Came Forward
The beginning of our troubles was when we got back from our honeymoon, my dad was with us and he asked if he could use my car in Maryland since I was in California. His car was broken down, so of course I said yes, after all it was my dad. James got really angry and displayed a major attitude. He began to be very sarcastic and abrupt with the way he talked to me. I can remember leaving our hotel room and slamming the door and walking over to a nearby shopping center. I remember feeling like I had just made the biggest mistake of my life, and I wished I had never married him. I came back and he proceeded to tell me that I had no right to give my dad permission to drive my car, and that it wasn’t only up to me anymore. I remember feeling so controlled at that very moment. I felt like maybe he was right and I felt guilty for saying yes to my dad.
This was the beginning of his controlling manipulation through guilt. This was the moment that I bought into the guilt and shame that he thrust upon me, and I dealt with it by overeating then working out everyday. I began this sick cycle of punishing myself because I felt like I was the worst wife that ever lived. The way he explained what I did by saying yes to my dad was it’s like I’ve hurt him more than anybody ever has in his entire life. He would look at me with watery eyes and tell me how unimportant he felt in my life. He would say that can’t I just think about him sometimes? Doesn’t it matter how he feels about something? This was just the beginning of the emotional abuse. I bought it hook, line and sinker, but he gave it to me so packed with guilt and shame that I truly didn’t know what to do with it. I began very early to own his feelings and hate him for every bit of it. He controlled my thoughts, my feelings, my moods, accomplishments, and my successes all through guilt.
We got back to Maryland, and I started major therapy. This time it would be with a specialist of sexual abuse survivors. I began seeing a man therapist, but over time I learned to trust him. He never betrayed my trust. Through my many hours of therapy, we discovered many different incidences of abuse starting with the one when I was 10-years-old from my neighbor. Now remember I had already, previously, dealt with that one. So we moved onto the very abusive boyfriend, John, who physically, mentally, verbally and sexually abused me. It was a very painful process. He would have me imagine the times of abuse, and I would start sharing the horrible details. I remember once being in his office, and we were doing some kind of trans-like therapy. I was remembering the first time John abused me sexually. As I was sitting there talking about it, I remembered hearing a noise of a vacuum cleaner and at that very moment I actually heard that sound - there was a maid in the office building vacuuming the floor above us, and this triggered the entire memory in detail. I really believe that God ordained that moment because that was my very first break-through in therapy. This opened up an entire dam of abuses, pain, fear and all the other emotions that I never allowed myself to feel.
I worked really diligently to get through these issues. For example, there were times during this therapy process that my therapist would have James and I do exercises - a kind of homework. We would sit face-to-face looking at each other and say wonderful things to each other, and the most terrifying things would happen. His face would distort into all these different guys’ faces - he would actually be transformed, in my mind, to look like a monster. And of course with my honesty, I told him what was going on, but this only added to his anger and resentment.
Even though I was having so much success in therapy, in reality, James and I were farther apart than ever. He felt rejected and angry and never talked about it. He just lashed out with disrespectful, unkind words. Every time I broke through some major or even minor barrier, I always shared it with him, but when we talked about my progress, all he could say was “Well that’s fine for you, but we’re still not having sex.” I felt like he only cared whether we were making love or not. His response only solidified my hatred of even the idea of sex with him. The idea of him touching me intimately made me cringe, but it wasn’t because of all the people that hurt me in the past. Now that was definitely an issue, but that was not what was making me cringe. It was how heartless and selfish and non-feeling he was about the whole intimacy thing. I felt so used and so alone and unloved—and always felt that from him from that point on.
I asked him to get some help to deal with the rejection that he was feeling, but he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. I told him that I was doing everything I could to get through this as fast as I could, but his response was always, “Well that’s great, but you’re still not making love to me.” Oh, that hurt so much and so deeply. I felt like no matter how much pain I was in emotionally, no matter what memories I was remembering and reliving, no matter how agonizing this whole process was, all he cared about was the fact that we didn’t have sex.