Control

I first learned from one of my books on domestic violence that it’s all about control.  And Loïc was a control freak, I wasn’t the only one to notice that.   I’d never run into such big issues over control in a relationship before, so I wasn’t clear about what was going on when I first noticed his controlling behavior.  Now I know that it’s a red flag for physical violence.  When we were in Italy for a few months, before going to Japan, I first noticed his controlling tendencies.  I’d just graduated, and followed him for his work, so for the first time I was with him without money.  Each day I’d meet him at the office for lunch, then he’d give me just enough money to go out for a coffee, then I’d return in the afternoon to get money for our evening’s snack.  This bothered me, but I didn’t say anything since I had to go back and forth to the office at least twice a day, since our meals were with colleagues and payed for by the office.  One evening, when we were trying to figure out how to get back to our hotel, I said there was a bus that stopped just a few meters from where we were standing,  He knew the city better than I did, and was adamant that I was wrong, he physically blocked me from walking over to the bus stop to confirm that the right bus stopped there--that triggered a big argument.  Very disturbing to me was that he began controlling words and phrases in French, using them and then telling me that they meant something other than what I’d understood.  Since I wasn’t in France, I couldn’t confirm the meanings with anyone.  He would put me down and then deny it.  The acts of control at the time seemed small and inconsequential, but they left me quite disturbed, questioning whether or not I should go to Japan with him when we’d hadn’t known each other for that long.  What was he really like?

In Paris, after we’d returned from Japan, the control escalated dramatically.  Each day he gave me just enough money to buy one evening’s worth of groceries.  I had to go to him for every small expense.  Not giving me pocket money obviously gave him complete control over my activities.  He would call several times a day from the office to check on me, supposedly because he knew that I was alone all day and he didn’t want me to feel lonely.  If the phone was busy he’d ask who’d called, and what they’d said.  He would say that he wished I were small enough to carry around in his pocket.  An idea which I found suffocating.  When I got letters he insisted on reading them first, supposedly because he was so interested.  I couldn’t protest about his interest in phone calls and mail, because it was loving, as was his desire to have a pocket sized version of myself.  Many of his means of control were disguised as loving acts, which made it difficult to recognize and feel upset by, still there a vague sense of something being terribly wrong.

Next Loïc began using another tactic typical of batterers: he cut me off from others.  First, he put down the two women friends I had, saying terrible things about them and that they were beneath me.  When I’d plan to meet them, he find ways to keep me from going, and so after a few incidents like that, they dropped me.  Then he set about demolishing each member of my family in detail, going to great lengths to show that they weren’t supportive of me, weren’t to be trusted, that I shouldn’t be in touch with them.  When I ran into people in the street, he would stand between us looking terribly impatient to go, so others would cut the conversation short.  He had all sorts of tactics.  Once when I’d just arrived at a friend’s for lunch, Loïc called saying that he’d forgotten to drop off his income declaration, that it was the final day, and I had to go and do it immediately or he’d pay a heavy fine.  I stood my ground for a few minutes and then gave in and agreed to go, which infuriated my friend.

Loïc’s main way of controlling me was through fear, which it had taken that one single severe beating to instill deeply in me.  After that, he could tell me what to do, and all he had to do was get irritated if I didn’t jump to do it.  He would constantly speak to me from the other room so I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then shout out for me to come into the room where he was.  His irritation terrified me, because it signaled possible violence on the horizon.  He expected me to serve him and so I served him.  Some of the expectations were small but irksome.  It was my task to open the wine each night and serve him a glass.  I walked on eggshells all of the time, fearing the flare ups of irritation, doing my best to keep the peace.  The littlest things were terrifying.  He criticized the way I made the bed--it was never good enough.  Each evening when he got home, the first thing he did was to inspect it.  So each day I would make and remake the bed, a nervous wreck, trying to get it right.  

If anyone had told me before I met Loïc that one day I would be servile and obedient to a man, I would’ve told them they were out of their minds.  After all I had strong female role models.  My grandmother was a fiercely independent woman.  She’d marched in suffragette parades, and had insisting against her father’s wishes to go to University when women had just obtained the right to attend university, thus becoming the first member of the family to go to university.  My mother was active in the feminist movement, and some of my early memories are of making posters for women’s rights.  Thus I’d grown up a feminist, expecting to be an equal in a relationship.

Because of the fear, gradually over the years I gave in on things more and more, small things and big things, until I felt that the only ground I had to stand on was the ground precisely beneath my feet.  I didn’t know how to say no or to say it firmly and loudly enough, to set my boundaries.  The ground I gave up was part of myself, my desire, my voice, and my independence.  One single step and I’d fall.  That’s how much my self-esteem and sense of self had been damaged by the psychological abuse.  

Change

The theme of today’s meeting was change.  Getting sober puts you through massive changes, and in order to stay sober you have to continue growing, so you’re constantly in a process of change.  It was a great meeting with a lot of interesting shares.  As I was listening, it suddenly occurred to me that during the long years I spent years I spent in a very physically and psychologically abusive relationship, staying drunk didn’t drown my sorrows in the way people think--that you forget, the pain I felt was acute, but alcohol was the only tool I had for coping.  And as long as I was drinking, I couldn’t change.  I couldn’t ask myself, how do I, Sonia, feel about being treated this way?  And what can I, Sonia do about it?  Do I want to be treated like shit?  No.  Well what can I do about it?  

I shared about this thought in the meeting.  Afterwards, two men came up to me to talk about my share, and one suggested that I do my entire 4th Step on men.  It had occurred to me recently, that the in 4th Steps I’ve done so far, I’ve left out men in my resentments list, and that it would me necessary to deal with those resentments when I get to my next 4th.  I’m going to follow the man’s suggestion to make my next 4th entirely on men, though I’ll include my mother.  When I was married, I constantly made the freudian slips of saying “mon mari,” when I meant to say “ma mère,” and “ma mère,” when I meant to say “mon mari.”  For some reason, I mixed my mother and my husband up easily when I was speaking French.  If my husband had been exactly the same man, but we’d been in an English speaking environment, it would have taken years to figure out the connection between my husband and my mother.  Anyway, you can see why I’m including her in my list of resentments against men.  It’s not a purpose of this blog to explain the 12 Steps, but a brief explanation of the 4th will help here for those who aren’t familiar with the Steps.  The 4th step is likened to a shop taking annual inventory.  You go through the goods and see what should be kept, and what should be pitched.  I like to think of it as a gigantic spring cleaning.  Listing your resentments towards individuals, groups, and institutions, etc. and going through those resentments with your sponsor, helps you let go of them.  Letting go of them is essential, since resentments are the main thing that lead an alcoholic back to drinking.  That’s how I understand it at this point anyway.  It’s a major healing process, and an emotional one at that.  Going through resentments intellectually, on own, and even in therapy, hasn't helped much. 

During the chat with the two men, I mentioned for years that I thought I had a healthy level of self-esteem, even a high level of self-esteem, but that it was based purely on my photography, writing, and other achievements.  It wasn’t until I got out of my marriage and was going through counseling at a center for battered women, that it dawned on me that I had little or no sense of self-esteem, based on who I am, just being me, and not on what I do.  At the center, I took a psychological test for self-esteem, and “failed” it with flying colors--I’m a walking, breathing, door mat.  I remember my father’s surprise when I mentioned a bit about my marriage to him, he couldn’t believe that I, who had always been fiercely independent, and very rebellious, could have ended up so obedient.  I'll be exploring how that happened in upcoming posts.

What I need to do now, is what I’ve been avoiding doing since I began this blog.  While I’ve been avoiding writing about the abuse I went through as a child, I’ve been feeling like it’s imperative for me to do it, for myself.  This is what I wrote about a week ago that gave me an emotional hangover--a bad migraine: one of the people who was abusive to me was Peter, and in part I’ve been afraid to write about the way he treated me because he has changed dramatically, much more than ordinary people do. He generally handles discussions, disagreements, and arguments quite maturely.  And because aside from employees of the French government, such as my psychiatrist, psychologist, and payee, and from my sponsor and other members of my alcohol support group, he’s the only person who’s really fighting to help me today, who’s really ready to be there for me, who takes care of me.  He respects how hard I’ve tried to work over the years, and how gets how much I’ve struggled with bipolar disorder, and for my long fight with alcohol, which he has really searched to understand..  He wants me to move to Spain because he would like to be able to help more when I’m not doing well.  He flies me over twice a year, sets out breakfast, and my lunch which he’s prepared, cooks dinner, and loves to take me out clothes shopping....Staying with him is like staying in a 5 star hotel.  So I feel like a traitor in speaking about the past, but the problem is that it continues to be the present for me--I can see that in my relationship patterns. I’ve been reliving repetitive, destructive patterns, that I really need, and want, to break free of.  

When I was about seven or eight, Peter started pinning me down and beating on my breast buds, which was excruciatingly painful.  I was to small to fight back or get away, so I told myself I’d be stronger, I’d win, by not crying, not showing the pain.  As I got a bit older, that continued and he began to taunt me that my younger sister would get her period first, would have bigger breasts than I, and also that she was cut out for motherhood, whereas I was not.  My sister and I remember my mother joining in on the taunts about my breasts and motherhood.  If she didn’t also remember, I’d have a hard time beleiving it was really true.  Now some people might see this as being less serious than incest, since it was my breasts rather than  my genitals which were mauled, because the aggressor was a sibling rather than an adult, and because the abuse was as much or more psychological than physical.  Interestingly, in studies of battered women, the relationships start with a pattern of the man psychologically abusing the women, and belittling is one of the common forms of abuse.  A man can start with a woman who has self-esteem,  lower it and lower it, rob her of it, until she reaches a point where she doesn’t feel she deserves any better.  The results of the psychological abuse are often, if not generally, more destructive than the physical abuse, unless the physical abuse becomes life threatening. The belittling of my femininity has made it difficult for me to asume.

I firmly believe that what Peter put me through, put me in a position to be vulnerable to predatorial men.  It contributed to my not to be able to say “No!”  Even when I was shouting it loudly inside of myself.  It made me not be able to stand up for myself when my ex-husband had been putting off having children until the point where it would soon be too late. I dress up in feminine clothes now, but I feel like I’m in disguise.  Even my ex-husband, who knew me and got me better than anyone else has, would be shocked to see me disguised thus.  Shortly before I left him, I changed my hair color, bought sweat pants with a feminine cut, and started wearing nail polish.  He was worried that I was going through an identity crisis, which I was.  Peter’s abuse with my was definitely incestuous, although we never had sexual relations.  While he denigrated my femininity and glorified my sister’s, he abused her sexually.  While the ways he abused us were different, the results are remarkably similar from what I can see.  Though she will be telling her own story, in her own time and place.  When you shut up about incest, it propagates like an untreated cancer, and your chances of recovery are unpredictable.

I was eleven or twelve when  it became clear that something was disturbing my sister, and she was unwilling to talk about what it was, my mother who was to go on to become a therapist, instructed me to have my sister over to my room for therapy sessions.  I was supposed to get her to reveal the secret that was troubling her.  I felt bad because I couldn’t get my sister to talk, and I had no clue as to how.  My mother must’ve put two and two together, but gone into massive denial--otherwise why ask a child to play therapist rather than taking your child to a real therapist?  She didn’t want to know.  While writing this paragraph, I have repeatedly mistyped me and my.  I’ve been writing me instead of my, (and I think writing my instead of me?) for at least the past thirty years.  I have to be constantly vigilant to correct the mistake.  I wonder if it has something to do with my sister, after all this paragraph deals with her.

When I was thirteen, I went into a major depression overnight.  One day I was a “happy” kid, and the next day, I couldn’t stop crying, I got tinnitus which is a permanent and constant source of discomfort, and I started getting severe migraines on a daily basis.  The treatment available for migraines was primitive at the time: caffeine pills and high doses of aspirin.  By the end of the year, I had an ulcer, perhaps due at least in part to all the aspirin I was taking.  I was required to attend school but usually the teachers took one look at me and sent me to the nurse’s office.  I saw a parade of neurologists, ear doctors, and other specialists.  At the end of a the year, I went to see my pediatrician with my mother.  They had a long discussion in my pediatrician’s office behind a closed door.  Then my pediatrician came out and announced to me that the cause of my migraines was my guilt over having known about my brother’s incestuous relationship with my (me/my, again) sister and not having told.  I was outraged because I had learned of the incest through my mother, and I was convinced that my migraines were my own problem--not somebody else’s.  Then my pediatrician told me she couldn’t treat me any more.  I told myself that I wouldn’t let un-based guilt get to me, but it did.  Ever since, people have pointed out that I apologize for things over which I have no control, or had nothing to do with.  Right down to the weather!  Peter who was fifteen at the time, was kicked out and left to fend for himself, which I thought was a poor solution and terribly unfair.  I found myself trying to help my sister however I could.  For example, when she was having self-image problems, I convinced my mother to enroll her in a modelling school and agency.  Which probably wasn't the best solution--I was too young to have her well-being placed on my shoulders in the way it was.

The reason I was blamed was that when I was told of the incest, I was asked what I knew of it.  What I told them was that when I was six or seven, Peter invited Ingrid and I over to his room to play a game: we were going to make a porn film and he was going to be the director and we were to be the stars.  Uncomfortable with the idea, I left, but Ingrid stayed.  She’s a year and a half younger than I am, so would have had that much less of an idea of what a porn film was than I did.  When I was twenty-eight and back home for a visit, at dinner,  my father brought up how it had been my fault.  I was amazed that they hadn’t dropped the charges after all these years.  

When I was about forty-two, I ran across a bit of information in the press, which said that in the US in the 60’s, all of the porn came from Sweden.  Immediately I thought of that game, and the fact that Peter must have been introduced to porn by an adult, and probably by an adult who had abused him.  Quickly I deduced the family friend who was the most likely suspect, and called Peter to ask him if that man had abused him, he confirmed the abuse with some reluctance, which I can understand, since I still have my fond childhood memories of him.  When I called my mother and told her, she said that when we were children the man had been accused of pedophilia, but that everyone had told each other that pedophiles don’t strike in middle class families, they strike in the working class--that there kids were safe even if he was a pedophile.  They’d asked Peter if he’d been abused, and he denied it.  When the man had to go to court, my father, a lawyer, successfully defended him, apparently convinced by my brother’s denial.  When I told my father the truth, he was horrified.  But maybe they still blame me, who knows?  It’s still easier.  My mother still insists regularly that she would have prevented my marriage if only she had known, but she did know--I’d called her asking for help and telling her in detail.  Only to be met with the same denial that we were met with as children.

The thing is that when Peter was kicked out of the house, I felt strongly that it was neither the best nor a just solution.  Even though I didn’t know yet that he too was a victim, I knew that while at the time all of this story began he was too young to have any idea of all the potential consequences of his acts, he was tried as an adult.  He hadn’t been a good parent, but he had certainly tried, at a time when my parents were absent.  The abuse didn’t just stem from the abuse he’d undergone, but also from our parent’s emotional negligence.

When we were young, my  father had to put in long hours at the firm, and my mother abandoned ship when I was eleven or twelve.  Years later, she said that at the time she’d just wanted to get into a car and drive as far away as she could.  What she did instead was get a job with a long commute, and spend her hours at home in the garden.  (Not to say that she was present before that--my sister and I remember her as being very distant, not touching us, and the terrible loneliness we felt)   Peter, as the eldest, did his best to step in and take on my mom’s role.  I don’t say my “parent’s roles,” because my while my dad was around, it never occurred to us to go to him for help.  Her voice and opinions drowned out his.  He doesn’t have the dominant, controlling, and bullying personality that she’s got.  (Oh, now she’s sounding like my ex-husband!)  We kept telling Peter that we didn’t need two mom’s, and telling her that we didn’t need two moms.  He of course wasn’t in a position to take on her role, so that may explain why he was very bossy and often violent.  The bigger he got, the scarier he got.    Ingrid, Kristian and I each went individually to our mother, pleading with her to intervene, not knowing that the other had gone, only to be told that we were “ganging up on him to get him in trouble.”  We were met with a wall of denial.   Although I tried my best to be a model student, I made sure to get into trouble once a day, knowing I would be kept after school, miss the school bus home, and have to spend a lot more time getting home by public transportation.  It was a way of staying safe.

I often tell myself, “Lot’s of people have rough childhoods.  Was that all that happened?”  No it wasn’t, but it was enough for me.  It’s been twelve years now since I left my ex, and I’m not ready to be with someone else.  I need more therapy to work through childhood trauma and the abuse in my marriage. I also need more sobriety--I learn as much through the program as through therapy--the two serve sometimes different but always complimentary goals.   

That Baby

How long was it?  A week, two weeks?  I don’t remember exactly.  When the sidewalk falls out from under my feet, time becomes fuzzy.  There were about three days that I forgot to eat, just plain forgot.  Whenever that happens, afterwards, when I try to eat, I can’t keep it down.  I barf up the food, and then I barf because my stomach is empty and the acids are eating away at it.  I barf and I barf for days, and the pain becomes really agonizing.  My thinking gets fuzzy because I’m running on an empty tank. I spend the day eating small amounts of simple foods, which is uncomfortable and difficult, and waiting to see how much I can keep down.  I become so weak that it’s difficult to even sit up and watch movies, but I try--with a barf bucket next to me--because I don’t want to spend all of the day in bed.  At the same time that I’m trying to get my stomach to calm down and heal, I've been doing two things which make it worse: I chain smoke on an empty stomach which is just plain crazy, and I drink water compulsively, which means that there’s that much more available in my stomach to barf.

I’ve been working for years on my issue with eating.  My ex-psychiatrist said that it wasn’t anorexia, but like anorexia.  I’m more than happy to eat if someone cooks for me, or if I’m in a restaurant, but I find it extremely difficult to make myself eat when I’m on my own--which is most of the time.  Years ago, after a session with my psychiatrist, Hervé asked what I’d spoken about, and explained this issue.  He said to imagine that I was a baby that was hungry, and asked me what I’d do with this baby.  When he said that, I vividly imagined a baby in my arms, and throwing that baby to the ground, shouting: “I don’t want this baby.”

While I was waiting to get better, I started to get really scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself, that I would need help, I began to fear that I’d have to go back to a psych ward.  I asked a friend from the alcohol support group if I could check in with him each day about what I’d eaten, and if I’d taken my meds.  It’s working, because I can’t call and say that I’ve eaten and taken my meds if I haven’t.

I have other issues that seem to be intertwined with my eating issue.  I neglect health problems, letting them drag out for months or years before seeking proper treatment.  For example, once I badly injured both knees, and spent months barely able to walk, before I sought help.  I tend to get used to the pain and discomfort, no matter how bad it is.  About nine years ago, I went into a deep depression that kept me in bed for three years.  That was in my last apartment, which I’d renovated, nicely decorated, and kept spotless.  My personal hygiene was impeccable, and I went to great lengths to dress quite fashionably on a limited budget.  When the depression set in, my apartment went to hell, it became filthy, and I became filthy.  That’s not surprising since just getting out of bed to pee felt like a major accomplishment.  Curiously, as I got better, the sloth didn’t clear up.  I love a good hot long bath, or short of that a good long hot shower.  And yet, it has been a huge struggle to get back into the habit of showering and dressing nicely.  I’ve made good progress there, but my room remains disgusting.  Interestingly, I discovered in the bipolar chat room that many of us have issues with personal hygiene--we’re practically allergic to soap and water.  I guess that’s the depression end of the spectrum, and being better doesn’t mean being well.  It’s been a long hard climb out of that depression, and I’m not all of the way out of it yet. To make matters worse, the same problems with hygiene and cleanliness crop up for alcoholics--we have to build new habits when we get into recovery.




It’s clear that I’m not just dealing with bipolar symptoms and alcoholsim, since I’m throwing that baby, myself,to the ground, saying: “I don’t want this baby.”  Clearly I have a problem with low self-esteem. Learning to take care of myself when I reject myself that severely is going to be a long and slow process.