still_flying
 Offline
What is your sexual orientation: Gay, lesb
Relationship status: Improving, NC, setting boundaries
Posts: 25
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« on: October 16, 2013, 10:40:19 PM » |
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Emotional abuse, self harm, stalking, and bad consent.
Hiya. I'm reintroducing myself now that I'm out of the relationship I was in and ready to start recovering from what's happened in my life. My story is a bit of a complicated one, so I'll give you the short version. I was raised by a borderline mother, with all the emotional trauma that entails. It's really difficult for me to talk about, because despite everything she's done, despite the things I think I remember but can't quite be sure, I still love her dearly. It hurts to think about too hard. I have recollections I pray are false memories-- being thrown at the ground as a small child is the main one. There are things I know in my heart of hearts happened, but I also know that nobody else heard or saw, things she would never admit to. Implying that my coming out of the closet was me acting out in response to a bad breakup. Whether unintentionally or not, planting the idea in my head that my identity was based in trauma, leading me to later wonder if I had multiple personality disorder since I also can't remember large periods of my childhood and she implied that this LGBT identity was something totally unlike myself. The constant fear growing up that she was spying on me, partially based in fact because I knew she had at least once questioned my little sister on my private life (schoolboy crushes, to be specific). Telling me when I was no older than ten that the reason I was feeling sad so much was because depression was in my genes. I don't think she took me to the therapist for several more years, but I can't remember. Filling my head with all sorts of confusing messages about intimacy by telling ribald jokes one minute and actively engaging in slut-shaming the next. Making me feel guilty for doing something seemingly innocuous, like expressing a dissenting opinion.
When I write all this down, it sounds like she's a horrible person.
But I don't think she is?
For every bad thing she did, there was also good. She'd hold me when I cried, listen to all my stories about my day, take care of me when I was sick. She'd go with me on day trips, volunteer at the school, talked to the mother of the boy who bullied me in 7th grade, helped me talk to the administration when I was being sexually harassed in high school, came to all my various sporting events and school plays. Even became my biggest ally as a queer person over time. If I ever need someone there for me, I know she will actively fight to protect me and I know that she loves me very much.
I'm not sure if it's because of the tense home life I experienced, but I have been in exactly 2 relationships, and both of them got really serious really fast, if I'm judging by the speed I think a high school relationship should go at. There were poor boundaries on both ends. In the first relationship, more on my end, in the second, more on his. He asked me to marry him after only 3 months. I told him to ask me again in a year. 9 months later he did, and I said yes because I was scared of what would happen if I said I wasn't ready. Not that I thought he would hurt me, I was just scared that we would have to break up. I was scared that he would be sad, and might hurt himself. Over the course of the two years we were together I missed many red flags because I had no model for a healthy relationship. He was bad at consent. I'll admit that with no model for what good consent looked like I was confused at times about when nonverbal agreements were good enough and that I did once overstep a boundary and stop immediately when I was told that what I was doing made him uncomfortable, but there were a number of times when I felt uncomfortable in sexual situations but continued them because it would be more uncomfortable to ask him to stop. In the last few months we were together, things got so bad I began to be afraid of what he would do next. One day after we moved in together, I came home to find he had thrown all of our personal belongings all over our bedroom because the place was too messy and he couldn't find something. In my head, this became my fault for not keeping it cleaner. Another time, just hours before he finally confessed to me he had fallen in love with someone else and days before he told me he wanted an open relationship, I found a sterile dissection scalpel hiding in his pants pocket while I was gathering his laundry off the floor to take to the washing machine. A few days prior he had informed me that he didn't feel comfortable sleeping with me anymore because my body made him uncomfortable (I have a medical disorder that results in a somewhat non-normative body configuration). Before he had told me he no longer desired physical intimacy with me, I was too scared to say no when he desired sex. This was because of my own emotional baggage, not any physical or emotional threat. I was so certain that my non-normative body was completely undesirable that I would accept any physical attention, even if I didn't want it at the time. This got to the point that I engaged in a sexual behavior I didn't feel safe doing because I knew it was likely all I was going to get from him. Things were bad. In the last few weeks we were together, most nights ended with one or the both of us crying and/or having a panic attack.
When he informed me that he wanted an open relationship so he could date this other guy, that was it. Maybe once upon a time, or for a different partner who didn't make me feel guilty all the time, but I wasn't going to give up on something that I knew was necessary for me to feel fulfilled in a relationship for someone who made me feel icky.
Since I left him, I established a modified form of no contact after a few weeks where if he contacted me I would tell him not to. Eventually, this switched to informing him that for my mental and physical safety as a recovering self-injurer, I needed him to stop contacting me. (Harsh, but true. I was very close to relapse for a while, and he was not making the situation easier when he contacted me.) Then it turned into ignoring texts, not replying to emails, and eventually blocking his number and contacting the police after I made the mistake of breaking NC for a brief conversation about why he had taken something of ours off of my porch after he had moved out, and he took it as an invitation to continue contacting me, and apparently log in to an inactive account on a forum I frequented and make no posts. This was a forum I had showed him two years ago, and he knew my username. My only assumption is he was monitoring my activity. I have since become a lot more wise about who I share my usernames with, and taken a different one. Unfortunately, since I am pretty popular on said forum and he could easily search the post history to find my old user name, I had to decide if my primary method of support was worth giving up for privacy. I did for a while, then came back after I felt he was likely to have given up when the mods blocked him. I'm still not certain he doesn't watch to see what I post, so I have ceased posting anything I feel he could use for ammunition if he ever does search me. I haven't talked to him since around 6 months ago, and when I saw him walking around campus the other day I gave him a non-committal half-smile from a distance, but kept it clear with my body that while I wasn't hostile I didn't want to talk either.
Our social networks overlap a great deal because we live in a small town, and I'm scared he may talk bad about me around other folks. It's one of my biggest fears. I have changed my social plans on more than one occasion because I was afraid he might attend the same event. I will shortly have to be deleting myself from one of my favorite webgroups (an anonymous confession blog of sorts for the college I go to) because I saw an anonymous post about a "great" sexual encounter someone had last year that I immediately recognized as being about the encounter I had that I'm still not sure if I enjoyed or not, as well as questioning how consensual it was.
This quote from Firefly really sums up everything I feel about my relationship to both these people.
"I get confused. I remember everything. I remember too much, and... .some of its made up, and... .some of it can't be quantified, and... .there's secrets." I just hope that by continuing to work at it, I can find peace some day.
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