I am just at a little over a month of gaining my house and my life back. The perspective is crazy. From a year ago to now, where I thought I should just accept the unhappiness of life and my ex husbands abuse as acceptable since there was no violence and our finances were separate. To now, freedom! Clarity! No more voices in my ear putting me down and all I hear is just myself, unmuted at last. And you know what? I am great.
During my marriage I harboured such resentment towards the lack of contribution to parenting and finances, I started to unconsciously rebel in my own way by doing things like purposely not cooking so he would not enjoy a nice meal when he had nothing to offer in return. In retrospect, I was doing myself a disservice and not eating as well as I could. I also was putting aside hobbies and passions because I couldn’t get out of my own head what the heck I was going to do about my situation.
Now I’m pleasantly surprised to learn I really enjoy things like gardening, cooking, cleaning. I was never willing to do it in my marriage because my ex used to berate me for not being good enough at any of these things, meanwhile contributing next to nothing financially, emotionally, or to our child. You don’t realize how bad it is until you remove yourself from the situation. It is like a gradual poking that intensifies so slowly over time you don’t notice it and after awhile you have a bleeding, gaping, infected wound that you have no idea how it got there. That is how these disgusting creatures build up your tolerance to their abuse.
I realized being in this toxic relationship really does make you lose yourself. Since then, I have been immersing myself in self improvement through some self help books, TED talks, and psychology lessons. One thing that really resonated with me was “Broken people hurt others”. It is so true. And as much as we want to hate these people who tried to destroy us, and we have every damn right to do so, we must realize in the end they are sick, broken people. Normal healthy people do not act this way. As much as I don’t think anyone should forget what was done to them, try to approach it with a little bit of empathy and understanding so that we ourselves stay whole and don’t bring malevolence to this world that already has way to much of it.
Narc Recovery Project 