Freedom_09's story

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#1 Jul 22 - 11AM
freedom_09
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Freedom_09's story

Here we go. The full-length, director's cut, technicolour version of my life with Him.

We met as strangers at a party. I was on my own and a long way from home. He was with a friend. It was a late night. He told me he'd just split up from a very difficult girlfriend. I told him I'd been single for 6 years. At some point he reached over and held my hand. It was a bit weird, but also kind of sweet. I can't deny I liked the attention.

I went home. He called immediately. We spoke alot on the phone for the next month and arranged to meet at his home town. All pretty standard pattern for an abusive relationship. I would describe being with him as like being under a spotlight, very very intense and very quick attachment. He swept me off my feet.

The pattern continued. My friends were charmed by him and happy I'd found a nice man. He was kind, generous etc. There was an edge to him but I put it down to being out of his envirionment and a bit nervous.

Odd things happened the unnerved me but I pushed them to one side. He was a flirt. He was always making himself the centre of attention. He was always 'playing the hero'. He was still dealing with his ex- who everyone described as a pretty awful character which made it easier for him to convince me. In fact he wasn't really dealing with it at all. Their relationship overshadowed the beginning of ours and life was very difficult but by then I was in love with him and he had made promises. Much later he admitted that he owed me for what he'd put me through with her, that is, he admitted that he could've done something about it and didn't. Truth is he enjoyed the drama of the situation and being at the centre of it. He enjoyed orchestrating these two women competing against each other.

Very quickly he was talking about my relocating to his town. He was talking about having children. Then he was talking about marriage. He proposed after 6 months and I accepted without even having lived with him.

After 9 months of a long distance relationship I did indeed relocate and move in with him. The following summer we were married.

By the next winter, before we'd gone on honeymoon, after just 6 months of marriage, I suspected him of cheating. I'd caught him flirting with other women before and challenged him on it and he always came up with a reason or an excuse. I put it to one side believing that it wouldn't happen again since I'd challenged him on it. Of course it did.

So by now he had me and thus began to discard me. I would describe my relationship with him as alternating between being smothered then abandoned, smothered then abandoned, smothered then abandoned. I was reeling.

He offered no support, no reassurance, no comfort to me who had given up everything to be with him and moved to the other end of the country. My husband was all acquisition and no maintenance. It didn't matter if it was a new shirt, a car, a wife, he was so intent on getting things, to bolster his appearance and his image, that once he had them he instantly forgot them. Once he had me he didn't need to look after me and turned his attention to other places.

The standard pattern continued. He did and said dreadful things and then denied them. If I ever spoke up against him and believe me I did, I stood up for myself and he would batter me down harder every time. Even a difference of opinion would create a huge reaction.

My husband is very intelligent but unfortunately he uses his intelligence for the dark side. I saw him lie to people's faces with not a flicker. He conned friends. He stole. He bullied and he Did Not Care. He only cared if he was caught out and then he'd react violently, sadistically and vengefully.

He told me he had a violent family upbringing and a violent history but he only needed to hit me once. Most of the time he didn't need to be physically abusive, he had it down so well just using a look, words, getting in my space, restraining me, intimidating me, threatening me.

I got pregnant. I had a miscarriage. The day after I found out he'd cheated on me. He'd cheated on me to punish me for my standing up to his bullying. That's always the way it went. Punishing me for standing up to him. Punishing me for leaving him on his own for 2 days whilst I visited my family. Punishing me for having a different opinion to him.

He brutally raped me to punish me for 'shaming' him in front of his friends. He killed my beloved pet to punish me for cancelling the car insurance that he had on a dodgy policy in my name.

He told me I'd let him down by being ill 'too long' when I was depressed after the miscarriage and finding out about his infidelity.

I fell pregnant again. He never took responsibility for contraception and it was an accidental pregnancy. When I began to miscarry again I was happy. How awful to admit. I knew then that I did not want to be tied to this man for life by a child, that he would be no father to a child. I took a break with my friends. He visited the Reserve Woman and strange underwear turned up in my house, very openly left for me to find and to question.

Things got worse. He told me I was depressing to be around and he'd had enough of me. I left. He began lining up the Reserve Woman. I came back. I didn't want to give up the whole life I'd made for myself, I wanted my husband back. More underwear turned up in my house. He was very adept at putting all the blame on me, told me I'd been 'inconsiderate' for leaving and played on my guilt. We tried again. He made promises that were kept for about a week.

I basically tried to keep out of his way and live my own life. We still had some good times but I was wary of him. I never knew what he was going to do next. Previously I had been so down that I'd cut myself. He told me "you've only done that to hurt me". Whenever I questioned him he would turn it round on me. I have a mental health diagnosis and he came to the doctor with me and actually sat there and said, "something's wrong with her, she keeps falling out with me." Or it was my 'PMT' or this or that or the other. Always my fault for pointing out his bad behaviour.

The most horrendous, evil thing he did was use my diagnosis against me. The doctor said I was well, I knew I was well but my husband would always use it against me whenever I got close to acknowledging the truth about him. "Take your meds and go to bed!" "I'm sick of your mood swings!" "I'm sick of you giving it the 'poor me'!" And everytime he said it was because of me, I did something to change it and make it better. It must've infuriated him as he had to keep finding new reasons to pin it all on me.

I watched him alienate all our friends. I became more isolated. He belittled the friends I'd made and undermined the work I did. Nothing I did was 'right' or good enough. He would correct me all the time. He was overbearing, domineering and controlling. He told me he 'had the right' to basically do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Even his family tread carefully around him. "Just leave it, don't upset him or he won't speak to us again". "Don't bring her up again or you'll drive him to her and it'll be your fault." He bullied and manipulted everyone. He got through people, once he'd used them up, often for money, he'd just throw them away.

One of the hardest things for me to deal with was that I was violent to him too. In fact I hit him more than he hit me. He engineered situations based on his knowledge of my vulnerabilities until he got the result he wanted. I lashed out and he could maximise the guilt. In counselling I was told that the difference was I was afraid of him but he was never afraid of me. That was true and it helped.

Eventually, my father told me during a visit that based on his knowledge on his girlfriend's work at a women's refuge I was in an abusive relationship. I was simultaneously horrified and relieved. I looked up stuff on the net and found I could answer Yes to all the symptoms, signs and behaviours. In the most crucial moment of my entire life and decided to pick up the phone, call my dad and get him to come and fetch me.

I packed my bags and hid them around the house by the time my husband got back from work. We had dinner together. He was very twitchy and could clearly tell something was up. I said I was just tired. I lay next to him that night, willing the morning to come and terrified that in the few hours ahead somehow he'd find out and do something awful. It was the longest night of my life. In the morning he got up, went to work and my dad arrived 5 minutes later. We loaded up a few things into the car and I had to say goodbye to my pets. To be honest they were the only reason I'd stayed so long. Two miscarriages, two pet rabbits. They were my babies and I had to leave them behind. That was so very hard.

Then my dad and me were on the road, I'd left a note and posted a note to my mother in law. My dad lives in another country to me and I stayed there for 6 months.

At first I had contact with my husband. His mother phoned and I explained that he'd punched me in the face, that I couldn't take any more etc etc etc. She understood. I began counselling. They helped me understand that None of this was my fault. I was in an abusive relationship and they all follow the same pattern. It was not my fault and I was not alone.

He was still playing games with me and still saying 'but how are you feeling in yourself?" in the menacing tone he would use when no one else was around. His line of course was that I had had some kind of breakdown and he was concerned. More like he was concerned the truth would out.

Once I found out he was with the Reserve Woman I really struggled. It was like I was putting a jigsaw puzzle together piece by piece and now the picture was coming clearly into view. I understood him completely and could make sense of all the lies, bullshit and manipulations. I didn't blame her. Her only mistake was to fall in love with him as I'd done. The pattern had gone full circle and again he was playing one woman off against the other.

In one way I was very happy. I felt completely vindicated. I had been right about him all along. The terrifying thing was that every time I was right about him and challenged him, he would rather have me think that I was ill. I'm bipolar. That doesn't make me imagine him being unfaithful, raping me and murdering innocent animals.

It's good to feel vindicated but it's not very nice to feel that way about your husband.

His piece de resistance was when I was about to come back to my country to start again. I told him and his mother, and my closely involved neighbour that I did not want to see him or to speak to him again. He was angry about this. I went home. My grandma had just died, my mother was about to have major surgery, I had a lot on my plate. The day I arrived back a letter arrived saying "I think it is only fair and respectful to you to let you know that I am having a baby with Reserve Woman." He signed the letter 'Yours sincerely'. All he cared about was proving to me how clever he was. "Look! You got away but the next one surely won't!" I was horrified. This man's cruelty knows no bounds.

I went to a solicitor and began divorce proceedings. When I had to ask for his new address, assuming he was living with Reserve Woman, he started telling me all about the divorce and how it was going to be and how I was going to do it. I said, "No. I'm divorcing you for adultery." He hated that. I'd out played him. It hadn't occured to him that his victory letter was evidence of his adultery and thus made divorcing him very easy. In response, one last desperate attempt to pull me back in, he phoned me and accused me of making obscene phonecalls to Reserve Woman's workplace. I calmly told him to stop lying. He said 'part of me is still concerned for your health'. I said, 'stop playing the mental health card and sign the papers'. Then I changed my number, my email address and blocked all numbers from home.

I haven't looked back since. It's strange to write this all down for you like this. I've been journalling since day one but now, a year after I left and 6 months after No Contact, I can really see the whole thing very clearly. My husband is a very damanged and damaging man. There is little point really in considering the awful things he said because they just don't make sense. I will never really make sense of him because he may as well be from another planet.

I think of my time with him as like being spiked with acid, or having been in another dimension or in a computer game. No one tells you you're going to go there. At first it looks the same, smells the same, sounds the same but slowly and steadily you begin to realise that things are not the same at all.

You spend all your time trying to work out what's going on, what are the rules and when you get close to understanding, something shifts and the rules change. You are utterly lost. And yet, something inside of you keeps fighting and eventually you burst out of that horrible, horrific, horrendous situation and back to reality, where you belong.

I understand now that he was a predator and a parasite. He wanted me because I was all the things he was not and he wanted those things for himself. I was strong, independent, kind, I had integrity and morals. He sucked the life out of me but when he realised that he was not becoming like me he became envious, jealous and sought retribution. It was my fault he was not like me and so he punished me. He listened to my story and picked up on my vulnerabilities. My difficult relationship with my dad, my brother bullying me, my diagnosis, the fact that I do not work. Each of these things did not bring out compassion or understanding in him, they were used as ammunition against me and kept me down at times when I threatened to unmask him. Sick, sadistic man that he is.

Now I've learned alot. I, like any other human being, would like to be in another relationship but of course am scared about this. However, I am sure that my radar is working very well these days and I would be much less likely to end up in a similar relationship again. For the time being though, it's All About Me!

xxx

Jul 22 - 7PM
starofthesea
starofthesea's picture

Thanks for sharing so

Thanks for sharing so honestly. This struck so many chords with me. I haven't been half as honest in my story - feel guilty in the telling, still looking over my shoulder. You have been through so much, and your honesty and clarity and perceptiveness shine through in your story. You don't need my advice - you've got it all sussed. I really admire your strength after all you've suffered with this cruel man. Mine called me evil and a slut and arrogant - all the things I'm not. Reading your stories gives me the strength to cast off his fake version of who I am. If you end in in a new relationship, then he will be a very lucky man, because you're a shining star. Thank you.
Jul 26 - 4AM (Reply to #3)
freedom_09
freedom_09's picture

Thank you for kind words,

Thank you for kind words, it means alot. And yes, please do cast off his false image of you. It's not true. I would imagine 'evil, slut and arrogant' are all a projection and more accurately describe him. They're not nice people but all you need to remember is it was never your fault and it would never be any different with him. You just need to get clear of him and live your own life. Best of luck to you Star xxx *** Living well is the best revenge ***

*** Living well is the best revenge ***

Jul 26 - 5PM (Reply to #4)
starofthesea
starofthesea's picture

Thanks

I am trying my best. Yes, I never took the names seriously. Even when I was in the depths of misery I always knew it was a load of crap. Best of luck to you too my dear xxx
Jul 22 - 1PM
WellRed
WellRed's picture

freedom09 - Welcome

Hi freedom09, You have a horrible story to tell and I hope you can reread it and say "what the heck have I been putting up with". I have found once I write something down, it is easier to reread it and it seems more like I am on the outside looking in. You are right on when you say it's time to think about YOU!! I lived 25 years considering the N in every decision I made. He even had me afraid to make decisions!! He never considers me in any of his decisions. It's always all about him. Welcome and I urge you to read, read read all of these stories. WE ARE NOT ALONE!! I look forward to getting to know you.