BWS

This isn't about my ex-husband, nor about the years of torment, which started verbally and slowly and progressed to violent shoves, choke-holds, slaps upside the head, and much more, always followed by rushed apologies sure to take into account my own 'asking for it.'  That sort of discussion causes most American men and women to look away to a more cheerful discussion.  This is about the psychological issues that would drive a beautifully endowed master of literature to repeatedly return to such a violent environment, pervasive with control and alcoholism.  For the past six years, I've reasoned that it was to protect my abused children, the equity of my stolen homes and the tending of my beaten animals, but none of these is adequately the reason.  Somehow, over the course of twenty years, my abuser was able to convince my subconscious that he is the best I could marry, the only one I could marry in fact, as he relentlessly pursued, threatened and harassed any other man who tried to love me, and that I am a co-dependant mess.  Years of verbal torment and near drowning in my own bathtub caused certain labels to embed, particularly "worthless." His wealthy and ever-intrusive parents played similar roles in the re-training of my brain, even as they used my left kidney to save their dying "daughter" of a previous marriage.  I am not cured of these many insidious leaks, and am unsure if I will ever be, but writing is a powerful tool in healing and re-training, even as another very old friend takes refuge in my former master bedroom a mere two weeks after our last split.  So I shall write.  I shall write to my detectives, to the civil and family courts, to his present and future bosses and to the world at large.  He had no right; no one does, to bash my head into the carpet until my head wanted to explode, and I will do so much better than to re-marry the likes of him.  Battered Wife Syndrome is my real and true affliction, fraught with episodes of post traumatic stress and irrational phobias of closed spaces and sudden loss of breath, but you know what?  I feel better now 😉

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