*Disclaimer: if you are in an abusive relationship, please seek help. All of my choices were made through the care of a licensed mental health therapist. In no way am I saying to stay in an abusive relationship. If you need help or guidance you can visit https://www.thehotline.org/is-this-abuse/ for help.
**Another disclaimer: I asked permission from my husband before posting this and he has read everything prior to posting. He was very supportive of my need to write about this and I just want to thank him publicly for allowing me to write about this, even if it might make him look bad. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I've been terrified and worried about talking about this. I've lived with these feelings for so long and I felt like I had to live with them alone for a long time. And while I do believe in keeping things between husband and wife, I feel this is too important to stay quiet on. I believe one of the ways I can heal from this is to talk and share and hopefully help someone in the same situation.
When Hayden and I first met, there was an instant connection. I felt like I had known him for years already the first time we hung out. It was like our souls already knew each other. I was comfortable with him and he made me feel safe. He never once made sexual advances that made me uncomfortable, he never once made me feel like I had to be something other than myself. He was even scared to cuss in front of me for the first month we were dating because he thought I was just too innocent and precious to hear such words. He never hid me, he always showed me off to the world and it felt so good to love someone who loved me back twice as hard.
For the first six months of our relationship, I don't think we had one fight. It was always laughs, always fun and full of love. We could talk about serious life topics, and then 10 minutes later be joking about immature things and laughing until our stomachs ached. It was my dream relationship. I felt the most comfortable I ever had in my life. The fights slowly started rolling in, but I was honestly expecting them at some point. What relationship doesn't have fights and hard times? At first they were normal, we settled them relatively quickly, and I felt like we had this communication thing down.
As the months went on, our fights started becoming less and less productive. I felt the goal wasn't to fix the issue anymore, but to win. His words became more vulgar, more painful, more direct and attacking my character. If I would bring up an issue, it was IMMEDIATELY redirected back to how I screwed up and everything that was wrong with me. He would get so mad, he would yell, scream, his face turned bright red and his veins popped out of his neck. His hands clenched, pacing back and forth, screaming at me. It genuinely scared me, I've never seen anyone so angry over a small discrepancy before. Any time I brought up an issue, he went into attack mode. He would hide things in for months on end and then scream at me for them out of nowhere and blame me for all his problems. Any time he was abusive with his words and I called him out on it, he would say it was my fault for making him that angry. It was never his fault for his anger, it was always my fault.
We started getting into these "circle fights." Which means we had the same exact fight over and over and over again. And when I say the exact same fight, I mean the EXACT same fight. He acted like we had never had that conversation before, like I hadn't told him 10 times before that those things upset and hurt my feelings. He acted clueless to me ever having told him these things, even though we would get in a fight about it a week prior for over an hour and he would promise up and down at the end of it that he knew where he went wrong and what he needed to do to fix it. And for years I lived with empty promises and the same fights over and over again. I felt like I was going mentally insane. I started to question if we really had those conversations or not because of how much he denied ever remembering them. He would always just blame it on his bad memory and never take the responsibility of not following through on his promises.
His responses became more and more manic, and he started getting more and more angry over extremely small things. There were so many times I had to cancel going out with friends or family because he just verbally abused me over something small that I said and I couldn't stop crying. Or even worse, the times we got in a huge fight on the way to plans with friends, and I sat there in misery and in silence trying not to cry the whole hang out. I had to lie to friends and family about what was really happening because I didn't want them to tell me to leave him. I just wanted things to be fixed, because I knew this wasn't who he was.
One night things got pretty bad. Hayden and I had been planning on going to a Halloween party for a few weeks and we were both on the same page with plans. A couple of his friends were going out to a bar that same night and Hayden asked if it would be okay to go hang out with his friends at the bar before going to the party with me. I told him of course and let him know what time to be back by to get to the party in time. We shared a car, so he took the car to go out with his friends while I stayed at home getting ready. The time came for him to come get me and I hadn't heard from him nor was he home, so I gave him a call to see if he was close. When he answered the phone, I could immediately hear the bar music and his friends in the background and his voice sounded off. He was still at the bar. I asked if he was leaving soon to come get me and didn't make a big deal about being late to the party. He said "I'm not gonna go anymore." I paused in shock and just replied with a "what?" He replied with an aggressive attitude, "Yeah I'm not going anymore, I'm staying out with my friends, I never wanted to go to that party anyway." I explained how we had these plans for weeks and how important it was to me for us to go together and the fact that he was my ride. But he didn't care. He yelled until he got his way. I hung up crying and called my friend to ask if their uber could swing by my place and pick me up. I never fully explained what happened, just that he couldn't make it anymore and we got in a little fight and then we went off to the party.
At the end of the night, the deal was that I would give my friend and her boyfriend a ride home since they took me to the party. I was going to order an uber, but Hayden offered to come pick us up, so I said yes and we waited for him to come get us. When we got in the car I immediately noticed that something was off. He was swerving a little bit and acting a little strange, but I couldn't tell what was going on so I just stayed quiet until we dropped off our friends. We got to my friends house and dropped them off and started on our drive home. He tried to talk to me like nothing was wrong and nothing had happened. At the time, we were cigarette smokers, so he asked me for a cigarette and out of anger I said "no, I want to talk about what you did tonight. That wasn't okay, we had plans and you ditched me." He started screaming at me about how he was just trying to have fun with his friends and how I ruined his night and it was all my fault, and then he started speeding like crazy. I quickly learned following that night that he starts to drive fast and dangerously when he's angry. I screamed at him to slow down because him being mad wasn't worth getting in a wreck, or worse getting our lives taken. He started acting manic and then I smelled his breath. He was drunk. I immediately panicked in my head. How could he put me in this situation? How could he put my friends in that situation? What if we crashed?
We got home and the screaming continued, on both sides. I was so angry and hurt, I didn't understand how any of this was my fault. I pleaded for him to calm down and hear me out, but instead he grabbed me by the wrists in anger; I tried to break free and skid my heels across the floor to break away, as I was sitting in a chair. He threw my hands to the side, yelled "f*ck you" and went to pass out in the bedroom. It was 2 or 3 in the morning at this point. I had a few drinks at my friends party, so I didn't want to risk driving, so I called my mom and asked her to come pick me up. Sobbing in my moms car on the way to my parents house in the middle of the night, my mom and I were heartbroken. I spent the night at their house, and didn't get much sleep at all. I woke up with swollen eyes and a broken heart. I went back to my apartment later that afternoon to talk with Hayden. There were skid marks on the floor from my shoes, and he was still asleep. He hadn't even woken up and realized what he had done yet. And when we did finally talk about it, he didn't remember almost any of it.
That day was an emotional one to say the least. I couldn't get out of bed. I was in a depressive funk and was questioning if marrying him was the right choice. That was the first time I realized it wasn't just an anger problem. He was abusive when he was angry. There was no talking myself out of it anymore. And I was scared. I didn't tell anyone that the fighting continued and got worse. He punched a hole in our wall and I had to lie to my friends and family and say it was from a piece of furniture we were moving into the bedroom.
It was hard to know what to do, because when he wasn't angry he would come to a place where he understood that he was wrong and that a change needed to happen. But when the same situation would present itself, he would react the exact same way. I tried my best to approach him in as many different ways as possible. I tried to come more lovingly at times, I tried to come more matter of factly, I took tools from therapy, I did everything I knew how at the time and each and every one of them failed. And he continued with the same behavior. It became harder and harder to come to him with a calm voice, as it became excruciatingly frustrating having to repeat the same conversations over and over again, and I would get blamed for his reaction because I came at him aggressively. When really, he reacted that way no matter how I presented myself.
There were so many nights I cried myself to sleep wondering if I made a mistake. I planned an escape route in my head just in case things got really bad. I just didn't know. And it was hard, because again, when he was good he was really good. But when he was bad he was REALLY bad. And it created this internal fight within myself. It began to become clear that it was more than verbal abuse and that it was more than anger management. There was something deeper there, but I was too scared to share that I felt that way, because he shunned the idea that he struggled with mental illness. So, I kept quiet.
Then really hard things started happening in our life. Our car would break down every few months and cost $1000 to fix and we wouldn't have enough to cover it. We got a ticket from a car Hayden abandoned years ago that cost us hundreds. Horrible things were happening at Hayden's work causing him to be stressed beyond belief. Then Hayden was fired from his job unjustly and jobless for a week and we didn't know how we were going to pay our bills. Family issues were occurring. Then we were completely car-less. We were barely squeezing by every paycheck and cried and fought over finances. I was in the hospital from a severe cooking oil burn. I was getting sick everyday from my anxiety. The next car we got was a blessing from my parents, but unfortunately another money guzzler and would break down every few months. I ate so much from all of the stress that I grew out of all my clothes and couldn't afford to buy more (I lightly talked about my binge and emotional eating disorder in my first mental health blog that you can check out here). I was at the mental health hospital and was ashamed of it for a long time. It just felt like nothing was going right and I was drowning in negativity all the time. And for every thing that would happen, Hayden would flip out, scream, yell, blame me for not having a job.
*This next part is something that's very hard for me to talk about in a public setting, so I ask for some sensitivity in this area.*
The state of our relationship made it hard for me to be sexually intimate with my husband, which caused a big rift. I wanted to be there emotionally and physically, but my body and mind weren't allowing me to. I couldn't be intimate when we weren't emotionally in a good place and when he was constantly verbally abusing me in fights. Hayden did okay with it for a while, but the sexual tension started building and I could tell he needed it. And for a while I gave in because, to be honest, I was fearful of him going elsewhere (there was a history of inappropriate behavior with him & women in the past and him not knowing where to draw the line), so to be honest I didn't fully trust him not to. I felt so guilty for not wanting to be intimate with my husband, and I beat myself up for it a lot and felt like a terrible wife.
Then one night, things really shifted. My own husband sexually assaulted me. I felt so violated, I felt so dirty, I felt used. I didn't even know you could feel this way with your own husband. I told him no over and over, but he persisted and kept touching me. And the fear of him going elsewhere sunk in, and then I just let it happen until it was over. In the moment I decided that would have felt better than him cheating on me. And the second it was over I started bursting into tears. He asked what was wrong and I told him "I told you no 3 times and you still persisted. I only continued because I felt guilty if I didn't." He immediately sunk into himself, looked at me with a face I'll never forget and said, "Oh my gosh...I just basically molested you, didn't I?" He started crying uncontrollably, as was I. And my body officially shut down. I couldn't be intimate with him anymore, even though I was craving intimacy.
I tried to chalk Hayden's behavior up to nothing but hard times and stress and what I thought could be a mental illness. I didn't really talk about it too much in therapy at that point because I was scared of what response I would get, so I would ever so lightly bring it up in a way that downplayed a lot of what actually happened. But I quickly realized that getting guidance and advice off of false statements wasn't going to get me where I actually needed. I opened up to my one on one therapist at the mental health hospital about a small portion of it to test the waters and build some trust before I decided to dive into what was really happening. I got a good reaction, but I still wasn't totally ready to bring it up. And a big part of that was I wasn't fully willing to admit that this was my life.
Hayden was good at admitting his wrong doings, but still failed to admit that his behavior was abusive in nature. I had a hard time explaining why, other than the way he made me feel. And that I couldn't shake the feeling that I felt abused. He had continued to hurt me over and over more than anyone in my entire life has ever hurt me, and that's all I could say. Then one day I was scrolling on social media and saw a trending hashtag called #MaybeHeDoesntHitYou. I began reading through them and identified with so many of them.
"#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but he makes you apologize because you get upset and "acted crazy" after he did something to hurt/upset you."
"#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but you're embarrassed to tell your friends what he's said to you because you know they'll ask "why are you still with him?'"
"#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but when you try to tell him how he makes you feel, it becomes what you did wrong & you walk away feeling guilty & invalidated."
There were so many more and I identified with so many of them. The second I saw this I knew this was how I was going to explain to him what he was doing. So I showed him. And to be honest his reaction shocked me. I was expecting a fight and yelling and screaming. And what I got were remorseful tears and apologies beyond belief. It was like the door had been opened and he finally saw what he needed to see. I had prayed so many days and nights and cried and pleaded for this day to come. I was coming to my wit's end, and right before I did, there was the change I needed.
I think the hardest thing about all of this is that when Hayden's in a clear head space, he can identify his wrong doings and identify his abusive tendencies. But when he's manic, all of that disappears and he's a different person completely. When we're fighting, I'm not fighting with my husband anymore. I'm fighting a raging monster that looks nothing like the loving husband I know and love. And that was the hardest part about whether to stay or not.
Today, he is much better and is truly truly working on himself. I have seen the biggest change in him and I really do see him making the changes. I can never expect a change over night. There are still times where he gets manic. But I feel like I have the tools to handle it better and he has the tools to stop himself and realize what he's doing now. He's making strides to find a doctor and find out his diagnoses, as he too now realizes there's something much deeper and a lot of signs of mental illness. And he is planning to get on medication for the time being and seek therapy. I am so proud of him for all the progress he's made, as it's not easy. I finally was able to fully open up to my therapist about what's been going on and we've been making tremendous progress and rebuilding what's been broken.
I think through all of this I realized abuse doesn't have a singular meaning. It doesn't have a certain face. It comes in all different degrees and all different shapes and forms. I made myself believe for a long time that it wasn't abusive just because I didn't see Hayden as an abuser. But what I realized is that not every person who is an abuser is abusive in every part of their life. I think we have this image that abusers are all around terrible people in every part of their life, and that's just not the case. They, too, have good sides and loving sides, that you see the potential of who they could be. And it makes it hard to leave. Luckily for me, my husband is working on it and realized who he was becoming and finally decided to act on it. But I realize not everyone in my situation is lucky enough to have that.
I know some of you might read this and think I should still leave. Some might think I'm brave. Some might think I'm an idiot. But what I know is that this is the right path for me. And with the help of my therapist and hopefully with the future help Hayden will be receiving, we can truly begin to heal and move forward. I know he is not his actions & I can see the desire & the drive to fix things. And for right now, that's all I can ask from an imperfect human being, trying to right their wrongs.
If any of you read this and can identify with my words, please feel free to reach out. I would love to be an open book for you.
Much love xx
Sara