Gaslighting.

Relating to 2019 - the effect of my husband's lying...

Looking back at some older posts, I came across my description of how any attempt from me to get to the truth of things, would end. His threats to walk out when I tried to talk about how I needed the truth, went beyond my threshold of endurance. I believe now that albeit unconsciously, he did this to prove his point 'that I was too mad' . 

And it felt like he wanted to see it this way - because this version of the truth was theirs (his and hers). She portrayed her husband as violent and irrational. And he said what about me? That I'd just go on and on, and would always be crying...I guess.

And the shared fictions were important and precious for him.

And devastating for me.

Weaponized epistemic injustice...

Otherwise known as gaslighting.

It took me seven months to unravel. Seven months of sensing the truth, and trying not to believe it - because if I was right, it meant that I was being lied to.

Seven months. 

And I couldn't just shut up.

I would not let him verbally abuse me without showing him how much it hurt me, without speaking up for myself. At the time I wouldn't sacrifice my core sense that the visions I had, the feelings I had were true. I would not internalise his view, I would not call myself mad. 

But it was a close thing.

Six months later, in May 2020 I discovered that he had been lying to me for a year, and that in November 2019 he had started  'giving her lifts home' and going into her home while her husband was away.

When I found out the truth the feeling of relief was indescribable. 

My visions and feelings had been startlingly accurate. Everything now made sense. I could be OK.

But back in November 2019 the sense of it, the aura of it, the feeling of it made me feel as if I was living with Blue Beard. Intuition and common sense had placed the key in my hand, and I kept on trying to open the door so I could see what was actually happening, so I could take back control of my reality. 

I understood then - it was as if our marriage had taken place under a contract I'd not seen. 

Except I had seen it...

It was as if I'd agreed in that contract to never show distress or fear or pain when my husband was elsewhere, doing what ever he pleased with whoever. 

But I had seen that at the time - that is why I'd told him always that I needed to know the truth. And why I asked for us to be hand fasted, not a forever contract. I had asked him to promise that when we had problems, we would re-negotiate. I'd asked for us to agree to be together, never to lie or pretend about devastating things.

He said it made him feel that I never loved him, and so I let it go.

In the Bluebeard story, the locked room contains the bodies of the murdered wives. The wives who had to open the door to find out...Bluebeard demands that you never know what he is really up to, or what he has done. Because if you do find out, you will be another body hanging off the meat hook inside his room! 

In November 2019 he was murdering his love for me, murdering his image of me as 'the one'.  

Where was the key?

While I was trapped watching him psychologically dismember me...How did this play out  for him in his mind? He couldn't bring himself to tell me that 'he'd found THE ONE again....' He couldn't tell me that his experiment of living with someone from a different culture, hadn't worked. He couldn't tell me that he wanted to go home now. He couldn't tell me because he thought that lying made it all OK, that somehow there would be a happy ending?

No he had to lie...or else we would both see the situation as it is!

And when he knew that I knew, he had to kill me...

And yes, he tried it, told himself it was an accident. Said 'he'd just been so angry'...

So when I think of Kit saying, 'how was it when you handed over to your husband' it makes me want to curl up and howl in frustration and fear - because that fear has not gone, will never go!

The best I can say about Gavin - is that in Jungian terms, he found the courage to embrace his shadow. By stepping into his dad's role, by accepting that he actually is the person who he wanted to love him, to see himself as the person he needed, in effect he has stepped into his own shadow - accepting through enacting - negligence, prejudice and cruelty. 

I am so very glad that he has gone.

Here is a description of what it was like...

21st November 2019.

Please!

A word I've been using a lot.

Please.

Please don't do this, please don't be angry, please hear me, please help me.

Please don't be angry comes before.

Before terror, before Hell.

And I'm not hysterical yet, I'm not in terror, not yet.. 

I know that if he speaks to me with disdain and voice full of warnings I am going to start keening, I cry as if bereft, a woman weeping for her lost love. I cannot understand what has happened, who took my beloved from me? 

Why is this man treating me in such a cold, cruel way? 

I say, "Please, don't talk to me in that way" and he walks out the room.

That's when the keening begins; grief overwhelms me, the full weight of abandonment. I am a child again and no one will come...I cannot, will not accept his disdain - but by speaking up I open the gates of Hell.

The pattern is old and entrenched, and I am well into despair. 

"Please don't do this" is when he puts on his coat and says, his voice quiet and low "I'm going". 

That is when the tsunami of panic hits me and I shatter. 

At this point I will not, cannot let go of him. 

I hold onto his legs, I am hysterical. 

He says - voice controlled, quiet and low "let go, fuck off, just get off me" and I'm screaming in terror. As his tone becomes more angry he shouts at me "I can't even leave my own house, fucking hell, just fuck off!" My eyes are shut, I'm holding on to the fracturing edge of the universe. I'm holding onto nothing, no one. No hand reaches out. No kind word is given. Between my arms, he is nothing except a tiny shard of splintering mirror glass. Hologrammatically it contains all my memory of love. It fixes me above psychic dismemberment and crushing, above the taste of blood, above my absolute ending. 

I am hanging above slow grinding cog wheels into which I will fall if I let go.

I cannot let go...

The end of pain is nothing to fear, end of all hurt. 

I want him to kill me.

He isn't that kind of man, he doesn't hit me, he wont kill me. 

And I will not let go, and this is making him hate me. 

I wish he would kill me for then I'd be safe. 

I wouldn't be making living worse.

How did it come to this. 

Why did I say the wrong thing. 

I should not, must never speak... 

Now only death is safe.

And now is not safe, nothing is safe.

Grief overwhelms me. 

I give up. 

Black despair slows my heart, I crawl as if through air as thick as mud, upstairs. 

Lights off.

Into the dark where I crouch, on my knees, head to the floor trying so hard to be as small as I can. 

Unseen. 

Silent. 

Trying not to drown in my tears, and to not make a sound.

Silenced, bound and gagged in bonds of fear and poison.

And so dear reader, this is a postcard from Hell. I've been camped here, slowly traveling closer and closer to the inner circle of psychosis since May. 

I need to describe this to myself, for myself if I'm going to get through this...