The thing nobody talks about

(Warning – long, harsh blog – be prepared)

I innocently went into Barnes and Noble yesterday looking for a book of plays to read for the Ark. Crossing through the store from the magazines, I found myself standing in the self-help/self-improvement/psychology section. Now, this is a section I usually avoid because most of the self-help books are, in my opinion, silly, overstated, warm and fuzzy bullshit. It’s all common sense, if we’d just look at things clearly. (Yeah, like I do that.) But I have never found any self-help books that have helped me. I will admit to picking up Dr. Phil’s book on authentic self but, again, found myself going, well, duh.

So as I was walking through the psychology area, which has books on real issues, not just "be yourself" and "love yourself," a book caught my eye. The title – “The Verbally Abusive Man” or something like that. It stopped me because it’s the first time I’ve seen something about verbal abuse. Usually, the abuse books/advice are for those women who have been beaten by their significant others and really need help. The ones who have been verbally or emotionally abused tend to be kind of ignored. After all, verbal and emotional abuse don’t show on the surface. It’s buried deep inside and the bruises are evident only after much searching and seeking and most people don’t want to search or seek inside someone that much. They brush it off – oh, sure, he yells at her, but everyone yells at their spouse sometimes; yeah, he is kinda harsh when he deals with her but I’m sure he’s not like that all the time; gosh, he must be hard to live with, being so compulsive and controlling, but can’t be that bad, why would she stay? If you ask yourself that after leaving a friend’s house, maybe you should go back in and ask that friend what the hell is going on. Chances are pretty good that, if it’s something you’ve experienced with that couple more than once, it’s the sign of an abusive relationship.

I should know. I’ve been through two of them and am just beginning to be able to say it. Now, those of you who know my current ex-husband and are fans of his will want to stop reading at this point. I have been polite and considerate of him until now but I feel it necessary to talk about this, so go read someone else’s blog and see what they had at Starbucks today because this probably won’t be pretty.

My first husband, S., came from an extremely abusive family. His father and stepfather both beat the crap out of the kids growing up, and his older brother ended up beating the crap out of one of my best friends for years. He broke her two front teeth by punching her in the mouth and put her into the drywall one night when I was staying with them. I understood my ex’s anger and where it came from. It was evident and right in front of me every time I was with his family. I tried to talk my friend into leaving her husband several times, even sat down with both of them one night, but she had to hit rock bottom and leave him on her own. I look back now and am sorry I didn’t do more to help her out. She must have been in so much pain and feeling so lost.

What I didn’t realize was what he was doing to me. Little snide comments constantly about how I acted, little things I did became big things. It was almost 20 years ago and I have very little memory left of that time other than constantly feeling put down and belittled by him over everything. It was particularly evident when I was doing the one thing I loved so much at that time – dancing. He always found a way to turn what I did well into something that somehow made him less of a man. I was warming up for a recital one night backstage, talking to a friend while he hung out, and he pointed at me in my pointe shoes and said, “And she wonders why I won’t dance with her.” Doesn’t sound like much, taken on its own, but when your life, 24/7, is filled with hundreds of demeaning comments like that, you stop being able to judge what they mean. I eventually gave up dancing for him, the single thing I regret doing in my whole life. I loved dancing more than almost anything else but he made it painful and dreadful, so I eventually stopped. I tried to start again when I finally moved to LA but it was never the same. Then my dancing injuries caught up with me and I couldn’t dance anymore. I miss it so much, even now.

When I met R., I thought he was the further thing from S. that ever could be. He was direct, he was solid, he was reliable. If he said he’d call at 10:15, the phone would ring at 10:15. He played “Kiss the Girl” on my answering machine after we saw “The Little Mermaid.” He brought me roses on our first date and for every opening night of every show I did. He could be enormously romantic and make the most amazing gestures of love that I had ever experienced. Those things made it easier to ignore the constant comments and violent rages that would overcome him. He tore a set of sheets in half one night when we first moved in together because they “weren’t cooperating.” I remember standing there, thinking, do I want to spend the rest of my life with this man? But, hey, it wasn’t constant, only every day, but not always, and not always that bad, and, besides, he could be so wonderful.

Verbal and emotional abuse can sneak up on you. I didn’t think twice when he criticized my writing or my directing. After all, I was still learning. I ignored the rages he flew into when I didn’t take every single one of his comments. I ignored the harsh way he spoke to me in front of industry peers and the way he cut me down in front of them. I participated willingly in the post-mortems of professional events, which always seemed to focus on what I did wrong that night and how I had made him look bad. He would throw in the odd comment that he needed to do better himself, but, over the years, it was more and more what I did wrong, without him accepting any responsibility. It was that way financially. There was no winning. If I told him we didn’t have the money for a book or for his comics that week, the evening would be filled with accusations about what an incompetent person I was, how could I do this. I should know better, I should do better. He wasn’t about to help me with it because every time I would say I needed help or try to get him to take over some of the responsibility, he would hand it back to me then criticize me when things fell apart again.

Slowly, gradually, I could no longer make a decision without an hour long conversation with him. Deciding between chicken or beef for dinner was excruciating. If I’d make chicken, he’d say, I thought you were going to make beef. Constantly. Not once, but almost every time I made dinner. Choosing a restaurant was the same. I’d say Chinese, we’d go, he’d say, after dinner, I really wanted Italian but you chose Chinese. Little wonder that eventually, I could only sit on the couch for hours on end, going over and over every choice of the day, wondering what he was going to say about it, wondering what was going to set him off.

I’ve seen him throw my shoes – MY shoes, never his – across the room when he was vacuuming because they were in the way. Every time he vacuumed. Screaming blue rages when he cleaned house. And if I dared to actually do any of the housework myself, he would literally go back over it and correct it. In front of me. Making me watch and learn how to do it correctly. For 16 years.

I would spends hours preparing for industry events, designing material, slaving over printing things, making sure everything was perfect. Consistently, as we were leaving, he’d look at what I did and find something wrong with it. Despite my having asked him a dozen times to look over what I was doing and give me his input. “No, fine, you know what you’re doing.” Ten minutes before we leave, “why did you use that image and not something better. I thought you knew what I wanted.” I apparently was supposed to be Kreskin and read his mind.

I thought this was normal. Every couple fought. Every couple had times where they didn’t get along. But a friend came to dinner one night and, a few days later, she talked to me privately, saying how horrified she was at the way R. was treating me and talking to me. She noticed it getting worse and worse as time went on but didn’t want to say anything. I brushed it off. Oh, we’re having a hard time, that’s all. It’s not that bad. I don’t cry myself to sleep every night and wonder which would be the most effective way to kill myself without incurring huge hospital bills because he would never tolerate that. Whenever I got a cold, there were hourly reminders not to get too sick because we didn’t have medical insurance and the one time I got sick with pneumonia, we had insurance, and I’d better not get too sick because we couldn’t afford it because we didn’t have insurance because he got fired from his job because of his stupid fucking mouth but it’s my responsibility not to cough too loud so that he doesn’t get upset because I’m sick and I can’t get sick because we can’t afford to get sick because we don’t have insurance so I’d better not get sick because that would a burden on him… That’s what emotional abuse does to you. Creates the hamster wheel you can’t get off of because you can’t trust yourself to.

Nobody ever said anything to him about the way he treated me. Nobody probably does now. I’ve heard from a few people that they have told him they didn’t know how I lived with him for so long because he’s so difficult. I don’t know either. I just know that, almost two years after leaving him, I am still wounded and bleeding inside and 16 years with him left me with scars so deep and so painful, I don’t know if I’ll ever recover. Some day, I’ll maybe be able to go back into therapy and work through some of this, now that I can actually say the words – I was abused. He would disagree. He mocked me once when we went into therapy, because he knew about my first husband and how I felt about that. “You’re going to tell people I’m abusing you now, right?” Then he let out a disgusted snort, because he couldn’t possible do that. I had hoped he would have learned something from my leaving him but I guess you can’t change the essence of what a person is. I just hope someone holds out a hand to the next victim on his list – or that she slaps him stupid until he stops. I wish I had. Maybe I wouldn’t be so messed up. Or I would have left him earlier, saving some of myself.

But I guess, despite my wounds and brokenness, I wouldn’t be who I am today without having gone through this. I wouldn’t be so determined to be what I am without having had to defend it. I might have taken those pills that night – or at some night in the future. I had to fight for my life. Now I have to heal the life I have and put this behind me, while keeping vigilant to never let this happen to me – or any of my friends – ever again.