~ChimaeraChan

I’m writing this because when looking back at my last journal I realized I had held back on certain details, which is not like me. I have given full discloser in the past, from my struggle with depression to the slow, painful death of my father, yet this last year my journals have dwindled and I haven’t really spoken much of what I have been dealing with. So I had to first ask myself why I had not told you the story of what precisely made me leave my house of twenty plus years. In the end I realized that it came down to feeling ashamed, a feeling completely uncalled for, and yet there you go. For some reason being a victim of domestic violence not only makes you pissed off, but it also makes you feel like shit.

You see, the night before I left my house, I was downstairs watching television when I began to hear a commotion upstairs. It was my older adoptive brother watching porn in the tv room. He had done this a week ago for six hours straight in the family living room upstairs, and in therapy had admitted he had made a mistake and would not do it again. This week, he not only broke his promise, but he also decided that after three years of sobriety that tonight was the night to down half a bottle of scotch. It was late at night, the kids and my sister-in-law were sleeping, but I, being a night owl, was awake, and my twin brother was out down the street with friends.

So I notice the tv is getting louder, and that he’s slipping around upstairs, knocking into things, breaking things, and even falling down. I also noticed when he came downstairs. My bedroom is downstairs, and I have a lock on my door, but I was in the sitting room watching tv with only a curtain to keep myself separated from this very drunk man. It was at this time I noticed that he was not wearing any clothes.

I asked him if he was drunk, while looking around casually for something to defend myself with. Thankfully, I had my cell phone with me, and while calling my twin for help, I announced it to my adoptive brother, and that seemed sufficient in scaring him upstairs. When my twin got home he found me shaking, and I asked him to go upstairs and make sure everything was okay because I had heard things breaking earlier. My twin went upstairs and found our brother hunched over on the floor in the kids’ room, nude. I calmly called my sister-in-law, waking her up and informing her of said events, which she was very blasé about, and my twin and I left the house.

We blew off some steam, walking the streets of Salem in the middle of the night with a friend of ours. Eventually we went back home. There had always been a very clear understanding that my twin and I would not put up with drunkenness in our house. Drinking is okay, but if you can’t control yourself, especially when there are children in the house, it is completely unacceptable. In accordance with this, we proceeded to dump any and all alcohol in the house, and went to bed.

Morning started with the sounds of smashing scotch bottles and screaming as my adoptive brother discovered that his alcohol was gone. He made continuous threats to me, and my safety, and even went so far as to have my nieces refer to me as a bitch (which the confused sweethearts did not do). Since we had a family therapy session that afternoon, my twin and I left early and took a different car to get there, I having called ahead to inform the therapist that we would need to be separated this time around for the session.

Arriving there, we told the story to our therapist, and then went into the waiting room to switch places so they could tell their perspective. I believe in patient confidentiality, but I also believe that it is somewhat moot when the patient is screaming threats at the top of his lungs like my adoptive brother was doing. Once they had left, the therapist saw us again, and asked us what sort of plan we had when our brother repeated this behavior, because it would be repeated. My twin and I had always had this agreement that we would never live with an Abuser again, and when the therapist said that for our safety we should leave the house immediately, we had to agree.

So… let me tell you about this Abuser, so you can understand what an abuser is when you don’t get the obvious signs of physical violence. My adoptive brother is a large man, over six feet tall, and overweight. He likes to bully people, especially his wife. He does not bully in the way a child does with fists and threats, but with continuous repeated derogatory comments followed by a laugh and a shrug, as if by joking they won’t hurt. My sister-in-law, quite depressed, and bed bound by pain, gets comments directed at her from him, such as ‘she’s lazy’ ‘she only sits around so that he is forced to do all the work and end up losing control of the situation because she likes to watch him suffer’ ‘that she can’t even take care of the kids right’ ‘that she’s always letting him down’ ‘that she loves being in pain and depressed’ and my all time favorite ‘you were supposed to know to do that for me’.

The kids get a different sort of abuse. They get the daddy that likes to go to parks and take them swimming and have fun, and then they get the daddy that yells, and rages, and has no control over himself, and can’t gain their respect because no one around him respects him. They get to see him rage, and watch him throw things across the room, and break and disrespect everything around him.

This man happily wears the persona of an asshole, and he does this to push people away. This way no one can get close enough to see the state of hell they keep their house in, like the trash and dirty clothes on the kitchen floor. They won’t be close enough to hear the constant yelling going on from day to night, or the quieter bulling. People slowly move away from this man, and the family he rules, taking any help they can give with them, because this man wants to isolate his family so he can have absolute control. And you cannot see this through his words, but through his actions, because as stupid as he is, he knows how to manipulate a situation because he has spent his entire life being a bully. His words are full of ‘I’m sorry’ ‘I made a mistake, and won’t do it again’ ‘I can only do the best I can’ ‘I’ve forgiven myself for that, I can’t help that you haven’t’ ‘I’m trying’—my fucking favorite, because while he limits himself to ‘try’, anyone with any actual intentions of reforming sets a goal and works every day to ‘succeed’. Forget about ‘trying’, just ‘do’ it.

This man likes to use people; for maids, for babysitters, for maintenance, and it’s very easy for him with a very charismatic wife and two shining daughters to draw people in. The wife is so dependant on him that she cannot speak out against him, not for fear that he would hurt her, but for fear that if she left him he would fall to pieces. She needs to care for him to justify her self worth because she has allowed him to destroy her self-esteem. And once he is done sucking the life out of you, he blames you. Any problem that arises is someone else’s fault because he refuses to take personal responsibility for his actions and the consequences he has reaped.

When this man was faced with the two of us, we saw through him from the very beginning, and he saw us as the threat we were to his control over his family. When you live with a person like that, all the smiles and bullshit go away, and you see him for the person he is. The way they destroyed our house, and disrespected everything in it, even when our father was still alive, to their complete inability to care for themselves, it was very clear that they were dealing with a lot of fucked up issues. They ignored boundaries in the hopes that they could push us away out of our own home and then came asking for us to help them by going to family therapy, as if it wasn’t their family that was the cause of the problems to begin with. This man was so self deluded he was expecting to get some sort of self vindication from the experience, and when he found that he was not hearing the answers he wanted-that he was right and everyone else was wrong-he bitched, as he is apt to do. They began to make plans to move once their inheritance paid out (another sad fate, for surely they will waste it as they have everything else in their lives) and of course, in their minds moving will solve the problem. But problems don’t disappear when you run away, especially when the problems are the two adults that have yet to figure out how to live a healthy existence.

I knew what was going on, I was living it, but each day I did less and less to stop it, although my twin and I were the only voices standing out against it. I was growing so tired of the conflict, so tired of having to reinstate my power over my own life everyday because that family tried to insist that their fucked up way of living was the way to live. There was no support from the wife that had long accepted the situation, and my twin, strong as he is, took to spending more and more time away, splitting my strength with it. But to be honest, I had grown complacent in that horrible situation of anger and bulling and cruelty. Because as much as I saw what he was doing, I had accepted it as the tradeoff I had to take if I wanted to stay in my home. I realize now how I was caught in that riptide, and I can only be grateful that the incident that finally set my head straight was not as bad as it could have been.

Domestic violence is always talked about as the fists and the drugs, if it is talked about at all, but it all starts differently. When someone is making you feel unsafe in your own home, or taking away the joy you feel around your friends and loved ones, or pummeling your self worth with little digs that keep digging and digging, and you find yourself being isolated because you don’t want to deal with the annoying conflict of yelling and standing up for yourself than you are living with an Abuser. An Abuser doesn’t have to be using drugs or drinking or hitting you, but when they take away your love of yourself, and of your life they are abusing your rights to be happy and free.

Do not wait for the shit to hit the fan, or a fist to hit your face to decide to get out. The fear of the big wide unknown world is nothing compared to the depression and weight of losing all joy of life because you’re in the clutches of an Abuser. There are housing opportunities out there just for people in this situation; I myself have signed onto the emergency section 8 program in Massachusetts and got on that quicker list because I was displaced because of domestic violence. There are people out there that will help you, and no matter what you may have begun to believe about yourself because of the words of that Abuser, you are a Strong, Capable, Independent person, that Deserves to be Safe, and Deserves to be Happy, and your only true responsibility is the health and well being of your self. All other responsibilities can wait until after you are safe and healthy.

As for me, while being put on antidepressants for the first time, I discovered that experiencing all the side effects to the medicine-especially a medicine like Effexor-was not a good thing at all. By the end of the third week depression had hit me, along with thoughts of self-harm and suicide that I did not act upon, nor tell anyone about. I had a doctor’s appointment the next day, where I was going to ask to be switched off the medicine since I hadn’t thought of suicide since I was in my teens and knew something was very wrong, but the opportunity never came. While seeking some space after an argument with the woman who had kindly taken me in where she had spoken down to me about my feelings towards the Abuser she had invited into my personal space once again, because for some reason she just couldn’t ‘get it’ or respect my rights to my emotions, I found a shitload of cops swarming me, asking me if I was going to kill myself and all about my lovely domestic violence incident. They then proceeded to take me to the nearest hospital and asked more questions, and then doctors asked questions, and then a guard stayed by my side 24-7 to make sure I didn’t ‘escape’ or ‘kill myself’while I waited many hours for some therapist from Lexington to come and access my mental health.

My neighbor informed me that it was the woman watching over me that had called the cops and had failed to:
1) ask my opinion on my health before calling the cops
2) ask if I wanted help or if I would rather wait for my doctor’s appointment the next morning
3) explained to show up and tell me what was happening while I was having flashbacks of being five years old and having police show up at my house to take me away from my biological family
4) show up to give me support when I was being forced into an ambulance
5) show up to give me support at the hospital and to tell me about the next steps in the process
6) give any sort of explanation for her actions or why she thought I had given her the right to make any decisions for me, including telling the police about the incident of domestic violence that had occurred a month previous at this point, and calling the family of the Abuser to inform them that I had been committed.
7) let me explain to her how much she had hurt me by her careless actions so that I could at least express to her how much of a breach of trust she had created.
8) face me on any level other than superficial visits where she would leave once the conversation turned serious.

I checked myself into a very nice place called Walden behavioral care, and was immediately taken off the Effexor and found that I could function again as a human being. I am now on Celexa, and have high hopes for it, although I’m not too happy with having to take the Klonopin because it is known to have addictive properties, but I may have to up the night dosage as suggested because I’m typing this at 4am because I fell asleep, woke up, and couldn’t fall back asleep again.

Don’t get me wrong though, I type from after the fact. I was terrified through the whole event. I did not know where I was going, or why, or for how long. I cried through the whole ambulance ride. I was so hurt by what my friend had done to me that I had just gone along with it all, knowing that at least if I was in a hospital I wouldn’t be a burden to her anymore.

I am living with my biological brothers in Lexington because I could not go and put my trust in the care of someone who would so disrespect me the way she had. When going to pick up my things from her apartment I found all my stuff out on the patio, including my laptop where anyone could have walked by and stolen it. She refuses to face me, return my calls, or initiate conversation. The worst thing is that I had allowed myself to trust her so much, and I saw her as a very good friend, but if she is so willing to let this gap grow than there is nothing I can do. She chose to take the actions she did, and hurt me on so many levels in such a short amount of time, and then give no explanation or apology after. Obviously I must have done something very hurtful or disrespectful to cause this situation, but I honestly can’t think of it. I was always respectful of their space, and their feelings, and tried to make myself as unobtrusive as possible while in their household. I should have just moved into a homeless shelter like I had intended instead of allowing her to lull me into a false sense of security. She was so determined to help me get better, but in the long run when I truly needed here help she ran away.

I’m very hurt by this betrayal, and I honestly miss the friendship we had, but I am relieved that I am on an antidepressant more suited for me, and for my time in Walden. I had gone in just to be supervised to see how the medicine was effecting me, and the doctors discharged me 5 days later after the weekend, but the people I met there and grew to know in that short time were wonderful, from the staff to the patients. I wish everyone there the best of luck, especially Kimberly who was evicted while in the unit and is currently homeless. Everyone from all walks of life are dealing with problems, but we all hurt the same way, and we all want the same thing-help, love, respect, and safety, all in unconditional bounds. It’s out there; you just have to remember that we all deserve it, that there is goodness in all of us, and that we have a right to be healthy and happy. Don’t ever let anyone try and convince you otherwise.

Love,
~Gabby