Wedding Bells

In spite of everything I still wanted to get married.  For one thing, I felt like we were already married emotionally, that it just hadn’t been formalized.  For another, Loïc was clearly insecure about the relationship, afraid that I would leave.  He was worried that marriage would end in divorce, since “Americans get divorced easily,”  (They don’t actually get divorced more frequently than the French.)  and I was from a broken home.  That insecurity produced negative behaviors which drove me crazy  and which indeed disappeared after the wedding.  More importantly, there was still the question of getting papers.  I couldn’t ignore the fact that I couldn’t earn the money to leave him unless we got married.  And even more importantly than that, was the feeling that I had to marry him--it was imperative.  My mother wanted me to marry him and I felt that I had to obey her desire.  There may have also been something deeper in my psyche that contributed to feeling like marrying him was imperative.  Finally, quite simply, I loved him.  How you can love someone who’s violent, who’s in the process of destroying your self-esteem and identity, is something that I can’t explain.

After Loïc agreed to a wedding date, and the plans were underway, things got particularly bad between us.  I can’t really remember what all got bad.  The violence perhaps?  I know our sex life was almost dead, and that I was despairing of rescuing it.  That was a big issue for me and I wanted to talk about it, and other issues such as finances, which I felt needed to be resolved before the wedding, but Loïc kept putting off talking or taking any actions to resolve the problems.  I was still convinced that if we could talk through our problems and seek outside help where necessary, we could work through them.  Everything that is but the violence, I knew talking wouldn’t put an end to the violence.  Loïc kept making phone calls to family members about flights and the wedding plans, and continued to do so even after I threatened to call everyone and say the wedding was off if we didn’t start working through our problems.  I didn’t know how to get through to him other than to leave, but couldn’t get myself to do so.

I found a friend who was both willing and able to help me talk through and think through the violence and the other issues in the relationship.  He was highly intelligent, empathic, and familiar with psychology.  We spent hours a day talking as I struggled to come to terms with what was going on, and to make a decision.  It was like going through really intensive psychotherapy.  Finally I made the decision to leave.  I couldn't have left if I'd been totally isolated. Now I understand why Loïc isolated me. It was so difficult for me to leave that as horribly cruel as it was, the only way I could think to do so was to pack up everything and go without warning.  I couldn’t have left if he’d been able to insist face to face that I stay.  So he got home to find the apartment half-empty, with a note, but no phone number to reach me.  

I went to stay with a new found friend in a small studio.  She was terribly generous, but clearly I couldn’t stay long.  We shared her bed, and my boxes took up practically half of the room.  I called my mother for help, telling her in detail of the violence, but she said she couldn’t help me.  Not only did she not help me financially, she didn’t discuss it with me, make suggestions or ask questions, which is surprising for a therapist.  Then I called my father who offered to send what he’d planned to spend on the wedding.  It was enough to get a flight home, but not enough to ship my belongings.  Also, I was torn up, I’d adapted to French culture and become accustomed to my life in Paris, I wasn’t mentally ready to return to the US, and worse yet was clueless as to what I would do or where I would be able to stay if I returned--returning would mean facing great difficulties.  The money my father sent wouldn’t go far.  I had to find work, but there was still the same old problem of not having a work permit.  To make matters worse, the truth was I wasn’t well enough to work, as I was really suffering from bipolar disorder for which I had no treatment since it still hadn’t been diagnosed.  I tried anyway, covering practically the entire city with English teaching ads hoping to find some private students under the table with no luck.  The money my father had sent ran out.  I was missing Loïc, but honestly don’t think I would’ve returned at that point if I’d had the means to be independent.

I returned, agreed not to leave again, and we got married on the originally planned date.  I was in such a state of nerves, my stomach was in bad shape before the wedding--I chugged down antacid by the bottle.  The wedding was tearing up my emotions.  I’ll never forget how horrible I felt at the wedding, because while I felt that I had to marry him, that I had no choice, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay forever in the marriage, that I would be leaving him.  So the marriage began with a fundamental betrayal.  I also felt quite sad seeing the emotion he was experiencing and wishing that I could share it.  It was my wedding day but I was not filled with joy.  Until the very last moment, there was another man whom I wished would save me.  Not that I felt that I couldn’t live without a man, I just didn’t feel I could get out by myself.

I don’t regret the marriage.  It was an important part of my life, one that I’m glad to have lived, in spite of everything.  I appreciate the time I got to spend with Loïc, the good things we shared.  What was good was good enough that I would’ve liked it to last a lifetime.  Does that mean I’m still in the denial phase of bereavement? Or will I be able to take my rose colored glasses off, balance out the good and the bad, and still not regret it? It may seem like I've taken the rose colored glasses off since I'm writing about it but the problem is there's a difference between talking through a trauma and processing through it, and I think I need to find more ways to process through it.

Dating and Domestic Violence

I can remember the beating vividly, but not in the way you remember something you’ve experienced yourself.  A typical trauma victim, I remember it with the same detachment I would as if it had happened to someone else.  The later incidents of violence in the relationship are all summarized by that one memory which repeats in my mind regularly, without bringing up any of the emotion associated with it.  At the same time that it repeats,  I remember our relationship with rose tinted glasses, I remember all that was wonderful, and find it very difficult to remember details of the rest.  About a month after I finally left Loïc, I reread my journal entries from the weeks prior to my departure and was shocked by the psychological abuse--I’d forgotten, or rather, it had become abstract, that quickly.

It’s taken me a long time to be able to write about this, because even when I try, my mind just won’t go there.  A few months ago, unable to find my old journals and hoping to trigger some specific memories of the marriage in order to think through them and move forward in the process of bereavement, I dug out my books on domestic violence, but I couldn’t read a single page.  I spent a few hours in the park scanning through sentences and turning pages to no avail, with a vague sense of anxiety.  Actually, that’s why I couldn’t find the old journals--the truth is I didn’t dare look for them, I just scanned my room in despair of finding them.  Similarly, when I finally contacted a center for battered women and started working with a psychologist there, I was really motivated to talk about the relationship, but session after session all I could talk about was my exciting new life, and all the escapades with men it involved.  Funny that, when I think about it, this journal started with two apparently disparate topics--trauma and dating, and the connection wasn’t at all apparent to me.  Dating the way I did helped me reinforce the wall of denial that shut me off from my feelings.  

Last summer while I was here,  I read Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman.  My brother Peter and I had some interesting discussions about it, but then he asked me why I don’t leave the past in the past, and move forward with the present.  He knows about PTSD intelectually, but doesn’t get it.  I imagine that kind of attitude is common, and its frustrating because it silences the trauma, which you can’t leave behind you because the past remains the present in the psyche.  Herman writes that one of the fundamental stages of recovery from trauma is reconstructing the story.  I haven’t completed mourning the loss of my relationship with Loïc, or mourning for the self I was before it damage it caused me, because I couldn’t face it fully, even though I spoke about it with other people..  So I have to work through it now, even though many years have gone by.  I am just now approaching the end of the denial phase of bereavement, or so I think.  The next phases are anger, sadness, and acceptance.  These phases of berievement can be gone through in various orders and not everyone goes through all of them.  I may well not go through a phase of anger because I have so much difficulty feeling it.  I tend to turn it against myself, in the form of depression.

Due to the fallout from the beating, the subsequent deep and long depression, and the heavy drinking which I’d begun, my notion of chronology and memory of events is fuzzy from that point of the beating until a number of years later.  So I’m not sure how long it was between the beating and our departure from Japan.  What’s important  is that during that time, I felt that I had a solution for leaving.  I was going to move to Tokyo, alone or with Loïc.  I’d been commuting to Tokyo for my photography work which was beginning to take off.  It was reasonable to imagine that I could become well enough established to become financially independent, and stay on in Japan on my own.  An unexpected change in events was to change that plan.  Our departure from Japan was sudden and brutal.  

The project that Loïc was working on in Osaka had come to an end, and his employer had offered him the possibility of working in Italy but not of returning to work with the company in France.  And I had told him that he could go where he wanted, but that I was going to Tokyo  Then Loïc found a dream job, in charge of several interesting projects, with an excellent salary and a house in central Tokyo--which is unheard of.  While I was away in the US for family reasons, he packed all of boxes for the move.  The morning of the move, when the movers were on their way, he received a fax with a map to the house, and shortly after a call saying the job was cancelled.  His visa depended on the job and so we had to leave Japan.  He called me saying I had five minutes to decide where to spend the rest of my life.  I insisted adamantly that I was going to stay, since I really loved Japan, but he refused, saying my belongings were packed.  I had to give in since I wasn’t yet in a position to stay there on my own..  I didn’t have the means to make the move to Tokyo on my own, and would have had difficulties with obtaining a new visa.  He was devastated that the job had fallen through, and became paralyzed.  I felt that I had to take care of him, and organized everything long distance, giving him detailed instructions.  At the end of the conversation I said “Okay, we’ll return to France then, but I’ll only go if we get married.  I’m not willing to be there if I can’t work.”  Of course he wasn’t thrilled with my bringing up marriage in such a manner, but I didn’t have much choice under the circumstances.  

You might think that no one in their right minds asks someone who has beaten them severely to marry them.  But I didn’t know where to go except Paris, and I couldn’t work there....  People often ask if I was in denial, if I believed it wouldn’t happen again, but no, I was firmly convinced that if we stayed together eventually it would happen again.  I can’t say exactly what was going on in my mind, only that things were very unclear to me.  I now know that trauma also causes feelings of paralysis and indecision, so it’s not surprising that things were unclear.  I also believe that my fight or flight instinct may have been disabled, perhaps due to something in my childhood.  Even if we’d gone to Tokyo and I’d managed to become financially independent, I don’t think I would have been capable of getting out of the relationship at the time.  I remember that when his job fell through I felt like I had to be his glue, to hold him together, a feeling that continued over the years.  Also, even though we weren’t married yet, we’d made a commitment to stay with each other forever, which I felt was binding.  Typical of an abuser, he’d asked for a firm commitment very early on in the relationship.  I couldn’t hurt him by breaking up with him.  I know I didn`t have a plan b for when he became violent again, instead I was focused on the immediate--finding work and beginning to establish my career, which would’ve meant independence in the long run.  

It took me about two months of working in the US before I could buy a plane ticket to France.  During that time my drinking career took a dramatic turn for the worse.  I’d begun drinking nightly a few years before meeting Loïc, then he kept my drinking strictly limited to one beer or two at most a night, and he didn’t let me drink every night.  But in the US I found myself alone again, free to drink as much as I pleased.  And I started getting smashed every night in order to cope with the trauma.  I became a full blown alcoholic.  It’s common for trauma victims to turn to alcohol in order to cope.  While the depression alone was paralyzing, booze fueled its fire.  Drinking did help dull the pain, but of course it immediately made my confusion worse.  You can’t think through things clearly when you’re drunk.  And yet night after night while I was drinking I tried to think of what to do, writing out ideas, trying to find a way out, and thinking through to whom I could talk, but my drunken thoughts went in circles.  

When I thought about who I could talk to while I was in the US, about who could help, I despaired that there was no one.  In retrospect, while most people would’ve been supportive without being very helpful, I can see that there were several people who probably would’ve been a great help.  I honestly don’t know why I didn’t talk to anyone about it.  One problem though is that they would’ve helped me get back to the US, and I just couldn’t see what I would do there.  My home town was no place to do my photography, so I couldn’t stay there to build my career, and I knew I couldn’t stay with my family, so I couldn’t imagine where I’d go or how I’d get there.  Starting over in another city in the US would have been as difficult as starting over in France, minus the visa problem.  And so I returned to France feeling utterly confused and lost.