Agree 100%...and ANYONE that hides these details is not a very good person.

Believer,

My daughter was able to recover from a poor grade and go on to do well in school. Had my husband had a domestic assault record, he could not get employment as a professional or volunteer in our children's school. The equivalent for my daughter would not have been a D in one course in 5th grade. The equivalent would have been to be permanently kicked out of school. I did protect my husband from some of the consequences of his actions, as a way to give him an opportunity to recover, but there have been plenty of consequences.

I can certainly appreciate that some would think he doesn't deserve that opportunity to recover. There were two major injuries which required surgery, and the first surgery (for the broken arm) occurred almost four years after the injury to my forehead and about a week after he broke my arm. Neither of us knew at the time that the injury to my forehead was anything but cosmetic. It turns out that a severe injury can result in a slow-growing cancer. How incredible is that?

We were both in a fog. I blamed myself for his abuse of me, and so I tried to placate him as a way to keep him from hurting me. It's classic behavior of an abused wife.

Am I placating him now? No. I'm willing to leave him. It's a kind of Plan B along a continuum. The better he treats me, the more receptive I am to him. The worse he treats me, the more I withdraw, and I am willing to separate or even divorce him.

Mulan's story affects me very much. She tried so very hard to stay with a man who treated her worse and worse because her goal was to stay married. I think that the willingness to separate is a key factor in a good marriage, and that willingness to separate comes from giving a priority to the dignity of yourself over the survival of your marriage. If you are willing to separate, you don't try to convince or coerce or control or placate or tolerate. You separate.


medc,

I'm sorry that you don't think I'm a good person. It can be difficult to sort out what to do when you find yourself in the situation I was in on the day he broke my arm -- two weeks after major surgery for childbirth-related injuries which kept me in the hospital five days, with a baby and three other children under 7, and just days until Christmas. The morning he broke my arm, we both went to see the therapist I had started seeing the month before who told me not to call the other woman or her husband because it was up to my husband to decide how he wanted to behave. It was all so confusing.

I had even been told that one of the effects of the surgery that I had been through 12 days before the broken arm (which included a hysterectomy) was emotional ups and downs, and I had abruptly stopped nursing the baby (who had not had anything but mother's milk prior to the surgery) because the surgery had not gone well and I was on so many pain pills -- Vikodin and Advil, some sort of pill called Diflucan for an infection, the same pill that was used for the anthrax patients (Cipro?) and on and on and on. It was a mess. I thought I had caused the broken arm, and I didn't think -- given my medical condition -- that I was in any position to make decisions that could not be reversed. My immediate goal was to find a good surgeon for the arm, which turned out to be difficult because one of the bones of the ulna had been shattered into seven pieces. In retrospect, I think I did about as well as could be expected.


Cherished

You are protecting him from the consequences of his actions. That is classic co-dependent behavior.

A person deserves to be a volunteer at school, a scoutmaster, or having a job that requires a background check because they have a clear record, NOT because they are an abuser who was protected by the victim.

What exactly have been the consequences he faced?

1. His children were told.
2. His family of origin was told.
3. His in-laws were told.
4. He attended anger management classes for 14 weeks.
5. He attended weekly anger management group for several years and still goes occasionally.
6. He went to two different therapists.
7. We went to MarriageBuilders and also have been to four different marriage counselors.
8. He was out of the house for a few months.
9. He's had to take care of me as I tried to understand what happened -- to the tune of about 150 therapy sessions.
10. He's had to pay the consequences of 8 surgeries for me.
11. He's had to look in the mirror and face that he made choices which led to the evil of having an affair and breaking his wife's arm to prevent her interference.

When is enough enough?

Do we spend the rest of our lives reliving December 2001? Reliving what led to it and reliving the fallout from it? Reliving the injury to my forehead in January 1998 and the surgeries which probably are over as of last month? No thank you. It was hard enough to try to recall exactly what condition I was in when I replied to medc about my not being a good person.

Dr. Harley talks about "just compensation" by the person involved in the affair as a focus for a couple rather than "forgiveness" by the person who is offended. He's had to provide plenty of "just compensation".

And today we had a good day together as a family at the state fair.

Cherished

I would like to think one broken arm or cracked skull is enough but, that's just me. You've effectively hidden his abuse of you from the public eye, deceived his employer and the schoool where he volunteers. I hope the hospital employees at least raised an eyebrow.

You've made your choice to stay in this marriage. Why do you continue to feel that you need to justify your choices.

Your "Last Post" was way the heck back in March. Now this is your "Last Thread" and it's been five months to the day since your supposed last post. When is enough enough?

Maybe it's time to change the name of the thread. You ain't goin' nowhere.

I am happy how things are going. Yes, there is a lot from the past to be overcome, but at least today and at least for us, it seems that things are improving.

It saddens me that positive change is met with complete skepticism.

People from this board have helped me. Mulan was one of the first people to post to me. I chose not to ruin my husband's ability to recover by putting his abuse in the public record, so my story was not one which I shared with many outside my immediate family and therapists.

I think the "Be still" thread was the most helpful for me. The WS and the BS both need to recognize that it is up to the WS to figure out and face the fact that each of us is responsible for our own behavior.

Cherished

Here are some new titles you could change your thread to:

"Cheat on me then Beat me again!"

"Hit me, I won't tell. Cheat on me, we can get counseling"

"Hit me till it hurts!"

"Hit me- I will love you for it."

"Hurt me again, I'm here for your target practice."

"I take your blows and bear your children"

"Beat me, and then get counseling"

"Beat me, almost kill me, then beat me again."

"Counseling is expensive but prison...! Not for my beater!"

"Beat me first, then the kids."

"I want your sympathy for being beaten and liking it"

"Beat me, beat the brains outta me."

"Slam my head until my brains come out, I will lie and say I fell"

" Please beat me again and again, then cheat on me"

"Cheat on me, beat me, I will hide it and have more of your children"

"Slam me against a wall, It makes me feel important"

"Beat me until I almost die, then cheat on me, I wont leave you."

"True love is never saying, STOP THE BEATINGS"

"I will never tell if you cheat on me and beat on me"

"Beat me up, then cheat on me, then you can be a sunday school teacher"

"I WILL BE STILL AS YOU HIT ME AGAIN AND AGAIN"

"I WILL BE STILL AS YOU CHEAT ON ME"

"I REFUSE TO SAY A WORD AS YOU BEAT ME UNRECOGNIZABLE"

"I WILL CRUCIFY MYSELF FOR YOU, MY BEAST AND MONSTER"

People can change.

My husband did. It took a lot, and it took a long time, but he did.

I reread Aristotle's Ethics this year, a book that I have read once since college. In it, Aristotle talks about a person being able to choose the good.

A man who has once been an abuser does not need to continue being abusive for the rest of his life.

I am not being abused. I am not being cheated on. My husband has made different choices today from those he has made in the past.

The "Be still" thread does not mean that I sit still and accept infidelity and abuse. It means that I recognize that he and he alone is the one who makes decisions about his behavior.

Cherished

http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/now-news/dv2.html

Stellakat,
I recognize that you care or you wouldn't be posting. The conventional wisdom is that a man who has been abusive can never learn how to act in a non-abusive manner. It's not true. A man can learn. It takes commitment and determination and acceptance of personal responsibility, but it can be done.
Cherished

So, If I was being beaten every day and nearly killed what advice would you give me, to wait it out and some day he might change and quite beating me and cheating on me?

Stellakat,

I did try to wait it out, and that is not the advice I would give. The advice I would give is to pull back, to stop pursuing, and to see what happens. He never had any concern about my leaving him.

After he broke my arm, I did consider leaving him. The therapist recommended against it. A year or so later, I asked her why. She told me she wasn't sure I could handle being on my own. I was in a cast up past my arm for several months and had four young children. Practically speaking, it would have been difficult, but I think he should have left. As it was, he pulled on both wrists and threw me down on the cast during the period I had on the cast. He could have caused more injury to a very fragile arm.

What has happened in the past several months is that I gave out. In February, he said to me, in one of our many converations, "Why are you so special?" That got to me. It's not that I'm so special. It's that he married me.

After that, I changed how I dealt with him. I was no longer pursuing him. He then got upset about how "I am the Invisible Man" and "you ignore me". I told him I was willing to do things with him, but he would have to initiate.

I think some of it is that I was pursuing him. It may not be politically correct, but I agree with John Paul II in his encyclical on women when he says "The man loves, and the woman loves in return."

What to do when the man does not love? I think the answer is silent withdrawal, including but not limited to separation. A priest once told me that his aunt married a man who became an alcoholic, she separated from him, she always considered herself married, and forty years later he returned to her to die of cirrhosis of the liver.

That story impressed me when he told me it about two years ago. I guess that is the advice I would give to my daughters: be receptive to a man but remove yourself from him if he treats you poorly. Our marriage should never have gotten to the point where he was physically abusive so that I ended up with surgeries. Physical abuse does not start with serious injury. It starts with what Harley calls "disrespectful judgments" and swearing and verbal contempt.

Yes, he is still verbally abusive. That is the point when the conversation ends. I leave.

Cherished

your response to this entire episode Cherished is perplexing at best. IMHO, I think both you and your husband are not fit parents...one for being an abuser...the other for failing to remove an abuser from the household. DHS should step in and get your kids to a safe place...before dad strikes again. And BTW, anger management classes do nothing for abusers. Your husband had NO trouble managing his anger before. Trust me, I am sure he wasn't beating on any men larger than him...it isn't anger management...it is abuse.

YOU have put others in harms way. YOU have a right to stupidly do that for you....but not for others.

Shame on you.

either this never really happened...or our therapist is is an incompetent idiot that is committing malpractice.

unfrickenbelieveable


Cherished...you need help.

Do others a favor and stop posting so a people in trouble won't "learn" from you.

medc,

There is a book called "Why Does He Do That?" that I recommended to someone on the board and have loaned to two other women. Domestic assault is about "power over" in a domestic relationship in which the victim is reluctant to file charges because of the consequences to both her and her abuser. Domestic assault is a strategy for getting what you want.

I am not putting anyone in danger because my husband learned new strategies. He worked hard at it.

The conventional wisdom that an abuser cannot change his behavior is self-perpetuating.

Cherished

another person that excused abusers. Bernard Law anyone. Oh, right, he got promoted to the Vatican.

medc,

"Verbally abusive" is a loose term to mean talking in a nasty way, saying things at which I could take offense. He's learning not to be verbally abusive because I don't stick around when he is.

Cherished

bullchit. he is STILL an abuser.

Cherished, frankly, you have no clue about what you speak. YOU are a danger to your children...and others with your current mindset.

I see jerks like your husband every day...and have carried more than a few bodies from "reformed" abusers.

Abusers can change...BUT..he is still verbally abusive...that is a HUGE red flag.

So, is this really your last post? You are a horrible example for women that come here in a bad situation....that's sad, but true.

I am sorry for what you have gone through....it has obviously left you unable to think with a rational mind.