Shine Sweet Freedom

I decided to begin writing about the journey I found myself on after leaving a marriage of nearly two decades—a marriage marked by emotional and verbal abuse that, over time, stripped away pieces of my dignity, confidence, and sense of self.

Emotional abuse is insidious.

I didn’t grow up learning how to recognize it. There were no bruises to explain, no obvious evidence to point to and say, See? This is what’s happening to me. So when I found myself living in it, I was confused and disoriented.

I’m naturally self-reflective, so when the man I loved began pointing out what he believed was wrong with me, I took him seriously. Within months of meeting him, I started therapy because I wanted to examine the things he was telling me about myself.

I had decades-long friendships with people who loved me enough to be honest with me, and I had never received the kind of feedback about myself that he routinely dished out. But he seemed so “together.” He seemed confident and certain. He seemed like someone whose opinion deserved respect.

So instead of questioning what he was saying, I began questioning myself.

Then I began questioning my family.

He told me my family “controlled” me. I started to believe that perhaps my upbringing was the reason I was timid, insecure, or somehow not quite enough for him. I began separating myself from the people who had always been my support system.

Less than a year after meeting him, I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, where he lived. I left my family, my friends, and almost everything familiar behind.

At the time, I thought I was becoming independent.

Looking back, I can see that I was actually becoming isolated.

I had hoped that getting away from my family would help me overcome my timidity, loosen what I had come to believe was their “control” over me, and somehow make me more appealing to him.

What I couldn’t see then was that he had accused my family of doing exactly what he was beginning to do himself: control me.

And separating me from them made that much easier.

I had crossed the country alone and left my support network thousands of miles away. He now had more influence over my life—and over my perception of myself—than ever before.

What followed were years of cycles.

There were good moments. Sometimes wonderful moments.

Then something would happen and the emotional or verbal abuse would return.

Eventually things would settle down. There would be apologies, explanations, promises, or simply enough normalcy that I could convince myself everything was okay again.

Until it wasn’t.

Good. Bad. Good again. Abuse again.

I didn’t have a name for it then.

Now I do.

The cycle of abuse.

Leaving or staying eventually became an impossible choice.

There were specific events that ultimately led me to the decision to leave, and I will explore those in later posts. But I won’t sugarcoat this part: leaving cost me a lot.

I simply reached the point where I believed staying would cost me more.

Because staying wasn’t only about me anymore.

Staying meant asking my children to deny what they could see with their own eyes. It meant participating in a family system where abusive behavior had to be renamed so we could live with it.

It was “anger.”

It was a “bad mood.”

It was “stress.”

It was “Dad being Dad.”

Anything except the word that frightened me most because saying it out loud meant I would have to confront what it required of me:

Abuse.

This blog will be about moments from the past and the present as I process the enormous changes in my life. It will be about the things I have learned that finally helped expose what had remained hidden in darkness for so long.

It will also be about what happens after you finally see the truth.

Because seeing it doesn’t instantly make you free.

Sometimes seeing it is simply where the journey begins.

I welcome your stories and your feedback. I welcome respectful disagreement and different perspectives.

But there is one rule here:

No putting people down. No demeaning one another. No cruelty disguised as “honesty.”

In short—

NO ABUSE.

Thank you for being here.

“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

— Thomas Jefferson