A Calm Period
As Ann put it, “He loves me. He just doesn’t like me.”
–Patricia Evans, The Verbally Abusive Relationship
Earlier I wrote about cycles of abuse, and how there is always a calm period somewhere in the cycle. We’re having one now, and it suddenly got much better about a month ago. From the reading I’ve done, I think I understand why this happened.
In Controlling People, Patricia Evans describes something called “The Teddy Illusion”, where the abuser imagines the partner as a kind of perfect “Teddy”, like a childhood stuffy toy that is always available and perfectly compliant. I find the “Teddy” concept to be very illuminating, and it certainly makes it easier to understand why the current calm period got better.
A month ago I did some volunteer work on two of my partner’s favorite non-profits, and since then I’ve been working hard on our very large vegetable garden. These are all things I was happy to do; I was not forced into them unwillingly. But apparently, they made my partner very happy with me. She has been praising me, using the word “love” on occasion, telling me how grateful she is for our partnership, encouraging me to find more friends – in short, being the partner I had first been attracted to years ago.
This is all very confusing, because I have to file this away in my memory next to the awful abuse scenarios where she told me she hated me, that I cared more about my piano teacher than about her, that I was a terrible listener, that her friends were deceived in thinking I was a “good guy”, and all the rest. The only way I can deal with this cognitive dissonance is to imagine that my partner is made of multiple personalities. This is not too surprising a conclusion, given that she was abused terribly as a child and has had to deal with the resulting trauma all of her life since then.
In my memory, I’m also contrasting the recent volunteering episode with my own chosen volunteer work, which takes me away from home for three hours a week. She often expresses some annoyance with my volunteer work for various reasons, usually because it somehow interferes with her plans or schedule. This tells me that she isn’t happy with me just because I did some rather intense and time-consuming volunteer work last month, but mainly because it was her preferred volunteer work.
So while I’m happy with the positive turn the relationship has taken, I’m still a bit wary, because I can’t predict exactly when the next blowup will happen. Based on past experience, it will likely be triggered by something that tells her that I’m not the perfect Teddy, not the perfectly behaving extension of her will.