Or, as my husband so eloquently put it, “I don’t beat you. Anyone else would beat you.”
He is correct. He has never and probably will never beat me.
However… abuse is not ONLY physical abuse (which I will go into in other posts). But in this post I want to address what I am now realizing is under-recognized physical abuse.
For 15 years I have told him that it hurts a LOT when he grabs me by my shoulders. He grabs and squeezes HARD on my collarbone until I scream in pain. He will do this when we are in the car, during a massage, standing in line at the grocery store, at a friend’s house, pretty much anywhere and for no particular reason.
He says he just “loves me so much he wants to squeeze me”, but I have been telling him for 15 years that it causes me extreme pain when he does it. The fact that he STILL does it (REGULARLY) after being told it hurts me for FIFTEEN YEARS… makes it abuse. Once is an accident. Twice? Ok… You forgot. After that… it is a conscious decision to inflict pain on someone. The fact that the response is anything other than an apology and change of behavior… is abuse.
Another fine example is pain inflicted “while he’s sleeping”. I have been choked, punched, had my knee dislocated, been kicked, bruised, and otherwise injured while he was “sleeping”. At first, I blamed it on PTSD from the military or sleepwalking type behavior or other such things. But I have recently tested the theory and realized that while he claims to not remember his actions because he was sleeping…. he can conveniently “correct” my memory of events if I change a fact about the “sleeping” event.
And again… I have never gotten an apology after any of these injuries only anger, deflection, blame, excuses… never an apology.
The shoulder/collar bone thing is only one example of many instances where I have repeatedly told him that something hurts and for 15 years he has chosen to do it anyway.
But I think one of the worst was after I broke my back. I had a horse wreck that fractured a vertebrae and I still have issues with it. I can’t wear pants that press on that area or lean on anything in that area. Nerve ablations have helped with the pain, but before I had started those, if you pressed on that area of my back, my legs would go numb and go out from under me.
He thought it was funny to “smack me on the @$$” but he would hit high… hitting me in the lower back causing my legs to go completely numb and making me collapse/fall. On one such occasion, he did this and I fell head first into the corner of the refrigerator.
I was angry. I yelled. I reminded him that I had repeatedly told him not to do that. He yelled back that he was just trying to be affectionate and then made the argument about how I am never affectionate. Deflecting the conversation away from his abuse and making him the victim.
IT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT IF IT HAPPENS MORE THAN TWO TIMES.
IT IS ABUSE.
The 13th Year 