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How the
Email Trail Began
When my mother first used the word "abuse"
with me, I quickly snapped, "My husband doesn't abuse me, I've never
been hit." and simply brushed aside her concerns because Mom will be
Moms. However, the word "abuse" stuck in my mind.
During a heated argument, Bob, my husband
screamed at me, "You're trying to control me!" and my AA sponsor agreed
with him. That confused me because he
was the control freak in the
marriage."
“You are trying to get him
to love you, Shelly,” Mary explained. “You don’t understand
what your boundaries are and try to take care of him and do things for
him that
he should be doing for himself. Why do you pay half his child support?
Why do
you take care of all the family business, accounting, and car repairs,
which
take so much time? Because he has a “real” job? Just because you work
at home
doesn’t mean your time and your job as a writer aren’t valuable. Why
have you
tried to get him the best lawyer to fight for custody of his son? You
are trying to control the way he feels about you and
how he treats you. So your husband is right. You are trying to control
him. This is called co-dependency.”
It's hard to say the word
"Abuse"
Learning
that I was being abused and that I was trying to earn my husband's love
and respect, learning that the more he abused me, the harder I tried to
please him--was not an easy lesson. A young woman, Dawn, from Dr.
Irene's Verbally Abusive Web Site, reached out to me after reading a
post I put there.
She became my
lifeline, teacher, mentor. My mother joined in our group and also my
prior step-daughter, Tammy, who was then also going through a nasty
divorce. We learned a lot from our little email group. So we compiled
the trail of e-mails to each other and openly share them with you. You
will
learn about abuse the way we did--revealed a little at a time through
our "healing" group online.
This is
only a beginning
At that time I knew
nothing about my husband's sex addiction and
and so our email
trail doesn't go there. But our suggestions in "Stopping
The Abuse" do
cover that as well as many other signs, symptoms, and suggestions on
changing yourself and taking responsibility for why we stayed and how
to stop it now.
Come meet myself,
Dawn, Tammy, and Mom in an incredible journey as we traverse through
partner abuse, how we learned to change ourselves, and change the
destructive patterns in our lives. In this on-line book, we hope
sharing
our journey will help
you make some positive change. We left our emails in
their raw form so you could
share our progress and light bulb moments
as we did. Growing and being responsible for ourselves wasn't easy--and
we continue to learn on this site. But this should give you someplace
to begin your own journey.
You may read it online by clicking on the
sections to the right, or by joining our
email notification list (we note any major changes on the site and with
our blogs but never give the list or sell it for any reason. and all
our
notifications are brief!) we will send you a free downloadable pdf file
so you can read it at leisure.
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This book is a
series of web based emails in our support group. You will experience
what we did as began to understand abuse, men, relationships,
responsibility, and ourselves.
SECTION:
One: The Trail
Begins
Two: Thinking
Changes
Three: It's Not
Just Us
Four: No Beating
Reality
Five: Boundaries
Six: Who is the
Abuser?
Seven: Get Past
the Past
Sign Up for our Notification list and we'll send a FREE downloadable
copy of Email-Trails that you can save on your hard drive and read at
your leisure.
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