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I hope that what women learn from me is not to stick around when a husband talks with them in a nasty way. One thing my husband's anger management class gave him was a healthy fear of jail. He doesn't want to go to jail. He doesn't want to be abusive.
I was married to him for eight years before the broken arm. It's been seven since then, and the contrast is dramatic.
medc, I hope you can agree that a woman should not stick around when a man talks with her in a nasty way. Either a man shows respect, or he doesn't. It has nothing to do with the woman. As Mitt Romney said so eloquently during the campaign, "What Peter says about Paul says more about Peter than about Paul." Cherished
In the past, it was thought that domestic violence was about problematic anger. It is now known to be about the abuser’s desire to control a partner using whatever behaviors are necessary. Many abusers are not angry when they use a control tactic. Abusers in treatment often say that they used their expression of anger as a way to intimidate and control their partners. Anger management programs are not designed to address the fundamental causes of domestic violence or safety and accountability issues. Anger management is not an appropriate alternative to domestic violence treatment.
Since you started this thread referencing Randy Pausch I am wondering if you learned any lessons from him? I doubt it...I thnk your teachers have been abusers and their apologists.
So, what made you come back to MB after leaving...even after a goodbye thread.
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.
In all honesty...YOU do. You talk about it in detail on EVERY thread that you start...and you also post about it in numerous threads that you respond on.
You give the time frames, the number of bones broken, the number of surgeries needed like they are bragging rights from an Olympic win.
So, YOU are spending the rest of your live reliving it. You relive each and every injury; but, what is more disturbing to me is that you wear it like a red badge of courage. It is almost like a mountain you have mastered and come through to the other side. You wear it proudly. This is what makes me think it is totally messed up. There is something really whacked about that.
I fear that other battered women will read your story and think that they can stick it out too...take injury after injury, and HE can change. They just have to be strong enough to stick it out. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They need to be strong enough to LEAVE...not stick around waiting for it to get better.
The list of consequences you give are nothing more than social and financial blips on a screen.
I have a feeling that you reaped some type of payout by not reporting a CRIME to the authorities.
your husband should be...based on justice..in jail. YOU protected a felon. His assault of you rose to the level of aggravated assault on at least three occasions. Each episode could have gotten him 10-20 years....although in reality, it would have been much less for the first one.
YOU protected a felon and now are an apologist for his behaviors. Shame on you Cherished. If you have a daughter, she is watching and has now learned to stay...no matter what someone does to you. YOU are a danger to your children for this reason...and because you keep them in harms way.
I know a lot more about abuse and abusers than you. I can see this objectively....and trust me, you are clueless right now. I feel sorry for you...because this will all come back and haunt your family one day.
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.
In all honesty...YOU do. You talk about it in detail on EVERY thread that you start...and you also post about it in numerous threads that you respond on.
You give the time frames, the number of bones broken, the number of surgeries needed like they are bragging rights from an Olympic win.
So, YOU are spending the rest of your live reliving it. You relive each and every injury; but, what is more disturbing to me is that you wear it like a red badge of courage. It is almost like a mountain you have mastered and come through to the other side. You wear it proudly. This is what makes me think it is totally messed up. There is something really whacked about that.
I fear that other battered women will read your story and think that they can stick it out too...take injury after injury, and HE can change. They just have to be strong enough to stick it out. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They need to be strong enough to LEAVE...not stick around waiting for it to get better.
The list of consequences you give are nothing more than social and financial blips on a screen.
I have a feeling that you reaped some type of payout by not reporting a CRIME to the authorities.
I thought he would stay away from this woman afterwards, since she was the cause of the broken arm.At least he was attentive to me when he broke my arm.
" He would have been barred from volunteering in the school. "
Now, you are telling us that since you refused to report him for almost killing you a few times, that this BEAST you married, this ABUSER husband, this BEATER, this CRIMINAL is volunteering in a SCHOOL!!!!???? Oh man, I have heard it all now. S-I-C-K !!!!
I meant for this to be a last thread, a chance for me to give updates during our admittedly slow recovery. Since mid-summer, there have been a lot of positive changes.
I did protect him from the legal consequences of his violence because there are no second chances in your career or with volunteering for your children when you are a man convicted of domestic assault. It's been a long haul, with my trying tactic after tactic and facing failure after failure. We got nowhere until this year, and now there is definite improvement.
Maybe it was too early for me to comment. It's really only been since mid-summer that there's been improvement beyond the cessation of physical violence and swearing and independent behavior. I'm happy. I'm happy that he takes the time to go on walks with me and to work with me to find what is positive for both of us. My goal was to share this and to give hope to those like Mulan who have tried Plan A with a reluctant spouse. Sometimes, it's best to pull back and let the other person figure out what he wants.
You seem frustrated and upset with the choices I have made, and it was not my intent to get anyone upset. Let me take a break for a year and come back next fall and tell you how it is going.
Time will tell. At this point, I like the trajectory. There is improvement, and I am happy.
"I did protect him from the legal consequences of his violence because there are no second chances in your career for men convicted of domestic assault."
CAREER!!??? So you needed him to work and support you and the kids and this was more important than putting him in jail, right?
Did you not want to get a job??? You needed him to work no matter how much he beat you and hurt you? Did he beat the kids too? Break any of thier bones?
"I did protect him from the legal consequences of his violence because there are no second chances in your career or with volunteering for your children when you are a man convicted of domestic assault. It's been a long haul, with my trying tactic after tactic and facing failure after failure. We got nowhere until this year, and now there is definite improvement."
I WOULD NOT WANT A MAN LIKE THIS WITHIN 100 FEET OF MY CHILDREN. DOES HE VOLUNTEER, WHERE? WITH YOUNG KIDS???
Is he still having affairs? Talking to other women?
Sounds like he still verbally abuses you.
WHY STAY WITH A MONSTER, ABUSER, CRIMINAL MAN, CHEATER, LIKE HIM!!!???
Where is your brain?. Where is your self respect? Where is your caring for your children and the children he volunteers for?
I was a stay at home mother of four children ages 7 and under when he broke my arm. I wanted our family to remain intact, and I wanted to be able to care for them.
The baby is now 7. It's been a long time. I regret not having separated from him immediately, but I am glad that he is now able to be part of our family and part of our community and have a good job. He can look back several years now and see how far he has come.
Yesterday, we had a wonderful day as a family just walking around at the fair, going on rides, having food that you only eat at the fair... The kids were traumatized as children, and I regret not having had him gone while he figured out he was responsible for his own actions, but now I'm glad he's with us, and we are a family.
Did he deserve a second chance? Is it appropriate for him to have a job and volunteer when he was violent in the past? You say no. I say he has demonstrated a great deal of commitment to be non-violent. His anger management therapist told me he is safe. Dr. Harley met him and talked with him for several hours and told me he was safe. I was afraid of him, and I no longer am afraid of him. The children love him. I cannot say I love him, but I do care for him, and I am proud of him for working so hard to recover.
My father once told me, "If you find that you have dug yourself a hole, the first thing to do is: stop digging!" He stopped digging. Now he's getting himself out of that hole. There is something very commendable about that.
I have a medical condition which prevents me from running. I was directly told not to run. We've discussed his running with me biking besides him, but I have a real aversion to his running. I wasn't real thrilled about his training for a marathon, and he ended up with physical problems from it, including a sore back for which he has gone to chiropractors and personal trainers. The real problem, though, was how his personality changed when he ran. He was like a man possessed. Nothing was as important as his running.
I do try to look at him for who he is now. The other day, my sister was asking me if I worried about his being unfaithful when he travels for work. I said no. I then told her he drove with a woman three hours to a conference, attended the conference, had dinner with her, stayed overnight in the city (presumably in the same hotel), and drove her three hours back to her company. This would not fit with Dr. Harley's "extraordinary precautions." The real precaution is internal to him. It's a boundary against going into emotional intimacy with another woman.
My sister brought this up because a woman who lived up the street from her found out her husband was having an affair, she and her husband decided to go on a "second honeymoon" to Hawaii as a way to repair the marriage, the wife slipped and fell off a cliff to her death while she was in Hawaii, and the husband went on to marry his affair partner. I told my sister that there is no doubt in my mind that my husband wanted me dead while he was having an affair. He pressed on my forehead so forcefully that I thought he was going to crush my skull. It turned out that he triggered a condition so difficult to treat that I went through five surgeries for it at the Mayo Clinic. That was in addition to the three surgeries for the arm he broke while he was having an affair. What got us through this mess, at least in part, was the affair occurred when the oldest of our four children was 7.
Now the youngest of our four children is 7, and the other day our oldest told me she is glad that I didn't divorce Dad. He's worked hard to be a loving husband and father, and I respect him for the choices he has made since he broke my arm and had an affair.
I know a lot of people write off men who have been abusive, and one thing that concerns me is that my husband could not have turned around his life if I had involved the police. He would have gone to jail. He would have had a criminal record. He would have lost the right to vote. He would have been barred from volunteering in the school.
Our families of origin and our children know what he did, but we have kept the past out of the present and out of the public record. He has a prestigious job for which he had to pass an extensive background check. He volunteers at the school and with outside activities with our children. He is able to recover from the horrible mistakes of the past and be a good father and husband today. It was a lot of work on his part, not on mine. A friend of mine once said to me, "Don't run interference for his conscience." It's like the 180 program posted on this forum or the "Be still" thread. I stood back and waited.
Over the past few months, I have come to consider that the POJA and the idea of "veto power" over each other may be inappropriate. I'm not sure how to describe this, but I think of it as deference. He knows I don't like fishing, but he loves to take the kids fishing. I tried to enjoy taking pictures of the kids and taking the dog for a walk while they were fishing. If I avoid saying "no", then he has the opportunity to work with me on finding solutions that work.
I have run rough over him over the years, so furious have I been about his treatment of me. What I lost was my femininity, and I am trying to regain it.
We still have a long way to go, but our house is now calmer -- and that's start!
Cherished
I have to say that your answer quite shocked me. I cannot fathom anyone staying with a man who would physically abuse them to this extent. To do so would mean you have also placed your children in harm's way for there is no guarantee that a man that would physically harm his wife would not also harm his children...his abuse should have alerted you to that possibility and you should have considered it a huge warning. Your children have watched you tolerate this abuse and that has been their instructor of what marriage is, all these years. It is too bad you did not use some of your "being furious" to fuel the impetus of getting out of the house and into a safe place. I cannot begin to understand how or why you have "protected" this man from the results of his own actions. As someone else has already put it, you have possibly added to the demise of others as he is free to come and go wherever he wants to without society being forewarned. This man might be volunteering anywhere and we have no idea there is a monster in our midst!
Your marriage seems to be the least of your problems. You are a highly educated, highly principled woman with so much to offer, it seems sad you have allowed this man to ruin your life with little regard to the safety of your own children and others.
I do not reproach you without feeling, I have a great deal of sympathy for you, but I am afraid sympathy does nothing, you need to let your anger fuel the need for change and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Do not hide behind the dogma of any church to make up for your lack of ownership in your own life. This very same church has allowed so many to be hurt by its very own and is only now, as a result of compulsory court judgments, beginning to own up to a small amount of its own responsibility. Get away from this man and do it today! Teach your children that this is not acceptable and get yourself to a safe place! Abusers rarely change to the extent you can count on...what has this man done to restore your trust in him? Has a professional counselor advised you to stay with this monster?
There are three daughters and one son. I've told our daughters that, if a boyfriend ever treats you badly, dump him. In fact, I came up with the idea of "be still" because I was pushing my husband to treat me well while telling our children, and in particular our middle daughter, that she should get away from students at school who don't treat you well.
I've also told them I should have separated from him until he treated me well. Our youngest objected to the idea of Dad leaving, but I told her that there is no reason for him to leave now because he's being a nice Dad.
As for our son, I know that my husband has had some talks with him when he's hit his sisters.
It's not been an ideal childhood for them by any means, and yet they have been resilient. I went into marriage with the commitment that I would stay with him no matter what, and I am teaching our daughters to be open to separation.
Cherished
OMG, now you're telling us what we most fear has already come to pass, that your children have already picked up on and begun to model the behavior shown to them? Do you not get that when it comes to what you say and what you do, what you do will set the precedence as to what your children pick up on? It's almost as if you're telling your children, "do as I say, not what I do"...and for that matter, so is your husband. What, by the way, did your husband do to you the day of your wedding that made you wish you separated from him before dinner?
I haven't posted to you before, but I want to say that I admire your composure and willingness to keep posting in a calm manner while under attack. Many on this board would be very defensive and angry. Thank you for being willing to explain your reasons, although many of us may not understand. Each of us has our own reasons for recovering our marriages whether is be kids, love for our spouse, lack of self respect, whatever, and I'm sure you have your own reasons.
Thanks for sharing your story....
Of course she has composure and calmness when under attack, she's had plenty of practice at it!
Our reasons for recovering our marriages should not come at the expense of our children's and society's physical and mental welfare.
He is sorry. I do appreciate your concern. When my very bright 9th grader was in 5th grade and on the math team, she got a D+ as a mid-quarter grade for math. She blew it. She handed in four math assignments late and got "0" for them because they were late. She was devastated.
She managed to pull up her grade to a B for the quarter. After that, she was more relaxed. She pulls very good grades, getting one B in the last two years (for late assignments).
Why am I saying this? Because one thing that I hope my children learn is that you can recover even from very bad mistakes. My husband made a slew of them. I shouldn't have stuck around. In the end, it was my willingness to leave him that I believe was a key reason for the turnaround. Even so, his willingness to work on being a good husband and father was his alone.
ChaiLover,
My mother had a lot of choice words about this guy beating up her daughter in front of her grandchildren. Six years ago, she told me she would "cheerfully murder" him. A few months ago, my father had to report to me that she was actually bragging about the job he got earlier this year. She hasn't seen him since D-day, which was also the day in 2002 that I told them I found out he had been having an affair and had broken my arm several months before because I had threatened to call this woman, but I think the time for them to see each other again is when we are happy together. Right now, we are calm together. It's a start.
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
I fail to see the correlation between your daughter getting her bad grade and your husband being an abuser...are you trying to draw some similarity into these two situations?
You keep TALKING about separation, have you ever DONE it?
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
I understand all of that, however I still feel he should "practice his changing" on someone else, not you, and society should be aware of him! They have registries for sex offenders, how about one for other violent offenders! If you were divorced and he were to marry someone else, would you feel obligated to warn her what she's getting in to?
