mostly working in his business which put me on my feet a great deal. Between helping him service customers, servicing my own customers, and trying to run the office, I literally worked until 9 or 10 PM just about everyday. With SUnday being my day to catch up on paperwork and things I had not gotten to during the week. But he was never satisfied. EVentually I started believing that I was a failure, and the more time that passed, the more he denounced everything I did, and the harder I tried to please him. What a vicious circle that is. These drastic turn abouts in his personality did not happen overnight. they happened slowly, over a period of about 7 months, getting worse as time went on. So that everytime I ended up butting heads with these new "personality traits", I found it very easy to take the blame for them. It isn't until now, looking back that I can clearly see that the vast majority of the arguments we had were indeed not my fault. Thinking back on them, however, still hurts. Even more than the hurt though is the anger. I am so mad at him for all the insults, all the nights i cried alone because he broke a promise to me and punished me many times by sleeping on the couch instead of with me. (him and his wife have seperate bedrooms and have most of their married life due to him bieng gone so often in the military.) I get so angry that I want to smack him so hard his teeth rattle. All the times he made me feel useless, stupid, scared, worthless, and more. All those times I listened to him berate me and everything I did. And the anger just sits there. It is, I realize, a healthy response at this point in my recovery, but I still don't like feeling angry. Mostly what I am angry about is how he lied to me about the kind of person he was, and how he lied to himself so he wouldn't have to acknowledge what he had done, and thus could lay the blame for everything on me. I just do not understand people that know so little about themselves or who have to create this fantasy image of who/what they are because they can't face the truth. The truth of him is he is an abusive male.
Looking back, I can see all the symptoms of a battered woman in his wife Doe. She is afraid of him. She waits for him to come home, and checks out the window constantly. If she sees him she takes the emotional weather check and depending on what she thinks she sees is how she reacts. If he seems cranky she immediately starts cleaning so he can't accuse her of being lazy. If he doesnt' seem cranky, she will pick up a book and read. But either way, she instantly shuts of the TV so he can't accuse her of watching mindless drivel and doing nothing, or she changes the channel to CNN so he cna watch the news when he gets inside the house. Forget if she was watching a moveie or something. He can stand there and literally tear her apart for hours, and she says nothing. She just takes it. sits there quietly crying while he tells her how stupid she is, how useless she is, what a pain in the ass she is, how dumb and things like that. She constantly puts herself down and admits she is dumb and stupid and useless and lazy. The worst she will do is say "Fuck you Jack!" then go to her bedroom and cry silently for 5 minutes. Then she comes back out and it's as if nothing ever happened. The entire time I was tehre, they never had sex. SHe had originally told me that she was glad I was there and he and I had entered into a relationship "because now he will leave me alone and not pester me for sex". Towards the end, she swore she never said that and blamed their lack of a sex life on me. Forget that I had offered to sleep on the couch so she could sleep with him. Forget that I had insisted on taking my son out of her bed and putting him in a bed of his own, so she could have private time with her husband. She refused to do any of those things. Forget that every time he made a move on her, she turned him down. He would try to arouse her a bit with a hug, kiss or gentle caress and she would literally tell him to leave her alone, stop touching me, and things like that. She turned him down constantly, so he eventually stopped asking. Yet, she blamed it on me, and I took that blame too. Doe has hair down to her ass. SHe has not cut it in years. Why? Because Jack threatened to kill her then divorce her if she ever cut her hair again (that's her version of it). Jack said he told her he would divorce her if she ever cut it again. I don't know exactly whos' version is correct, but my money's on Doe's version because Jack's memory is so bad it isn't even funny. ALso, they both told me of a time where Doe had screwed up the money while Jack was away on assignment from the military, so badly that his car was repossessed. His punishment was to tie her down and rape her anally. She hates anal sex, and refuses to do it. he knew this and chose to do that to her, without lubricant, as a punishment for her mishandling of money. She not only accepted that behavior from him, but justified it with "I deserved it". No, they are not in a d/s relationship. She swears she is not submissive. ANd she's right, she's not. She's a battered woman. She would tell me how when she was growing up she was raped repeatedly by her foster father. I asked her once if she ever had therapy for it. She told me that the one time she had decided to go to therapy for it Jack refused to let her. He said she just had to "forget" it ever happened. somehow, I think he had an ulterior motive, that being she was easier to subjugate so long as she never realized her own worth. Healing that past abuse, would give her self esteem, self esteem would make her realize she does not have to put up with his abuse and thus leave. He cant' have that happening, so keep her "broken". None of these things were known to me before I moved in there. WHen I had talked with her before I moved in, she talked like their marriage was the epitomy of a loving union. But she mistakes being yelled at and called stupid with love. She knows Jack always salts his food, no matter what it is. And she would purposely move the salt just before dinner so he couldn't find it. Then he'd yell at her, call her stupid and things like taht. And I swear, she would smile. It was like his negative attention to her, his yelling at her and being pissed for hours was somehow an affirmation of "love' to her. All her anger at him however, did come out. And it came out in some very nasty ways. She would get very bitchy and purposely pick on the kids. My daughter was afraid of her, and to a certain extent so is her son. Though Billy is more afriad of his father and part of Billly hates his father, but his fear keeps him from telling Doe the truth of how he feels. Though he did tell me, and ayli about his hate and his fear on more than one occasion, and seperately as well.
I'm going to stop for now. I think this part came out beacuse of my thoughts about acceptance and acknowledgement and how important they sometimes are to people.
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