Cause – What happened?
I moved to a city that was new to me. I had friends, but I didn’t see them as frequently as I would have liked. I was lonely. When I went to an online dating site, I met a man and began a relationship with him. I ended up getting pregnant with a much-wanted baby, and we married and moved in together. He had a number of head injuries when our child was very young, that he left untreated. He didn’t think he had a problem. His temperament became more volatile. I left him and got my own apartment. The break up was amicable. He would come to my place, and I would go out so that our child would have an uninterrupted experience with her parents.
He became more distant, which I didn’t understand. I was about to go on a holiday for my birthday. I went shopping and when I got home, I was surrounded by police officers. I was terrified as they kept citing legal paperwork that I had no idea about, and that they didn’t have possession of. After the police left, stunned, I looked out my apartment window and noticed my car was gone. The car that I had parked and put a steering wheel lock on. All my alarm systems were going off in my head. I realized – holy fuck – this was all highly orchestrated. My life descended into terror and hell.
Impact – How did this impact your life?
I never celebrated my birthday. I went into acute crisis. My ex-husband purposefully took his legal action the day before my lawyer went on vacation, leaving me with no legal representation. I needed court intervention for the danger we faced. I had to be very public about what happened. I experienced emotional, psychological, and financial abuse, coercive control and manipulation, false allegations and lots and lots of lies. Everybody knew something was going wrong, but I didn’t have the words to explain it all, and over time even male members of my family defended him. They loved him. They couldn’t understand the level of invisible violence I was experiencing.
My ex-husband hired a psychopathic lawyer. His family funded all his legal maneuvers and bonded over it. I went to the Supreme Court thirty-five times. I lost all my money. I spent it on legal representation, and when I ran out, I eventually needed legal aide. The Supreme Court judge said that what happened to me was draconian, and my therapist said that I was being tortured, and the women’s group who supported me said they’d seen this inverted violence all the time. It was four years of immense litigation and harassment.
Healing – How did you heal?
I was invested in looking after myself the whole time even though it was completely illogical. I always paid for a therapist. My therapist was spectacular. I did a lot of trauma therapy and EMDR. I sobbed and processed and grieved. I came to understand my ex-husband is evil, and that he’s always going to be my enemy, and I’ll never be safe around him. I also unpacked the early childhood violence I experienced by one of my parents, which had precipitated my being enculturated to violence. Later, I did therapeutic psilocybin for trauma, and what was fascinating about it was that my ex-husband never came up – only the grieving and pain and fear of that experience.
I did a lot of movement. I was doing exercise because it was the only thing that could meet the level of ferocity of that kind of violence. I had so much panicky terror in my body that the only thing that could match it was dancing, planking, and intense exercise.
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