Threats

I’ve received a number of threats over the course of this relationships, ranging from emotional manipulation to physical threats. What follows is a partial list along with some context as way of explanation.

Physical threats

These are, for the most part, not direct threats against my person, but threats to my belongings or my physical freedom.

If you leave, I’ll smash your piano with a sledgehammer. (Not quite the exact wording, but it’s the essence of the message.) This one occurred during the book-throwing incident. This one was quite frightening, because it sounded serious. It told me that I would need to find a way to get the piano out of the house before any attempt to leave the relationship.

You wanna see violence? This is what it looks like! This also occurred during that book-throwing incident, and was said with her fists just inches from my face. Later she said she was just trying to show me what physical abuse would have looked like in her childhood family, but I don’t quite believe that backpedaling excuse. During the moment, it was pretty frightening, especially given a story she told me about how she, as a teenager, beat up her mother with her fists to get her mother to stop her abuse.

If you walk out now, I’ll lock the doors and not let you back in. This also occurred during the book-throwing incident. A week or so later, I made copies of the house keys and stashed them in a safe place. I took this a physical threat because it impinged on my freedom of movement.

If you walk out now, I’ll leave and not come back. This occurred during a recent “argument” while I was attempting to leave the house to buy some food for my rather sick partner (more about this another time). It’s a source of wry amusement to me that the threatened consequence is the opposite of the preceding one.

Emotional threats

These are threats that attempt to bend my will to hers using emotional manipulation. I doubt that they were consciously designed to be manipulative. More likely, they are indirect cries for help from someone who is afraid of abandonment. That still doesn’t make them less abusive, and as you will see, they were very effective in some cases.

If you leave, I’ll kill myself. This occurred during a phone conversation a year and half ago, when I called from my volunteer workplace to say that I was leaving for a 30-day period. (Later I will have much more to say about this incident and the reasons behind it.) The conversation went on for hours, and in the end I came back home and promised not to leave. I know I’m a weak person for allowing myself to be manipulated this way, but based on what I had learned about my partner very early in our relationship, I took the threat seriously and could not bear the thought of her carrying it out.

I’m going to find someone else to have sex with. This is related to my earlier post about sex and shame.

I’m going to sleep upstairs until you apologize properly. Again, this is not the exact wording, but the message was clear. It has occurred during several “arguments”, including the book-throwing incident.

How can you think of breaking our marriage vows? Apparently, this means that no matter how bad things are for me, despite all my failed efforts to be understood, I’m supposed to stick around and endure.

I can’t be with someone who’s afraid of me. I’ve heard this several times. Apparently I’m not supposed to cringe in fear when she yells at me or throws things. Yet if I try to stand up for myself politely (my typical response is “Please stop yelling”) I get subjected to more angry blasts. Maybe she is expecting me to apologize in a convincingly heartfelt manner, which is difficult when I’m fearing for my safety. If I weren’t so weak, I would take this threat seriously and leave when it is used against me.