Diane: I Did Not Know

First of all, thank you Pat for creating a place where we can tell our stories. I’ve wanted to tell mine for a long, long time. A few people know part of my story, no one has known it all.

I’m going to call my husband Harold, and Hal. It’s not his name, and mine isn’t Diane either, but those are the names I’ll be using for us.

I met my husband-to-be in college. We’d both gone to different schools for our first year and had transferred to the same mid sized religious college in Oregon for our second.

During the winter semester we found ourselves studying in the small library at the same time, began to have discussions about one thing and another during breaks, and formed a friendship that grew closer over the next few months.

One of the things I liked about him was that he related to me as an intellectual equal and answered my questions straightforwardly. He didn’t play games with me, or talk down, or put me down. Eventually, we began to date, casually, things like accompaning each other shopping and running together.

Looking back later, when I was so puzzled by his behavior after we got married, I can only see a few hints of what was to come. I could not have recognized them at the time for what they were, indicators of the man hidden beneath all the good things I saw in him.

He began to change, almost imperceptably, a few weeks before our wedding. He was slightly morose, looking on the dark side of things, seeming insecure and almost dependent, and yet domineering too, in little things. But, I thought this was just a guy who was a bit overwhelmed with getting married, making our small apartment ready to live in, having car trouble, and working long hours, etc. But, it wasn’t that. It was a shift into the new person I worke up to after the honeymoon.

It was as though he’d changed into someone who looked like him--no, often his whole look changed too. He looked like someone related to the person I married, but not him.

I didn’t know what was wrong. I only knew that I felt increasing presssure and stress, and like escaping, like running and not stopping. I wanted to throw a book through the big window in the apartment, and then another and another, and then the bookcase and furniture. I’d never felt that way before. I thought, What is happening to me!? I felt like I was being robbed of my own life, of my self, my identity, that I was being taken over, and that I had no real choices of my own anymore, and the terrible feeling of being trapped. But I didn’t know how it was happening.

It took me years to find in a book a description of what had happened. It had a section about what the author called a “punisher,” what we now know as someone who engages in abuse.

At that point, it was mostly emotional and psychological abuse. There were physical elements, but they were all “accidental,” and minor. He’d leave doors half open in the dark, and I’d run into them. Drawers would be left open where I’d bump into them. He’d thrash about in his sleep and hit me with an elbow, or a hand or foot. All of these, he was sorry for, he said, but they kept on happening.

Comments

[Dorion]

Yuck wow. This thing about thrashing and hitting you in his sleep is truly creepy.

My dh had this habit of entering the bedroom and tossing himself on the bed without looking where I lie. A few times he really caused me serious pain in that manner - I told him to watch where he steps, etc, but he just got defensive and dismissed both my physical pain and emotional discomfort. I am not sure how to react to that should that happen again.

[Diane]

Eventually, I told Hal that it didn't matter to me why he was hitting me in his sleep, but that it had to stop, and I'd be returning jab for jab if it happened again. It stopped.

[Dorion]

I like that!

[Barbara]

Wow!

"He’d thrash about in his sleep and hit me with an elbow, or a hand or foot. All of these, he was sorry for, he said, but they kept on happening."

Same here - I'd wake up CLINGING to the side of the mattress where I'd been PUSHED during the night. My ex told me it was my disability and he wasn't doing it.

Funny, now that I sleep alone it never happens.