Losing relationships because of abusers
Submitted by Awen on Thu, 12/16/2010 - 10:35amMy best friend and I are no longer friends because she chose to email with my exhusband because she has "morbid curiousity" about what he is doing. This is the man I started going to psych wards because of, to hide from his violence and insanity. The man who led to a suicide attempt. The man who was so insanely cruel. (He threatened to abandon me in Europe on our honeymoon if I cried when he told he wouldn't have sex with me because he didn't think I was pretty enough.)
This friend I have never met. I should have known better. (The constant refrain of survivors "I should have known" as if we are alweays to blame.) She used to send my ex gifts all the time. He never talked to her, said she was an alocoholic he went to college with. For our wedding she made me an amazing goat scupluture out of one piece of wire. She told me to take it when he and I broke up. I had begun emailing her because I was naive and trusting before the trauma recovery started, I would help anyone and talk to anyone. She and I emailed everyday for the past 3 and a half years. She's had no contact with my ex.
Then he facebook friends her (I hate facebook - middle aged people trying to contact ex lovers in desperation for second chances at being young and in lust, abusers seeking their old prey, endlessly trite messages with all shallow and no depth) and she says yes and starts emailing him out of "morbid curiousity".
I tell her repeatedly I cannot be in contact with her if she's in contact with one of my abusers. That makes sense right? It feels like a breach of trust, a betrayal, and likehe has direct access to me. She's telling me his dog is fine and that she only told him that I am her friend, nothing else about me. I didn't want to know that much even.
She tells me that she hopes one day I don't let him control my life.
I am in shock. Really. For 3 and half years she gets daily emails about PTSD recovery. But she didn't GET it, she doesn't understand what he did to me.
How many of you have had this sort of thing happen, where people you trust allow your abusers in their lives even though they know that the person harmed you? I feel so hurt. She chose him over me. When my friends are hurt by anyone, I don't talk to that person ever again. As a teenager I was known for my meanness to my friends' exboyfriends. This wasn't a normal bad breakup, but my exfriend says that he and I just brought out the worst in each other. WHAT? So I brought out his violence? NO freaking WAY. I am not taking the blame for his evil. What bad did he bring out in me? Cleaning all day, hiding my crying in pillows, dying inside, unable to leave him?
What the fuck? I am very hurt. She didn't get it. She makes it sound like I was an equal player in that trauma. Doesn't she believe me? Or is it just that she's never had trauma so she doesn't get it?
Plus I think it is very weird that one of his exgirlfriends out of the blue at the same timme send me an email asking if I have recovered from Deke's abuse, I never even met this woman.
I feel so alone. Does everyone chose the abuser over the survivor? Have any of you been hurt like this? I have a lot of issues with feeling unlovable especially now that I am being honest about what my past was like and how I feel. I just had to end yet another friendship with a friend in Ireland who told me she cannot reply to my emails because sometimes I sound angry and that's bad New Age crap. I want people on MY side, I am so rarely on MY side, and the domestic violence group says that DV doesn't cause PTSD - any thoughts on that bs?
Oh man. DV doesn't cause
Oh man. DV doesn't cause ptsd? Are they joking? So if you're life is threatened in war thats legit but if it was threatened by your boyriend then it doesn't count??? Thats rediculous. Absolutely nonsensical.
I haven't lost friends in that way, but I have felt very distanced from my friends, who are really awesome people but are living in a different world than me. Acknowledging how I feel and expressing it is extremely important to me, and honoring emotions like anger and hurt are a part of the healing and moving on. But my friends are very into the new age kind of stuff too, they want to tell me how to detach from my emotions or not be "controlled by my ego". They want to help, but their idea involves seeing me as a broken or immature person and to be honest I see myself as being beyond apoint in my process of self that they have any frame of reference for. They are looking backward in their own process and identifying me as being in some sort of regressive , less developed state but this fails to recognize the cyclical nature of development. I am not in their ball park anymore. I don't know if that makes sense or if it just sounds obnoxious but i'll leave it like that anyways.
Honor you, take care of you. Maybe that involves making new friends, finding new community. To be honest, even though this is going to sound super bitchy, my friends ' concerns and everyday dramas have come to sound so trivial and shallow to me. If someone could for once talk about something that feels real to me and not just whether or not that guy is into them or surfing I would die of shock. I realize that this has everything to do with me and where I am in my life, its not wrong to be interested in those things. And its good to get out of my brain and pretend to be normal everyonce in awhile.
Sorry went off on a tangent...what I am saying is I understand that you can't be friends with that person, even though that sucks.
I REALLY relate to finding
I REALLY relate to finding out that people just don't get it - any of it - about having survived abuse. Awen, I am so sorry to hear that this person chose the abuser over you. I can well imagine that that could be heartbreaking. I haven't had exactly the same situation because my abusers were primarily pre-adulthood. But I've had so many other situations, similar to what Sarsha describes, where people's whole focus seems to be nothing but shallow. And at times I have been the object of resentment for breaking the silence around people's carefully constructed shallow worlds.
Becoming distant from people you have felt close to in the past can, in my experience, be a sign of real forward progress in your own recovery/process/life/development. At several points in my life, I missed friends terribly after their loss, but now I can't even imagine wanting to be close to someone like the people I felt close to before. I was drawn to people who were talented and charismatic, people who fascinated me - but not necessarily people who valued kindness and honesty. You've talked about values before. I know this can be tricky because some people are very, very good at convincing others as well as themselves that they have these values - and then you find out they don't. Especially people who are "running" from their own issues - I've been stepped on many times, starting with my family and continuing with many adult relationships.
It has been so scary, like dying, to give up trying to have friendships. But when I let go completely more or less - which sucked and I felt like I was sitting around waiting for the gun store to open at the end of the weekend so I could blow my brains out because I just didn't have any more hope - that's when I started to make new and nicer friends.
Well, my husband just made fish chowder so I need to get off. But I just wanted to say I totally relate to what you're saying, and I think you're right that there is something terribly wrong with this woman valuing the interaction with the abuser over you.
How weird, but I didn't see
How weird, but I didn't see the last two replies. I'm sorry, they were great! Yeah, I know about the superficial things with people. One of the only people I talk to anymore is a woman I was sorta friend with in my early 20s in the punk scene in Cincinati. A year or two ago her fiance had two strokes and is paralyzed and they are a zillion dollars in debt, he cannot even get to the bathroom without her, she;s at the E/R all the time with him (he is 300 lbs and she is 120), she adopted his 8 year old daughter whose Mom is a crack addict, and she and the guy have a 2 year old girl. She is trying to work. She married her best friend who is in love with her, I am not sure if she has feeling anymore, and she finally got health care that way, and then ended up in ICU for several days because it turned out she almost had cardiac arrest. Oh yeah and they have to keep staying at hotels while getting the house treated for bedbugs - and no one visits them but his brohter does email her asking her for naked pictures of her and his mother says that my friend should have let him die. Medicaid/SSA told her twice to abandon him at a nursing home and never visit him so he'd be taken care of and she wouldn't be billed. Yay USA. She gets 3 hours of sleep a night. She sometimes falls asleep on the phone with me.
Interestingly she says that if this happened to a friend of hers she probably wouldn't offer to help clean or do babysitting or whatever. She says she wouldn't get it. Until tragedy happens to you, you don't get it. I don't get what it is like to have someone I love die - it hasn't happened to me yet - and I am sure I suck for people grieving to be around. I didn't understand how divorce was different from breaking up with a live in lover until I got divorced.
Everyone we know will sooner or later face trauma. They will get cancer, their husband will die in a car crash, their child will have a disease, they will lose their home, they will be in an earthquake. When you are someone it happens younger to and you chose to deal with it (is chose the right word for what we are doing?) it sorta ages you I think in a good way.
Sometimes I worry I am coping at - as recovering NuAger I worry I am creating my reality by allowing myself to admit anger, to say I was a victim, to say I am in pain. When I was 20 I was a mover shaker, I achieved ALL my life goals by age 26 - and was stumped as to what to do next which might be why I got married for no reason I knew of. I was so IN CONTROL of everything, I was envied and hated for it. I had boys following me around, and I didn't see it. The envy hate thingfor being an "overacheiver" I saw a lot of, but was used to it from being a straight A student.
Now I am an adult, because I see I don't have much control. I am not sure if it is healthy for me to feel so powerless, but I feel more realistic. I also don't blame myself or others that much now. Life is hard. It just is. Maybe i miss being in control so much, but I think I like knowing more about reality.
I had no friends til I was 13 and moved to Ithaca and was found by adult punk rock junkies and prostitutes. When I quit that scene at age 20, I had no friends. I had nothing in common with anyone I met - I went to college and no one there had seen a murder, kicked heroin, or lived with a man for three years. I hung out in the rock scene wherever I lived and dated losers. In Toronto I had friends for the first time I think - My first female friends in a group. Before, I had a best girlfriend here or there, but in general the competitiveness of women scared the hell out of me. But in Toronto I had lots of friends. MAC wearing, dieting, eye brow plucking, heavy drinking, artsy friends. And it was fun. They tried to teach me make up (punk rock was nice - I never had to change my clothes even) and they thought my past escapades were funny. People felt a bit sorry for me being bipolar (although I wasn't) and how the pills made me fat and shakey. They liked the psychic thing and the tough American thing.
And then I lost all of them during the divorce/suicide attempt/realization I had PTSD. I haven't been in person with a friend in about 5 years. FIVE YEARS since I was in person with a friend. Nakisha, the woman who just sold me out, was my daily email, my one contact with the outside world as I navigated hell - hospitalizations, suicidality, all that.
My friend with the fiance who had a stroke is too exhausted to hear much of my life. I reconnected with the girl I was friends with in the Ithaca punk scene - she's been in NA for 12 years and is in LA. We don't have much in common aside from wondering how we ended up in that nightmare. I have a friend whose 12 year old son has severe autism, she also has a 5 year old, a husband going to college, a fulltime nonprofit job, and goes to night school for her masters - and just published a book called "My Baby Rides the Short Bus" and flies all over the country talking about raising special needs kids. I talk to her on the phone about once a year if I am lucky.
The people who understand trauma like I do are usually too messed up or too busy dealing with it to hang out. Add to the fact that people have kids - Yeah, maybe I'll see them when the kids go to college. All the guy friends I thought I had I don't now that i have gained 60 lbs and talk about abuse.
But one thing I notice is that most people are pretty miserable and that brings me some joy. They are overworked, in debt, unable to control their kids, divorced, and haven't had any sleep for about 10 years. Why does that make me happy? I guess because I know I am not missing out on anything. No one I know of is having a wonderful life. When I was a psychic in LA I read for a lot of famous and rich people and they secretly were in misery. Being a Tarot reader, people tell me things they say they never told their therapists. People come to me in crisis. (Who pays $80 when they are feeling great and life is swell?)
The ACT workbook Finding Life After Trauma is honest - other people are not going to want to hear about our traumas. It will upset them, trigger them, and they won't know how to help and it'll make it all weird. I am so glad it doesn't say how important a support network is for healing. In reality, not a perfect world, a trauma survivor is going to have abusers in her life, people she hangs out with supporting her denial (partying), she will isolate, whatever - But a support system is pretty unlikely. It actually feels better to not try anymore.
"It's the end," said the caterpillar. "It's the beginning," said the butterfly.