As Long As it Takes

It’s so hard when you’re in the middle of recovery from emotional abuse, but once your brain acquires some equilibrium, a sort of normalcy settles over you that wasn’t there before. It’s disconcerting, because for the first time in your life, normal reactions feel unhealthy and you have to lean into them, instead of what you’ve been told your whole life; lies and secrecy are the way of the world. If you tell anyone anything at any time, it’s going to let me down, and we’re both going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

The trouble with that take-home message is that from an abuser, it’s a double-edged sword. 95% of the time, the abuser shuts down emotionally and cannot support you in your grief and anger. You can’t bring yourself to tell anyone what you’ve been through, so there’s no one else to tell, either. Emotional abuse begins so slowly that you don’t even realize it, and by the time you figure out what’s going on, you’re trapped in someone else’s stories. You become fearful of living your own life because you are already so emotionally laden that your own life feels far away… a hazy dream that appears in the moments when you remember what you were like before it started.

In my own case, before it started was almost a quarter century ago. That’s almost 25 years of feeling strangled by someone else’s mess. I am only 36 now. You do the math. How quickly did I have to grow up? How quickly was my childhood taken away from me? Feeling like the one who was responsible for an adult’s behavior started literally the day I turned 13, and by the time I was 14, I had all the emotional responsibilities of what I thought was taking care of someone and what was actually being a very inappropriate garbage bin for someone else’s pain. Years of sexual abuse mixed with drug use mixed with an abusive spouse mixed with sexualized poetry turned the idea of confiding in a 12-year-old okay.

It was fine until a few months ago, when all of it caught up to me at once and I was tired of screaming into a black hole. I was so miserable that I literally wanted to die, and I thought about it often. I say that not to scare you, just to illustrate just how bad verbal abuse gets. Just because my abuser never raped me doesn’t mean that she didn’t damage me from the inside out.

To me, the thing that separates physical from verbal abuse is that physical abuse is right out there in plain sight. If we had been romantically involved (and I use that term loosely because of the age difference), I would have at least been *sure* it was wrong. The bitch of verbal abuse is that you start to believe that it’s you that’s broken. It’s you that’s worthless. It’s you that can’t live up to your abuser’s standards and that’s how it’s supposed to be because you don’t know anything else.

Abusive people, and this is only my opinion, simply lack the capacity to take responsibility for their actions. It isn’t that they are bad people. It’s that their brains just aren’t wired to think that way. They’re wired to deflect everything away from them because they just want the pain to stop.

Enablers, the chosen recipients of abuse, pick up this behavior pretty quickly. It isn’t malicious when we lie, cheat, and steal to avoid culpability. it’s that we learn early on that the truth will be met with emotional violence and we’ll do anything to avoid it. For instance, we know that if we breathe a word of anything, you’ll withold affection for as long as it takes. We also know that “as long as it takes” is a vague term that you’ll never define.

As an enabler myself, all I ever hoped is that 25 years would be enough… And it was…

For me.