My Post Abuse Life

As part of my healing process I am supposed to write about what my life will be like post abuse.  Kind of late to the party on this as I have taken steps to get beyond the situation. I have divorced my ex and cut contact with her down to a minimum and don't miss her at all. I recently bought a house in one my favorite neighborhoods in town and got engaged to a loving woman who is amazing. So the last 18 months I have toiled to get out and away from my former life with the ex. Now I can think about where I want to be in the future.

The first thing I want is to move on from the emotional flashbacks from the pain I avoided over the years of my marriage. Constantly being emotionally manipulated and treated like shit caused me to avoid my feelings and now that I am safe they have all come flooding back. I want to be in a place where the past is in the past and I can enjoy the present more. 

I fell and broke my leg 2 weeks ago and have 2 more months of down time. Once I have healed from this injury, I am hoping to get some house projects done, us moved under one roof and a vacation planned for the spring. 

Career wise I hope there are opportunities for growth and advancement. I hope now that my personal life isn't so stressful, I can be more effective in my career and coach up my people to take on more responsibility.

Learning how to love in a healthy way is a blessing and uncharted territory for me. Hoping my relationship with my fiance grows in depth and becomes better with time. Its such a blessing to be heard and loved for who I really am. 

Health wise I am hoping for improvement too. With less stress and avoidance drinking I am hoping the need for prescription meds goes away. 

Looking forward to getting to be me and having the space and support to do so. I looked in the mirror the other day and see the dude there is happy and flourishing. 

Finally, just living under one roof and getting settled into a new normal. Been a long haul with the old house, apartment, new house and fiances house. Ready for things to settle down finally. Even with all of the changes, I have hope for the future for the first time in my life and love the present. I know this will make me stronger and in a way saved my life. 

Postmortem From Talk

When I talked to the ex for the non apology from her she said some stuff that stuck with me and made me really angry. It has been churning in my brain and I am hoping to let go of it if I type it out. The first thing I noticed was the splitting I experienced during the talk. She was either totally happy to be single now or she was devastated that she was alone and crying all the time. Also, to her the marriage was all bad and then she would change and say there were good times too. Just UGH..

Then she started telling me she is making strides in therapy and is all better now. When I asked her if she had told her therapist about certain traumas in her past, she said she didn't, which makes me wonder if there is accurate information shared to make progress. It was a valiant effort on her part to try to give me hope that she might change and be able to have a healthy relationship. Cruel really as I was with her for over a quarter of a century and suffered mightily under her regime.

I was able to get her bottom line for the apology though, she found out I was moving on with someone else and wanted to offer her advise. She hoped that I was going to stay single for a year, learn to love myself and choose her at the end of said year. This was really rich on her part as all I have done is wait for her to show up. Let's see I supported her through 6 years of school and a month of going to work with her affair partner in Ms. So what prize am I gonna receive for living like a monk for another year? I have learned through all of this that if it isn't good now it never will be.

So feeling the feelings of disgust, sadness, frustration and grief are what I am doing with this. For too long I avoided them and now I have to sit through them as they come in waves. With a living person, grief is a tricky situation. I am grieving the loss of the marriage that could have been and the person would probably take me back. Then there is the knowing that if I went back it would never be good and I would be miserable again. Coming to terms with this loss and the projection of my good qualities on a bad person tells me I am grieving a figment of my imagination.

Facebook Memories are Not Your Friend

Yesterday a picture came up on my feed with my ex-wife in it. I had unfollowed  her on Facebook and didn't want to see her posts any more. This post was with her at a brewery we were at with cowboy and was seemingly harmless at first glance. Then I remembered the time and place it was in. She was in the midst of the affair and this was one day she hung out with me in 4 years that was exceptional only for that reason. There was no connection that I was longing for, and I took whatever scraps she offered me at the time. The grief kicks in as I have it so much better now and I know how short changed I was at the time. She was never a good partner and was using me for financial security, but back then I thought it would have been a great day.

The insidious part of emotional abuse is just this, your expectations are managed down to the point you accept literally nothing while giving everything. Its a wonder I survived and got out but I still grieve the loss of the marriage. This seems crazy as I empirically know I was abused emotionally and she never loved me. Maybe I am mad at myself for still caring and feeling the loss. Or am I pissed that I wasted so much time hoping things would change.

So yeah, facebook memories suck for those who have left an abuser.

The Apology

The second try at reconciliation wasn't working and I walked back in April. I kept my boundaries strong, life is good and I am moving on. In mid September she tells me she has something she wants to tell me that just won't work over text. After a couple of weeks, I cave and talk to her. She offers what I feel, is a non apology. She says something like " I know I acted terribly and hurt you. I am sorry." I got mad at her and we argued for over an hour rehashing the past. When I cooled off for a moment, I asked her "What exactly did you do to me?" she said she had some ideas but forgot.

During the conversation, she told me she was going to therapy, growing and working on herself. For an instant, the hope came back that she might be finally the person I always thought she had the potential to be. So some sadness came over me for a split second that I had walked away for good knowing change wasn't possible and I was done with her. Now maybe I was too harsh, but I know this was all a scheme to try to get me to come back.

Not seeing her for a while was the best thing I could do to get some perspective as I could see her trying to manipulate me with false hope. Just like she did when she lured me back the second time. I felt angry, misunderstood, gaslit and back to where I was in April after 2 hours of talking to her.

I know what started all of this was me telling her I was moving on with someone else. I felt I owed it to her to be honest about my future plans since she was a part of my life for 27 years. She wanted me to be single for a year or 6 months and get to like myself again and come back to her. What a crazy delusion she is under, as she was so awful to me for all of our marriage, especially the last 7 years.

My guess is the consequences of her actions are finally catching up with her now that she is 100% on her own now. She wants the old life back where I was trapped with her and she could treat me as poorly as she pleased. I was expected to bring my A game as a husband while she did nothing but alienate me from affection and cheat on me. How she can think I would wait another year for her is just crazy and delusional. The old me might have, but fuck her for being that arrogant and thinking she is worth that.

So the call took me back there and it took me a couple of days to process and calm back down. Lesson learned and I saw how miserable she made me when I saw her every day. No wonder I hated life and was stressed out when a 2 hour call made me this upset.

Back to my new life I went and was amazed at how easy it is. I am validated, loved and understood. Also, reality is on the same timeline with the new partner and I don't feel gaslit. Boundaries up going forward and this blog post will remain a reminder to do so.

Why I can never go back to my ex-wife, a short list. She apologized recently for hurting me and doing devious things, but for some reason she couldn't tell me what she did when I asked her. So basically, it was a non apology and just fucked with my emotions.

1. She lied to me and cheated for 5 years before I found out.
2. She tried to get me to quit my job and move with her to be closer to her affair partner.
3. She admits to not loving me the last 8 years of our marriage and just using me for financial security.
4. She admits to purposely throughout our marriage acting like she didn't like what I did to make me feel rejected and unloved.
5. She admits to doing the abuse cycle in our relationship the whole time. Idealization, Devalue, Discard. It seemed to be on a 3 month cycle.
6. I felt so alone and abandoned in early 2018, I wanted to die.
7. The 2 times I went back to her and tried to reconcile after filing for divorce she kept talking to her affair partner.
8. The 2 times I went back to her she denied me affection, and nothing changed.
9. Her work life balance sucks and she is never available. I always thought it would get better when the season of life changed, but it just carried over to the new realm.
10. She only apologized when I finally left her for good and hadn't seen her for a few months. The thing is it wasn't sincere at all.
11. Throughout the 27 long years of our relationship, she projected her own self hatred on to me and acted like it was my fault.
12. The marriage was one sided and I always felt tired and unloved.
13. The marriage was going to kill me, through self-harm from drinking or suicide.
14. When the kids found out about the affair she gaslight and denied it. This caused them to carry the burden of knowing before I did.
15. She deliberately with held kissing me for 5 years and never initiated any physical affection.
16. She was unable to fully function as an adult and relied on me to do everything.
17. When I had a crisis of faith and needed her support, she abandoned me and chose to have an affair.
18. The marriage was over in 2009 when I made some changes in my life and quit doing everything her way.
19. She emotionally abused me the entire time and took a sick pleasure in my pain,
20. She told me on the eve of our 20th anniversary that she wouldn't date me if we were single. Then she later gaslit me when I confronted her about how much it hurt me.
21. She accidentally sent her affair partner an "I'm horny" text to our family group text instead. Foolishly, I thought it was for me.
22. When she and my daughter went on a trip to Texas she sent me a random nude pic. Come to find out later, she gave her phone to her cousin to take a picture of them and she saw the photo. She sent it to me to cover her ass as it was for the affair partner.
23. I took her to dinner on Valentines day 2014 after pictures of her in her lingerie showed up accidentally on social media. She never sent the pictures to me and when I confronted her later she lied to me.
24. After repeatedly asking her to fix things between us over the years, she blew me off.
25. She used the guise of having penpals to carry on an affair and abandon me.
26. She controlled me and I lost my social network and all of my friends.
27. Whenever I needed her help she was unavailable. She would take a shower to avoid moving something.
28. She never took the time to know me. All conversations were about her and there was no time for me.
29.I could never rest on evenings and weekends with her. We always had to be doing something or I would escape to get away from her.
30.Vacations were exhausting and I did all of the driving. One time when I wanted to take a nap she woke me up and made me meet with her relatives after telling me I was on vacation and could do whatever I want.
31. She was very controlling and I never had a voice in the relationship.



I know I did all I could to save our marriage and she was the problem. Sure, I wasn't perfect and acted poorly at times after repeated mistreatment. I can never go back to that and am fearful for any one who gets tangled in that womans web. Good riddance to her.

Met Her

I was at a local punk rock bar with my friend in 2016 and I was introduced to her. It was on the cusp of my wife going out of town to spend a month with her unbeknownst to me affair partner. She was wearing a blue dress and there by herself dancing to the local band playing that night. I was interested and impressed that a woman liked punk rock music and wanted to get to know her better. Unfortunately, it would be a year before we would meet again and I would see her at the film festival office when I was there for screenings. I wanted go and say hi when she would walk by the screening room, then I remembered I was married and why would I do that?

Fast forward a few months and she ends up coming out for a late dinner and drinks with several of us after a screening. I got seated next to her at the bar and we ended up talking for that evening. I was still pretty raw from my religious deconversion and  very lonely in a loveless marriage. The conversation with her was so fulfilling and like rain on a parched desert. She was so smart, funny and empathetic. When we went to leave, she hugged everyone since she knew them better than me. I asked if she would give me a hug and she did; wow, it was amazing and something I hadn't ever felt. 

I would see her on occasion over the next few months but then I got her to come to trivia night with our friends. From there our friendship would blossom.

What Happened?

My biggest fear was my marriage failing. I heard stories of friends through the years that were going through a divorce and it absolutely terrified me. I saw how my wife and I were never on the same page and I couldn't win no matter what I did. There was a lack of affection and alienation throughout our marriage and I took the blame for all of it. If only I could do something different and avoid her getting mad at me, then I would get frustrated and act out then feel worse. I tried to reason with the unreasonable and stayed in misery. Even as the obvious signs of infidelity were creeping in on her part, I still tried to save things. Even as I met someone who finally loved me as I wanted, I rejected her twice and went back to my wife and the shitty treatment.

I realized I was addicted to the highs and lows of an abusive relationship. I finally realized the hope I had that my wife would actually step up to the plate and be the partner I deserved was a fantasy. Everyone around me saw the mess it all was and I had to be strong enough to move on.