From the inside, fighting to see out: journal entries
By Jessica J
These are a sample of my real journal entries. Written in my struggle to finally see through the fog of lies and confusion and effective mind-control/brainwashing of a emotionally-abusive psychologically-violent husband, who had me believing deeply that I was bad, wrong, deserving of blame and shame whenever things somehow weren't going his way, such that I learned so well to self-blame and self-shame and proactively take erroneously-rationalised responsibility for problems that weren't even mine. Eventually he had me believing and owning that our problems were largely due to some inherent "mental illness" in me, though there was never a professional diagnosis.
This abuse played out over a course of ten years. Two years after finally escaping from abusive husband, my mind is still working through the abusive conditioning and confusion. I've learned terms recently, in relation to emotional (also narcissistic or sociopathic psychological) abuse, that ring true: gaslighting, reality-shifting, hoovering, cognitive dissonance,... If these personal records might shed any light for others...
Date: Friday 26 April 2013
Yesterday husband attended an Anzac Day BBQ hosted by his friends. I did not attend; I couldn't. There is too much baggage from past encounters. As usual, my pain of past encounters started to cry for attention.
Husband had hoped that I had resolved these issues with his friends. He lost his temper with unusual speed this time when he realised I hadn't, irritation from the bursting of false expectations.
It started with me, as always, wanting my share of his morning time, since I had given his friends the rest of the day. Husband also spent some 20 minutes flustering over the names of his friends' many children. Because I was not being heard, not getting my time, I escalated. Because his hope/expectations were suddenly dashed he abuptly lost his temper.
Husband went into defensive, black-and-white mode. His friends were absolutely right, absolutely good. Husband was quick to pick up on my self-criticisms, he blurted, with uncharacteristic responsiveness, "Yes, you're projecting!" But he would concede nothing about his friends, their flaws, the choices they could have made better. I escalated because I was getting no acknowledgement, no concessions. I went searching for criticisms of his friends, rationalisation to justify my dislike for them. I suggested E and J did not, in the many intervening years, show much interest in getting to know me on a deeper personal level. Husband retorted "It's no surprise given your reaction to personal questions in the past."
I tried to call a truce as husband had to leave. I thought I could settle myself. I thought this was my problem and I had to handle it. Husband left and I spent the day obsessing in pain. I forced myself to do a couple of hours of housework. Then I went for a quick run to clear my head, even though I really didn't feel like it. I sorely wanted to call him during the day and discuss the issue at length. I attained some level of control, settled myself somewhat by the time husband returned, but not entirely.
I realised that I couldn't settle the situation because it involved another who had inflicted secondary wounds by taking a black-and-white defensive stance. Just because I am recognisably sick, doesn't mean everyone else is perfectly rational.
I needed admission and recognition from husband. It took me until Friday morning to settle. Over the past two or three days, I find I am increasingly less able to regulate my emotions. I hope it is just the addition of fatigue and stress from the housework and prep for our leaving for his year of work overseas.
This week has been stressful with tradesmen in, damaging floors and walls, not being considerate or entirely straight with us.
...
...
Date: Thursday 24 April 2014 [Overseas, in a strange house, in a strange town, socially isolated, alone.]
I want so bad to be part of a team of undying love and support. I want it so bad. I will do so much for it; I will give everything. And I have everything to lose. So much to lose...
But I will not betray truth for blind loyalty; I will not betray "truth" for "love". For therein lies that path to delusion, which I have witnessed too many times, and from there... you do not find "good". Yet I do not believe that truth and love ever need to be in conflict; I do not believe that truth and love are ever inherently incompatible. They are only when they are made to be, by us.
Is it me who makes truth and love incompatible here? Is it me? What can I do? What can I change? What must I change?
What can I do?
Again, from Howard Zinn: "...we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas. ...The answer then is as obvious and profound as the Buddhist mantra that says: "Look for the truth exactly on the spot where you stand." "
If husband has the will to see truth, his own truth. But every so often he stumbles and maybe falls. Then is it not exactly here that I can enact my responsibility in life? If I believe so in truth, if I agree with Zinn, then is it not my responsibility to support husband when he falls? Do I abandon one person with the will to see truth in search of another? To repeat the process again, until it becomes "too hard", too much work, too painful, and I grow weary of that other too?
And if I walk away from hard work or pain or unhappiness now, how am I really different to those others whom I criticise for shying away from truth?
What remains?
...
Date: Monday 5 May 2014
Some where around 24 April 2014, after I broke having realised I had nothing left and noone to go to, after husband, my body went tingly for several days. Then as that continued, my brain became numb, and I lost all emotional feeling. By 1 May 2014, I felt no more pain, no more anxiety, no more stress. And no care. I didn't care. I stopped caring about everything. I stopped caring for husband. I still had cognitive capacity, and logic. But no strength of force behind my thinking.
Today there is still numbness in my mind. I still have a suppressed sense of care. Though my intellect has started to reassert itself. But now with a new perspective of a world where husband is not, and was not, "good".
He inflicted on me so much pain, and rationalised to me, and to himself, that it was for my own good, because he was "good". He required me to admit and submit to his "good". I asked him to stop, I warned him clearly and repeatedly that I was nearing exhaustion, my limit, that there was only so much pain I forsee that a person could take. As late as 3 May 2014 he has still came back with more self-rationalisations, more lies. He can't stop.
Though not too sure what "good" is anymore, or if it really exists. I no longer believe in people. I no longer trust anyone. I no longer believe.
Some part of me is a bit sad, I think. But I mostly don't care. And I still don't care for husband.
...
Date: Thurs 22 May 2014
To my best friend:
You knew we were in trouble, I was in trouble. You told me to stay with him and work it out.
But where were you when I needed a friend? I needed anyone to believe in.
You left me alone with him.
I guess I did work something out.
I don't trust anyone anymore.
I no longer believe. ...
I can't see you. I don't have the strength. I'm sorry.
Talk to my husband; if you want. Make of his words what you will.
...
Date: Sunday 15 June 2014
Listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, `Investigating Belief' , aired 01 June 2014.
Partial transcript.
- Irrational Beliefs -- Will Storr
WS: ...So he saw what the rest of us saw, but it was as if he only saw the handle bars, that's all he saw. It was an extraordinary display of how selective our perception can be at only seeing the things that reinforce our personal truths. ...
INTERVIEWER: The depressing thing is that it almost sounds like you're saying that we're all prone to bias, we all have beliefs that we've developed irrationally, and we simply keep confirming them over and over again, and our neural circuitry perpetuates our bias. So, how are we supposed to figure out whose opinions we can trust?
WS: Well, that's it. It's completely disorientating and terrifying, I agree. But it's fascinating nonetheless. Um, and I guess if there's a hero to my book it is the scientific method. You know, we're creatures of story. We experience our lives as stories that are populated with heros and villains. ...
...
Everywhere I look, everyone's a liar. Not one of you isn't. And by extension I must accept that it seems likely that I am too a liar. So that existence is a lie.
...
Date: Tuesday 17 June 2014
Listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, `Investigating Belief' , aired 01 June 2014.
Partial transcript.
- Charting Religious Traditions - Karen Armstrong
KA: ...in every single age, the catalyst for religious change had been a revulsion, a disciplined turning away from violence.
INTERVIEWER: So what was the message, what was the spiritual message that rejected violence?
KA: First of all, they all insisted---in very different ways but they came to the same conclusion---that you must give up and abandon your ego. That the cause of violence, hatred, and human evil is very largely rooted in desperation about the ego. We are egocentric creatures. And so the sages said that the root cause of suffering lay in our desperate concern with self, which often needs to destroy others in order to preserve itself. And so they insisted that if we stepped outside the ego, then we would encounter what they called Brahman or God, Nirvana or the Dao. ...
...
Date: Friday 1 August 2014
To the person I thought was my best friend:
I hope you will make the effort to properly understand this. For this is serious and important. I will try, once again, to be clear:
In May, after many earnest months of exchange, husband's relentless and insidious world of lies finally caused some decisive break in my brain. He can see this now.
For you, you say it is necessary to participate in this social-economy of lies, for your survival. For me, for my survival, I find it now necessary to avoid lies where possible.
I have found that your words and behaviour too closely replicate my deleterious experiences with husband. You, how you are, in all your unconscious un-intention, with this lie-economy you have bought in to, pose a critical danger to my already wounded brain. I am compelled by my "fight or flight" response.
And so, between us we now have a problem of compatibility.
And I must now walk away from our interactions, to avoid risk of our situation turning nastier.
I do this with all the respect I have ever had for you.
...
...
Date: An afterword: April 2015
In this month of April 2015, two years after the initial breakthrough, I have re-visited these original journal entries for the first time. I recall that I knew intuitively and deeply in March 2013, what I had seen was "big". I would periodically ask husband "Is it big?" over the next few months, as I grew in certainty and self-belief. Some days it seemed like I had seen nothing at all, so obvious and in plain sight was much of the material from which I drew.
But that, of course, is a measure of how complex and subtle, how insidious, the problems of people and humanity can be. Truth hiding in plain sight ...
... thoughts penned by me must necessarily be taken in context and of time. I and my understanding evolve. And most rapidly in recent times: What was said by me in 2013 is very not necessarily in agreement with my view and interpretation in 2015.
The evolution of self and one's thoughts and worldview through one's lifetime may seem an obvious statement, and even axiomatic---true of all people.
To this statement I make two points, briefly. First, to the latter proposition: I might have once glibly agreed "all persons learn and grow over time". But I have now clearly seen humans who have given me grave pause, such that I stop short of generalising this notion. There are people who have a deep and desperate psychological need, to cope with life wholescale, for their internal "models" of the world to remain wishful and fixed in their minds, actively resistant to realworld feedback.
Second, to the proposition that the statement is "obvious": I have seen enough to firmly agree with the findings of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, among many many others, "two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindnesses." ('Thinking, Fast and Slow', 2011, p.24)
... That a person expresses rational agreement to a fact or principle, however vehemently, does not guarantee his thorough emotional unconscious commitment to it. That a man declares in words his ideological belief in universal respect and equality for all persons, does not guarantee he will act accordingly in the everyday scuffle. ...
Date: Today, 16 February 2017
And where a person's words and actions don't match, beware. Beware of the excuses, denials, misdirections, distractions, minimisations, both beguiling and intimidating. As I heard Gloria Steinem say, "Trust your instincts. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck but you think it's a pig, it's a pig."
Your feelings are valid. Trust them, love them, understand them, for they are our natural biological indicators trying to tell us something. But more than that, YOU are valid. You are worthy. You are enough. Anyone who tells you otherwise---whether parent, partner, priest, therapist, "friend"---is exploiting you.