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I Know He Would Never Hurt Me And Other Fairy Tales
https://captainawkward.com/2014/10/31/640-i-know-he-would-never-physically-hurt-me-is-not-a-selling-point-its-a-sign-that-things-have-already-gone-too-far/
This whole article is amazing and a must-read, and there are so many points that could be picked out and reflected upon. But I'm picking out one particular point, and it's not even one of the main points. I'm picking it out because I have a personal association with this particular point.
I know what physical abuse is, and I've always had the "the second someone raises a hand to me, I'm outta here" mantra. And I've held to that my entire life. What I didn't know was that doing that kind of mental calculus, "the calculus called Would He Hit Me?", is a sign of emotional abuse. I never *felt* emotionally abused by my partners getting jealous and punching things in their rage. I knew, without a doubt, that they'd never hit me. But I thought their jealousy was unreasonable (not the punching the wall - that was a totally safe outlet for anger, I thought (I have my own anger issues)), so I'd leave them for the jealousy reason alone, not the intimidating violence.
I once had a partner. Like the questioner above, who wrote into Captain Awkward with her story, I had a partner with a mismatch in poly relationship expectations. Unlike that questioner, it wasn't because I told him my boundaries but he refused to tell me his, so I would bump into them on accident. No, we talked about it. And we still didn't see eye to eye. But because we talked about it, I *thought* that we understood each other and it was only until I smacked head-first into his massive armored tank of insecurity and abuse that I learned otherwise.
I found myself in an incredibly unstable situation. I was experiencing loss left and right. The situation that led to the discovering-my-boyfriend-was-an-abusive-monster thing was only the beginning of my series of losses, and the whole series combined threw me into a deep depression that I hadn't experienced since I had been bullied as a kid. I not only thought about suicide, but I started planning it. This was the time that I needed my partner the most to be supportive and compassionate. But this was the time that frightened him the most, so he lashed out.
I went after something that, at the time, I felt I needed to help cope with all my chaos and loss and pain. And it did help. It was honestly the right thing for me at the time and I don't regret it at all. It directly led to another series of events that eventually contributed to my healing, and to pulling myself out of the bleakness that was consuming me. It turned out to be absolutely necessary for me, although I couldn't have known that at the time - I thought it was something I should do, but I didn't realize how it would start a snowball effect that would ultimately lead to saving my life. The details are not mine alone to share, even anonymously, but I will also say that the thing I "went after" is not actually the thing that I was accused of doing that lead to my partner "Flipp[ing] the Fuck Out". But I did pursue another relationship, and its progress frightened my abusive ex.
Something that Captain Awkward doesn't mention in their response is a lesser known truism - if you make it unsafe for your partner to tell you the truth, they are likely to start hiding things from you. My ex made it very unsafe for people to share difficult things with him. Some things were difficult because they triggered his insecurity. Some things were difficult because he felt strongly about them and argued tenaciously (a trait I share with him) so that his loved ones stopped giving their contrary opinions on those subjects because it simply wasn't worth the argument. He made sharing difficult subjects with him a very scary thing.
In addition to that, he was largely unavailable at this time, both temporally and emotionally. This was part of the chaos that had entered my life - a small part, but a contributing part. He had begun working longer hours, long enough that he essentially was at work for all but one or two waking hours a day. This pissed off his live-in partner, because she never got to see him anymore, and their tradition was for her to wait for him to come home so they could eat dinner together and this meant that she was now waiting until 9 or 10 at night before she could eat (don't ask me why she didn't just eat when she needed to eat and then spend time with him while *he* ate whenever he came home - that's a whole thing in passive-aggressive manipulation that deserves its own post).
He was trying to manage a total of 4 romantic partners and two of them were emotionally turbulent, to give the understatement of the year. We used to chat online throughout the day, but his work situation had recently put an end to that. So I was allocated the 10-minute drive from his office to his house to talk to him on the phone in the evenings. Except on those nights where one of his other partners was in the car with him because there was also car trouble in the group and some car sharing had become necessary.
So, here I was, in a relationship with someone who was giving me about 30 minutes of his time per week after being accustomed to his attention pretty much whenever I wanted, knowing that I would only have his attention for 10 minutes at a stretch, which would have a pretty hard cut-off time otherwise his live-in partner would get pissed (which he indicated to me that she blamed me for cutting into her time with him, causing a rift between her and I and making me feel like a bad metamour for not "considering her needs" to eat - a common abuse isolation tactic found in poly relationships), most of that time would be taken up with his anguish over the troubles his other relationships were giving him, AND that, because of how he reacted to difficult news, telling him about my own emotional tailspin and the subsequent Incident would be a very Unsafe Conversation and definitely take more than 10 minutes, further ruining the night for his live-in partner who was waiting for him so she could finally eat her one big meal of the day.
All of this added up to the fact that he was unreachable to talk to immediately after the Incident (again, too busy at work, putting out relationship fires at home, just not available), and he was very "intimidating" to talk to when I did finally have his attention. So I know that I handled my end of the conversation poorly several days after the fact when I could finally have that conversation with him. I was accused of "cheating" on him when I A) didn't do what he said I had done, B) only waited as long as I did because I literally could not reach him or have any of his time and attention until the moment I finally did talk to him about it, and C) acted completely within my own ethical framework that I thought I had conveyed to him but I found out because of this that we had different relationship frameworks.
He immediately tried to impose restrictions on me. He was very slick about it, though. Unlike the abuser in this advice letter, he didn't do it punitively, exactly. He tried to *retroactively* impose restrictions on me. He wanted me to obey some restrictions that he claimed had *always been there* that I had now broken. Those restrictions violated the agency of my other partner because they imposed limitations on that other partner's behaviour who was not present to negotiate for them, nor would that partner have accepted them had he been present. I felt (and still do) that I would never have agreed to such restrictions had I understood that's what *he* thought our relationship was operating under. As they were not restrictions that *I* wanted either even self-imposed, that should have settled the matter.
But, instead, my ex told me that I could not just arbitrarily "change" the nature of our relationship without his permission. Since the so-called "change" he was speaking of was regarding my own behaviour, yes, actually, I can. He can choose to remain with me or not in light of the change, but I am the sole arbitrator of my own behaviour and, as such, am the *only* one who has the ability to "change" it or not.
I do not believe he had ever encountered any romantic partner who faced that kind of challenge from him head on with "yes, I can make, re-make, and re-arrange the boundaries around my own behaviour without input from you" before. Whenever I had seen him challenge one of his other partners in such a manner, without fail, they backtracked and apologized and, in many cases, grovelled for his forgiveness, and accepted all kinds of restrictions and limitations in order to "prove" their worthiness of remaining in a relationship with him.
He called it "accepting responsibility for fucking up". I call it "falling victim to gaslighting", at least in these cases where I witnessed it and where I have details of the situations that I'm not sharing here. I believe my refusal to bend on the issue of who can command my behaviour is what ultimately saved me. As a blogger once said, "'I was victimized by acts of control' is not the same as 'I was victimized by the other person’s resistance to my control,'" and "These are my choices. You are not entitled to control over them, you are not victimized by them."
He felt "victimized" by my resistance to his attempt to control my behaviour. He felt "betrayed" because I behaved in a manner that didn't affect him directly at all, was something that I needed to do for myself in a time of need, but was something that he found frightening because it was not under his control. When I gave no quarter, the relationship ended swiftly, without build-up or warning. Everyone was surprised by how quickly things escalated to a breakup. And I can't be more thankful for that, because I saw what happens to his partners when the breakups are slow in coming, and when they try to negotiate and seek compromise in good faith with him.
There is no "in good faith" with an abuser. I did not recognize him at the time as an abuser. I do not feel abused by him because his attempts to control me were met by my stubborn refusal to give up my autonomy. I am quite unyielding about that. And when people feel "victimized by the other person's resistance to my control", that unyielding feels cold, hard, calculated, uncompassionate, uncaring, and other words that are supposed to be bad adjectives for a romantic partner. But those are the adjectives that have rescued me from several abusive relationships.
And, strangely, those partners of mine who have not attempted to abuse me or who do not have abusive tendencies don't feel that those adjectives describe me in the slightest. Funny, that.
This whole article is amazing and a must-read, and there are so many points that could be picked out and reflected upon. But I'm picking out one particular point, and it's not even one of the main points. I'm picking it out because I have a personal association with this particular point.
"So, even though I had meant to tell him what happened between me and Peter, I didn’t. When Nathan gets upset at me, I tend to recoil. He’s intimidating, though he would never physically hurt me. ... That was another Huge Mistake.I wish I had known about this years ago. I have ridiculously high self-esteem. I am supremely confident in myself and my ability both to handle romantic relationships and to leave them if they go bad. This means that I've missed people's attempts to manipulate and emotionally abuse me in the past. I just thought they were jerks. It took seeing someone I love dearly get emotionally manipulated, and to eventually see how my own ignorance of the situation contributed to it, before I finally started to learn anything about emotional abuse.
Nathan was totally fine with Peter and I becoming partners as well, but he said that he thought it would be best if we didn’t do anything sexual yet. That created a lump in my throat and a questioning in my mind. After much stewing, the next night I told him what happened, and he Flipped the Fuck Out. He punched the wall, told me I cheated on him, and that I had totally broken his trust. " ~ Advice Asker
"You are a woman who wanted something, and you went after it in a way you thought was within the bounds of your relationship. You found out later that your partner didn’t agree. You didn’t do anything to deserve the amount of humiliation and worry and fear you are feeling right now." ~ Advice Giver
I know what physical abuse is, and I've always had the "the second someone raises a hand to me, I'm outta here" mantra. And I've held to that my entire life. What I didn't know was that doing that kind of mental calculus, "the calculus called Would He Hit Me?", is a sign of emotional abuse. I never *felt* emotionally abused by my partners getting jealous and punching things in their rage. I knew, without a doubt, that they'd never hit me. But I thought their jealousy was unreasonable (not the punching the wall - that was a totally safe outlet for anger, I thought (I have my own anger issues)), so I'd leave them for the jealousy reason alone, not the intimidating violence.
I once had a partner. Like the questioner above, who wrote into Captain Awkward with her story, I had a partner with a mismatch in poly relationship expectations. Unlike that questioner, it wasn't because I told him my boundaries but he refused to tell me his, so I would bump into them on accident. No, we talked about it. And we still didn't see eye to eye. But because we talked about it, I *thought* that we understood each other and it was only until I smacked head-first into his massive armored tank of insecurity and abuse that I learned otherwise.
I found myself in an incredibly unstable situation. I was experiencing loss left and right. The situation that led to the discovering-my-boyfriend-was-an-abusive-monster thing was only the beginning of my series of losses, and the whole series combined threw me into a deep depression that I hadn't experienced since I had been bullied as a kid. I not only thought about suicide, but I started planning it. This was the time that I needed my partner the most to be supportive and compassionate. But this was the time that frightened him the most, so he lashed out.
I went after something that, at the time, I felt I needed to help cope with all my chaos and loss and pain. And it did help. It was honestly the right thing for me at the time and I don't regret it at all. It directly led to another series of events that eventually contributed to my healing, and to pulling myself out of the bleakness that was consuming me. It turned out to be absolutely necessary for me, although I couldn't have known that at the time - I thought it was something I should do, but I didn't realize how it would start a snowball effect that would ultimately lead to saving my life. The details are not mine alone to share, even anonymously, but I will also say that the thing I "went after" is not actually the thing that I was accused of doing that lead to my partner "Flipp[ing] the Fuck Out". But I did pursue another relationship, and its progress frightened my abusive ex.
Something that Captain Awkward doesn't mention in their response is a lesser known truism - if you make it unsafe for your partner to tell you the truth, they are likely to start hiding things from you. My ex made it very unsafe for people to share difficult things with him. Some things were difficult because they triggered his insecurity. Some things were difficult because he felt strongly about them and argued tenaciously (a trait I share with him) so that his loved ones stopped giving their contrary opinions on those subjects because it simply wasn't worth the argument. He made sharing difficult subjects with him a very scary thing.
In addition to that, he was largely unavailable at this time, both temporally and emotionally. This was part of the chaos that had entered my life - a small part, but a contributing part. He had begun working longer hours, long enough that he essentially was at work for all but one or two waking hours a day. This pissed off his live-in partner, because she never got to see him anymore, and their tradition was for her to wait for him to come home so they could eat dinner together and this meant that she was now waiting until 9 or 10 at night before she could eat (don't ask me why she didn't just eat when she needed to eat and then spend time with him while *he* ate whenever he came home - that's a whole thing in passive-aggressive manipulation that deserves its own post).
He was trying to manage a total of 4 romantic partners and two of them were emotionally turbulent, to give the understatement of the year. We used to chat online throughout the day, but his work situation had recently put an end to that. So I was allocated the 10-minute drive from his office to his house to talk to him on the phone in the evenings. Except on those nights where one of his other partners was in the car with him because there was also car trouble in the group and some car sharing had become necessary.
So, here I was, in a relationship with someone who was giving me about 30 minutes of his time per week after being accustomed to his attention pretty much whenever I wanted, knowing that I would only have his attention for 10 minutes at a stretch, which would have a pretty hard cut-off time otherwise his live-in partner would get pissed (which he indicated to me that she blamed me for cutting into her time with him, causing a rift between her and I and making me feel like a bad metamour for not "considering her needs" to eat - a common abuse isolation tactic found in poly relationships), most of that time would be taken up with his anguish over the troubles his other relationships were giving him, AND that, because of how he reacted to difficult news, telling him about my own emotional tailspin and the subsequent Incident would be a very Unsafe Conversation and definitely take more than 10 minutes, further ruining the night for his live-in partner who was waiting for him so she could finally eat her one big meal of the day.
All of this added up to the fact that he was unreachable to talk to immediately after the Incident (again, too busy at work, putting out relationship fires at home, just not available), and he was very "intimidating" to talk to when I did finally have his attention. So I know that I handled my end of the conversation poorly several days after the fact when I could finally have that conversation with him. I was accused of "cheating" on him when I A) didn't do what he said I had done, B) only waited as long as I did because I literally could not reach him or have any of his time and attention until the moment I finally did talk to him about it, and C) acted completely within my own ethical framework that I thought I had conveyed to him but I found out because of this that we had different relationship frameworks.
He immediately tried to impose restrictions on me. He was very slick about it, though. Unlike the abuser in this advice letter, he didn't do it punitively, exactly. He tried to *retroactively* impose restrictions on me. He wanted me to obey some restrictions that he claimed had *always been there* that I had now broken. Those restrictions violated the agency of my other partner because they imposed limitations on that other partner's behaviour who was not present to negotiate for them, nor would that partner have accepted them had he been present. I felt (and still do) that I would never have agreed to such restrictions had I understood that's what *he* thought our relationship was operating under. As they were not restrictions that *I* wanted either even self-imposed, that should have settled the matter.
But, instead, my ex told me that I could not just arbitrarily "change" the nature of our relationship without his permission. Since the so-called "change" he was speaking of was regarding my own behaviour, yes, actually, I can. He can choose to remain with me or not in light of the change, but I am the sole arbitrator of my own behaviour and, as such, am the *only* one who has the ability to "change" it or not.
I do not believe he had ever encountered any romantic partner who faced that kind of challenge from him head on with "yes, I can make, re-make, and re-arrange the boundaries around my own behaviour without input from you" before. Whenever I had seen him challenge one of his other partners in such a manner, without fail, they backtracked and apologized and, in many cases, grovelled for his forgiveness, and accepted all kinds of restrictions and limitations in order to "prove" their worthiness of remaining in a relationship with him.
He called it "accepting responsibility for fucking up". I call it "falling victim to gaslighting", at least in these cases where I witnessed it and where I have details of the situations that I'm not sharing here. I believe my refusal to bend on the issue of who can command my behaviour is what ultimately saved me. As a blogger once said, "'I was victimized by acts of control' is not the same as 'I was victimized by the other person’s resistance to my control,'" and "These are my choices. You are not entitled to control over them, you are not victimized by them."
He felt "victimized" by my resistance to his attempt to control my behaviour. He felt "betrayed" because I behaved in a manner that didn't affect him directly at all, was something that I needed to do for myself in a time of need, but was something that he found frightening because it was not under his control. When I gave no quarter, the relationship ended swiftly, without build-up or warning. Everyone was surprised by how quickly things escalated to a breakup. And I can't be more thankful for that, because I saw what happens to his partners when the breakups are slow in coming, and when they try to negotiate and seek compromise in good faith with him.
There is no "in good faith" with an abuser. I did not recognize him at the time as an abuser. I do not feel abused by him because his attempts to control me were met by my stubborn refusal to give up my autonomy. I am quite unyielding about that. And when people feel "victimized by the other person's resistance to my control", that unyielding feels cold, hard, calculated, uncompassionate, uncaring, and other words that are supposed to be bad adjectives for a romantic partner. But those are the adjectives that have rescued me from several abusive relationships.
And, strangely, those partners of mine who have not attempted to abuse me or who do not have abusive tendencies don't feel that those adjectives describe me in the slightest. Funny, that.