Verbal Abuse
This subsection contains posts I wrote as a secret blog during the period when I was dealing with verbal abuse in my marriage. I had to keep it secret in order to avoid endangering myself and my escape plan. The marriage ended in 2024, so I feel it’s safe to publish these posts now, in case they might help someone else dealing with abuse in a relationship.
A good place to start would be The Book-Throwing Incident.
How I Escaped
On January 7, 2020, I finally escaped my abusive marriage – or more accurately, I left the house we’d built together, and never came back. Here is the story of that day.
December 14, 2022
My First Attempt to Leave
It’s been just over two years since I wrote the last post here. I noticed that in my post about visitors, I promised to write about how I tried and failed to leave the marriage for a 30-day separation. Here is what happened then:
December 13, 2022
The Backpacking Incidents
It’s been almost exactly a year since I wrote the last post here. A month and a half after I wrote that, I ran away from home and am now happily living alone. But recently I was thinking about a couple of tantrum incidents that happened on two separate backpacking trips in the Emigrant Wilderness of the Sierra Nevada.
November 19, 2020
The Surgery Incident
I write about these awful incidents to remind me, when things are going OK, that I can never let down my guard. During the first couple of months of our house-building project seven years ago, I was suffering from debilitating pain from hemorrhoids. It was bad enough that I was forced to stay in bed for several hours each morning before starting on the building project for that day.
November 20, 2019
The Bicycle Ride Incident
Last year, shortly after the book-throwing incident, we visited a friend at Cape Cod and camped in his backyard for several days. On one of those days, we rode around the neighborhood and discovered a cluster of tiny cottages off the main road, on a circular gravel drive. We started to ride the bikes around the circle, and at one point I stopped to write down the phone number posted on a sign in front of one the cottages, while my wife rode on ahead. When I got back on my bike, I couldn’t see her anywhere.
August 25, 2019
Visitors
I’ve observed a double standard in this relationship around visitors: when I have friends visiting (a very rare occurrence), my partner seems to feel threatened, abandoned, and jealous – or at least that’s my judgment, based on her dealings with me after the visit. But when her friends visit, or we visit her friends, she leaves me alone for long periods and thinks nothing of it. Here are couple of incidents that illustrate this pattern.
August 24, 2019
No Big Deal
Frequently my wife tries to get reassurance from me that her abuse of me is no big deal. In other words, she wants me to agree that constant criticism, throwing my books on the floor, threatening to smash my piano, using f-bombs, yelling, and all the rest of it, are just normal fights that married couples often have. I’m pretty sure that she knows this isn’t true, and that she wants me to back her up in her denial. Here are a few reasons why I think this is the case.
June 30, 2019
ESP
#Verbal Abuse#Listening#Boundaries
Perhaps the compaint I hear most often in this relationship is: “You’re not listening!” This is often accompanied by these statements: “Just listen to my words!” “Clear your mind of preconceptions and listen!” “I feel lonely and diminished and discounted when you don’t listen.” These statements are usually triggered by my failure to perfectly execute her instructions, usually because the instructions are ambiguous or unclear. After receiving the criticisms, I try to explain why I misunderstand her instructions, but that never works, of course. To her, all of her instructions are perfectly clear and easy to understand. She seems to have no concept that my mental models and knowledge are different from hers.
June 28, 2019
Experiments
#Verbal Abuse#Experiments#Counseling
In the past few weeks I’ve conducted some experiments in my own behavior to see how they affect the verbal abuse: Try to establish a tiny bit of independence. Don’t respond to respond to abuse; try to keep quiet when it happens. See a counselor. The results are mixed: Not so good. Better. Not sure yet, but hopeful. Here’s more about that.
June 26, 2019
Crazy-making Patterns
There are several patterns in this relationship that are crazy-making – and very confusing, because I haven’t seen them in all my reading about verbal abuse. The most I can say to make sense of them is that they seem to be about my partner’s belief that I am merely an extension of her will, and that when I fail to implement her will perfectly, she becomes furious. One such pattern revolves around vacation planning.
June 22, 2019