Memories, September 2018, 1

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by SuperDepressed in Uncategorized

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"nice guys", abuse, asd, autism, autistic spectrum disorder, Domestic violence, intimate partner violence, relationships, sexual assault, social cues, toxic relationships

He poked me in the face, that first day. D___ had chuckled at something he had said, and I caught D___’s eye and smiled a little, trying to walk a balance between them, and he poked me–4 or 5 times, just under each eye, not quite hard enough to bruise–and I “slapped” his face (not hard enough to leave any mark, never mind a bruise) and told him that if he ever did it again, we were over.

There was the time we were having a good-natured, playful argument, and he picked up a pizza and “playfully” rubbed it into my face. I stood up, walked silently to the shower, and didn’t speak for several minutes. It was in jest, and he hadn’t struck me; it didn’t count, did it?

The times (plural) he followed me from room to room, shouting at me, and when I refused to engage, he loomed over me, using his extra 9 inches of height and exponentially stronger voice to full advantage. One time, he even admitted he was trying to goad me into hitting him.

The same in the car, the raving at me for anything and everything, too many times. Shouting at me for not being a better navigator, until I was sobbing in helpless fury, while he was driving us somewhere. Handing me his phone despite my protests that I can’t read maps–he never offered to show me how, because he’s rubbish at reading them as well, but his vanity won’t let him admit it–and then snatching it back, shouting, “Don’t touch anything!” when I tried to zoom in, to read the street signs.

The car again, ignoring first my pleas to let me out, and later, my warning that if he didn’t either let me out or stop screaming at me, I’d hit him. Eventually I did–the same way I did it the first time, when he poked me, not leaving any signs I had touched him–and he blacked my eye. It was swollen nearly shut for a week, and purple and green for 2 weeks on top of that.

I won’t talk about the time we “had sex” that I mostly don’t remember, when I’d had 100 mg of Sertraline, 300 mg of tramadol hydrochloride plus paracetamol and ibuprofen in the 12 hours before going out, and 4 glasses of red wine in 4 hours, but he was perfectly sober… I remember coming to underneath him, which is so unlike me–why wasn’t I on top, especially drunk, disinhibited?–but I do remember flirting with him in the other room, even brushing my foot across his (fully clothed) crotch, and asking someone else if I should have sex with him… I must have consented, even propositioned him, after an entire summer of explaining over and over again that I wanted to be friends and turning down his advances, AND already having fought off the unwelcome advances of another friend, who told me he needed a friend to talk to, led me around the corner from the doormen of the club, and forced his teeth and tongue into my mouth while he held me, struggling, against a brick wall.

I’m sure that if I’d wanted to say no–after repeatedly begging these 2 “good friends” of mine (and longer-term, better friends of each other) to just BE MY FRIEND over the course of several months–I would have done.

I think he thinks I miss him, and that’s why I had to stop talking to him. I think there’s some part of him that thinks I’m not over him… that might be true enough, but not in the way he thinks.

The only thing I’m not over, is how I could have allowed myself to be used, so many times, and still believed all the bullshit he spouted at me. Was I born that naïve, or did I learn it, somehow? All the signs were there, and he wasn’t the first man to work up to blacking my eye, over a period of months/years… I do not know what I will do, if that ever happens to me again.

Sometimes, statistics are true. Some conditions (ASD, in my case) make you so much more vulnerable than you realise, at the time.

My Narcissistic Ex

02 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by SuperDepressed in Uncategorized

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abuse, anxiety and depression, BPD, controlling, intimate partner violence, intimidation, mental health, mental illness, narcissist, relationship, self-harm

I finally blocked him, not that long ago–my mental health has only improved, in subsequent weeks.

During our final conversation, I told him that he’d had no right to start a relationship with someone who was mentally ill, unless he was willing to make the sacrifices they needed in order to continue improving their mental health.

He argued with me for an hour, I’d guess, accusing me of everything from saying mentally ill folk don’t deserve romance to lying about my motives. The sum total of his words were: “how dare you not accept the crumbs of my attention I’m willing to give you, the weeks or months of not talking, and then not be thrilled to hear from me when I finally deign to reply to your message or send one of my own–my girlfriend is mentally ill, and her needs come first.”

Throughout the entire conversation, he kept making references like the above, which let me know: he thought I was talking about when he began his relationship with his current girlfriend, who has Borderline Personality Disorder.

He never once understood that my words were an indictment against the years he spent deceiving me, lying to my face, and pretending that I “deserved” to be treated that way (abused, in a word) because he didn’t agree with the morality of some of my life choices.

I wasn’t talking about her, you pure-blind narcissistic idiot–the person you’re looking at is not necessarily the person at the top of everyone else’s thoughts.

I was talking about me: about the suicidal ideation that you were bored of hearing about (in pretty much those words: bored, tired of, doesn’t make an impact anymore….) the self-harm that I tried to hide from you (yet you *still* shouted at me for doing it, after following me into the bathroom to watch me shower) and most of all, the insistence that it wasn’t abuse to scream obscenities at me, call me ugly names, shove/restrain/throw things at/hit me, or coerce me into sex when I was so obviously stiff and scared and not in the mood.

I’m sorry for her, because she’s not equipped to deal with you, and you’ll take advantage, because that’s what you do… but, as ever, until I finally gave up the fight, I wanted you to just once acknowledge how you treated *me*.

Before I Continue…

09 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by SuperDepressed in Uncategorized

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abuse, consent, domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, intimidation, misogyny, pathological lying, relationship, relationship trouble, sexual abuse, spin doctoring, toxic people, verbal abuse

….the potential pregnancy saga, I have to get something off my chest. It’s about the last guy I was seeing, before I started seeing my now-husband. We’ll call the previous guy, “The Spin Doctor,” because literally everything he says is spun to his best advantage, and he is a master of PR.

Essentially, I started seeing someone who turned out to be the aforementioned Spin Doctor. I didn’t realise at the start of the relationship, but in hindsight, the SD decided they understood me based on a few factors, and treated me “accordingly”. As he’s also sort of an accidental misogynist, that did not go well.

I’d love to post this on Facebook, get some support from my real-life mates, but the last time I did that, I just got a list of reasons from The Spin Doctor (and his new girlfriend–well, not new, since he started seeing her the day after convincing me to take him back, which was in April, but you take my point) why it was perfectly acceptable that he behaved that way. I can do without the hassle. I’m going to post here, and just hope he never sees it. I digress. Moving swiftly on.

In a writing prompt, the question was asked: “What do you want to say to the person who broke you?” And this was my response:

“It was domestic abuse EVERY time you screamed and shouted at me when I hadn’t raised my voice or even said anything unkind. It was abuse every time you blamed me for something I didn’t do. It was abuse every time you stomped around your house, looming over me, leaning into my face, slamming doors and cabinets and generally making me feel unsafe, when you were meant to be offering me a room 3x a week so I could finish my degree.

It was abuse when you said I ‘couldn’t be raped’. It was abuse when you, months later, proved that you weren’t joking, when you forced my hand onto your dick and told me that ‘you can’t dip in and out of people like that’ (in other words, finish jerking me off and I don’t care about your RSI pain) and later berated me for being upset about it. It was abuse when you were screaming at me so loudly in the car, for 10 solid minutes, while I begged you to pull over and let me out, that eventually I lightly tapped your face to get you to stop, and it was definitely abuse when you blacked my eye nearly shut in retaliation.

It was abuse when you said, ‘I’ve come to terms with the fact that your kids might always be awful, and I have to protect myself from them.’ All of that was abuse. You didn’t ‘make one mistake’ (blacking my eye). You abused me repeatedly, for a year and a half, and threw money at me to ease your own guilt…. but *I* know, you’re an abuser.”

I still have mixed feelings about the guy–you always do, in a situation like that–and, as stated above, there were times when I screamed too, times when I almost struck him, and, once (under extreme duress) I even slapped at him (I say “slapped at” because it was the kind of tap you do to get someone’s attention, but it did knock his glasses off and I’m sure it was disorienting). I’m certainly not blameless, in that relationship.

The thing is, I wanted to be with him, and I made it very clear over and over again, but he just wanted to stick his dick in me; preferably, without ever having to deal with my actual life, or, God forbid, my children. Once he got tired of pretending to actually care, the gloves came off, the abuse escalated, he to the point of his taking shots at my kids. In the end, it was that comment about my kids being awful that made me walk out of his house and take a train back home, missing a uni lecture in the process; I stayed for months after he blacked my eye, but I was permanently gone as soon as I had somewhere else to stay, after the comment about my babies.

The last time I tried to talk to him about any of it, he showed no awareness of wrongdoing, nor remorse. He actually denied making that comment about my kids; awkward, as the comment was made in a conversation via Messenger, so…? I mean really, what *is* the point, I ask you? And I may as well ask you, the anonymous reader.

God knows, I’ll never get a straight answer out of The Spin Doctor.

Things I Wish I Didn’t Know, 1

25 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by SuperDepressed in Things I Wish I Didn't Know, Uncategorized

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abuse, attackers, date rape, Domestic violence, intimate partner violence, IPV, not my fault, rape, sexual assault, victims

It’s been a while.

I toyed with the idea of starting a new blog, even bought a domain, but in the end, this is probably my spiritual home. Today’s post is going to be about something that didn’t happen to me, but it really could have, and how/why that freaks me THE FUCK out.

I used to know this guy. Over time, it became clear that because we’d fooled around a couple of times after he’d split with his girlfriend, he couldn’t really be trusted to be alone with me. Even physical games (rough-housing–I don’t mean anything sexual) became about him trying to dominate me, in increasingly humiliating ways, and then being pissed off if I fought back.

Eventually, he spread a rumour that I’d said something about his new girlfriend (I hadn’t–if I had, I’d have owned up to it). He sent me a message in which he told me at least 1 lie that I can prove, and a couple of things that I’m 90% sure are suspect. Without giving me a chance to respond, he blocked me and warned me that if I contacted him in any way, he’d ignore it.

Even people accused of a crime have the right to answer their accuser, legally speaking. And this guy used to say I was one of his best friends.

A couple of months after this, I was complaining about one of the times this former “friend” of mine had pushed me up against a wall and tried to snog me. The friend I was telling then went on to mention a third friend of ours, who had been staying with ex-friend…. apparently, one night after getting outrageously drunk, he followed her up to her room, threw open the door, went inside, and shoved his hand down her pants.

That’s sexual assault.

And maybe if I’d said something about the… more than 5? fewer than 10?… times he’d done similar things to me (albeit, he never got as far as groping my vag, just other parts of me, plus holding me still and laughing while I struggled) maybe he’d have known better. A nice caution from the police might have made all the difference.

The worst bit is, she was staying at his while recovering from a life-threatening illness. She’d been hospitalized several times that year. And she has a history of serious, damaging sexual abuse. She was the epitome of a vulnerable person… and in hindsight, by not telling everyone what I knew about him, maybe even going to the police about it, I contributed to the ignorance that helped put her in that position.

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s 100% on him, that he both did that and continues to deny it now, over a year later. But if I could’ve prevented it, I would have… I just (foolishly) believed him, all the times he said he was sorry and that it wouldn’t happen again. But then, it’s not the first time I’ve fallen for that particular chestnut.

I have a history of being abused, too.

To summarise, the thing I wish I didn’t know: if someone sexually assaults you, no matter how minor the assault is (and there are scales to rate these things, so it’s legit to say some attacks are worse than others) you need to tell people about it. If not the police, at least the people likely to be at your abuser’s mercy. If you don’t, you’re still the victim and you mustn’t feel guilty about it, but… if you can, tell. Tell everyone.

And cut all ties with the abuser calling themselves your friend. Something like 80% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by people you know. They’re predators, they choose to prey on people they suspect won’t report them, won’t call them on their behaviour, due to misplaced loyalty.

It is in no way your fault if something bad happens to you–but please, if you can, get away from people you *know* actively want to hurt you.

Here are some groups who can help you move on:

SupportLine 01708 765200

Confidential emotional support to children, young adults and adults by telephone, email and post.
Website: www.supportline.org.uk

CISters (Surviving Rape and/or Sexual Abuse) 02380 338080

Answerphone 023 80 338080 is usually monitored daily during the week and callers can choose to leave their name and phone number, and we will call them back and will take care when doing so. Or can email admin@cisters.org.uk

The helpline is available to female adult survivors of childhood rape/sexual abuse, and others can call if they have a concern about such issues. In the case of the latter we will seek to signpost them to appropriate services.

Rape Crisis England & Wales

Rape Crisis England & Wales is a national feminist organisation that exists to promote the needs and rights of women and girls who have experienced sexual violence, to improve services to them and to work towards the elimination of sexual violence. They are a national umbrella body for their network of autonomous member Rape Crisis organisations across England and Wales and was set up to support their specialist work.
Website: www.rapecrisis.org.uk