If you want to read my story from the beginning, click here.
Disclaimer: This post involves descriptions of domestic violence. I believe it is important to tell this part of my story to help readers understand why I was so concerned about my children’s safety once we separated and why I was so flabbergasted by the family court response to my allegations of abuse.
Seven years ago today I woke up confused. And scared.
The night before was the turning point in my marriage, the moment at which I knew I could never go back to not knowing how immensely screwed up our relationship was. I was pretty sure X wanted me dead. And I was terrified what would happen if I tried to leave.
The escalation had started about a month earlier. We had a planned trip to California to see my mom and step-dad, with a stop at Legoland in San Diego first. I had done what I always did before trips: planned every detail, created lists for everyone, and spent the entire day packing all of us up for the trip. Because I was becoming more aware of X’s disordered behavior, I did try to get him to pack for himself. But it seemed futile. The trip was a chance to put all of the chaos and drama on hold, to be with our kids, and to perhaps have one final cohesive memory for everyone. It’s amazing the lies we tell ourselves to survive.
Our day had been like a roller coaster, like most of the days around that time. He seemed to hear me in counseling, and then he would get mad at me for checking my March Madness bracket and ignoring him. We would seem united at the parent teacher conference, and then he would come home and harass me and tell me he needed me to “hold him like a baby.” That night, I was loading the kids into the car to go to soccer practice, when X said that he wasn’t coming – not to soccer practice, not to California.
I should have let him walk away. Instead, I stood in front of his car door and begged him to come with us.
“Then have sex with me tonight,” he said. It always, always came back to sex.
I was taken aback. The conversations, the sexual requests, always confused me, seemingly disconnected from whatever we were talking about. I once again pleaded with him to come with us, to reconsider his desire to leave.
“Get out of my way or I’ll push you out of the way.” It was a rare direct threat, and he immediately caught himself saying it. This should have cued me in to recognizing that he knew exactly what he was doing. But it seemed so impossible that this was all deliberate, that he was in far more control than he pretended to be. Catching his mistake, he followed with, “You’re so afraid I’m going to chop you up, so here’s a real threat.”
I hadn’t ever been concerned about being chopped up by my husband – which is a sentence I never expected to have to write. But I certainly became concerned about it after the comment. And yet I still didn’t leave. X came with us to soccer and then came with us to California, one of the worst vacations of my life, in no small part due to the fact that my younger son got the Flu on Day 2, and we were all stuck together in a hotel room for 5 days and couldn’t go to my mom’s because my step-dad had a heart attack. #storyOfMyLife
The night we returned from vacation, I was helping out with a fundraiser for my college, something I was paid to help with. X got angry that I wasn’t paying attention to him. I kept explaining I had to do my job as though I needed to explain why I didn’t deserve the treatment he was giving me. At 4 am the next morning, he woke me up to tell me that he was leaving me.
“Ok,” I said.
He woke me back up. “I want you to understand what I mean. I’m leaving you.”
What X wanted me to do, I believe, is panic. He wanted me to beg him to stay, just as I had a hundred other times. And he woke me up in the middle of the night to create the most extreme conditions possible. This was a torture technique. But I wasn’t interested in his games anymore. I let him leave, believing we were all safer if he abandoned us. By the time I woke up, I was getting texts from him to hire a babysitter to come meet him at a hotel. Instead, I called our marriage counselor, who by now was pretty annoyed with this whole situation. She didn’t understand why I didn’t just leave. That day would involve a car chase around the city, ending with me and the kids at a women’s shelter, being given a burner phone, and staying at a hotel to protect us.
And yet, IT STILL WAS NOT ENOUGH FOR ME TO LEAVE.
By this point, my support system was nearly non-existent. My parents were investors in our startup company, and I felt a responsibility to everyone to try to make this work. But it felt like it was becoming harder and harder to do so while keeping everyone safe.
X ended up coming home.
But then something did happen, something I could no longer deny. I knew I was afraid of X, but I was having a hard time articulating it. I was going to therapy twice a week, seeing a psychiatrist every other week, attending marriage counseling. My own counselor told me that the police wouldn’t help me. My psychiatrist wanted me to file a police report. The marriage counselor, unbeknownst to me, had told my counselor that I needed a safety plan. But no one really told me what to do to protect myself. I knew very little about protection orders. And I wouldn’t have even known what to put in one. (It’s why I try to help women who are trying to figure out how to leave – I had no one to talk me through it.)
That night, April 30, 2016, I was getting the kids ready for bed, as I always did. They were putting on pajamas, and I was reading them a bed time story. X called me into one of the back bedrooms, where he was sitting in a rocking chair in the dark.
“We need to talk about our marriage,” he said.
I agreed. “Just let me finish putting the kids to bed.” My heart started to race. I knew we needed to talk, but the way he was sitting, the tone of his voice, sounded menacing. I was afraid. Just breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.
When the kids were in bed, I let him know that I was free. He said he needed a minute. I walked into our bedroom and used every anxiety calming tool I had. I knew that I needed to stay detached, unemotional, even if he would criticize me for it.
I heard him walking down the hallway. Deep breaths. He stopped at the door to our bedroom. In his hand was a two foot long rope that I had used to make my kids’ Santa bags a few years prior. He stared at me and slowly started to thread the rope through his fingers. He would pull it through and then start again.
I tried to stay calm. “Why do you have a rope in your hands?” I asked, trying to feign ignorance.
“Oh, no reason,” he said. He tossed the rope behind his head and walked toward the bed. “I’m going to sleep now.”
And that was it.
It’s been seven years, and I still feel like I need to explain to people why that was so terrifying. He didn’t make an actual threat. But I knew exactly what it meant. And yet, how would I get police protection for “he threaded a rope through his fingers and didn’t say anything.” He knew what he was doing. He knew it then. He knows it now.
Six days later, in the safety of our marriage counselor’s office, I told him I wanted a divorce.
He stood up and walked out.
I didn’t know that while it was the end of our marriage it was the start of five years trapped in a family court nightmare.
They say “it” takes a village. Mostly I think they mean child-rearing, but I think it takes a village to leave, especially if you are in an emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise abusive relationship. Your world is distorted. You don’t know if you can trust yourself or your experiences. You minimize everything, not giving potentially dangerous circumstances the weight they truly deserve. You need people. And yet, people are often systematically removed from your life so that in that moment of despair, you have no one to turn to.
One of the first women who gave me hope that I might be able to leave, that divorce was a possibility, isn’t even really a friend. She was an acquaintance, a business relationship. And all she did was tell me she had gotten divorced. The world didn’t collapse. No one thought she was a failure. She was happy. I hadn’t yet had my epiphany that I was in an abusive relationship. But I knew I was unhappy, that something was wrong. And this woman, and all of the women who helped her make her decision, gave me hope.
Another woman I’ll call Amber I met one winter afternoon at a Country Club luncheon fundraiser. We happened to be seated next to each other, serendipitously. She would become my life line to resources and domestic violence advocacy. I reached out to her when things started to get crazy. She had shared parts of her own story on Facebook, and as I started questioning what was really happening, she was one of the only people I knew to ask. She may have been the person who first talked to me about narcissism.
Another friend I met through a work project met me for coffee. I needed to know that I could get a divorce, that I would be ok. She gave me one of the best pieces of advice I have maybe ever gotten. She asked me what percentage of the time I deserved to be happy in my marriage. “Everybody’s number is different. Mine was 80%.” I thought about it and agreed that 80% sounded like a solid number to aim for. It also made the process far more objective. I could take my heart out of the situation completely and focus only on this data point. I wasn’t happy 80% of the time. Not even close.
The other woman was my marriage counselor, who, by this point, had figured out that I wasn’t in a situation that could be helped by traditional psychotherapy. She was recommending antipsychotics for my ex-husband. I would find out months later that she had even reached out to my individual counselor to tell her she was afraid for my life and that I needed a safety plan. I’ve heard many people in the narcissistic abuse recovery groups talk about how unsuccessful marriage counseling is, how easily conned the therapist is. And I believe that is true for many people. But my marriage counselor got it. She saw through him. And eventually she told me the words I needed to hear to be able to leave. “He’s an abuser. This is what abusers do.”
I’d love to know about the women who helped you leave. Tell me more in the comments!
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Click here to read my Family Court nightmare from the beginning. (This series talks about domestic violence and abuse. Please take care in reading.)
The madness continued, especially because I wasn’t letting go of my concerns like I had for the past ten years. The first time I said I was going to leave, my older son was 2. I talked myself into courage, walked into the house, and told X I wanted to separate. Within an hour, he had spun the conversation so that he was the one leaving me and had me pleading with him to stay. Then there was the time that I discovered an email he had written to a corporate video game company asking for his account back after they kicked him off their platform – but the facts he presented were a giant lie. He had leveraged our home burning down and my getting sick but twisted the facts and even made up family members of mine who don’t exist. I thought I was done then. Instead, X agreed to get a brain scan and go to rehab (he was spending 10s of thousands of dollars on video games a month without my knowing).
I wasn’t so easily swayed this time. I wasn’t latching on to a new shiny solution or fix. I was collecting information, trying to untangle a decade of “love.”
A week after the Women of the Year banquet, we got into another round of circular conversations. By this point, I was keeping notes for myself on a Locked Notes app on my phone. I needed the proof for myself that things were as bad as I believed them to be. As we were talking, X would say things like “I’m not manipulating. You might think this is manipulative, but it is not.” [Oh yeah, sure Jan.] When I mentioned the abuse that I was still trying to figure out, he would say, “You have to stop living in the past.” What I wrote one night to myself was “I am afraid. Challenging X means fear, crazy-making, blame. Our whole relationship is built on him manipulating me for sex.”
I’m a little uncomfortable writing about the sexual abuse. What I will say for now is that it was very common for X to call sex with me “rape” as though it were a joke we were both in on. I spent hours, days, weeks of my life talking about X’s genitals and his related problems down there! This information matters because of what I did next.
I still didn’t quite believe that things were as awful as they actually were. I needed facts and data so that I could base my decision to leave (or stay) on sound logic and not some vague feeling that things were bad. So I woke up one morning and decided I would do an experiment to see how far X would take things (I’m not sure I recommend this strategy).
X was lying down next to me, groping me, saying things like “I know you like this. This is what you want.” I felt nauseated.
I agreed to have sex. And then I started apologizing (I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to see what would happen). I asked X how I could be the wife for him. X told me to get rid of all of the guys who want me. Look, that sounds flattering. But I was a size 16/18 married mother of two who was barely allowed to talk to friends. I didn’t exactly have a secret line of men waiting to f* me. But anyhow.
I kept telling him that I would get rid of men. I told him that I was going to lay in bed all day, every day and wait for him to be ready to have sex with me. In my mind, I was waiting for him to stop, to tell me he didn’t want me to be a sex doll. Instead, he started crying and told me that was the only thing he ever wanted from me. He was so happy. “[Therapist] is going to be so shocked that we figured out our relationship problems in a couple of weeks.” To him, our problem was that I was a living, breathing human with thoughts and feelings of my own.
I’m married to a psychopath.
That’s what I wrote. In that moment, I knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t solvable by marriage counseling. And if he was a psychopath, I was likely in grave danger. And so were my kids.
We went to marriage counseling that day. While we were in the waiting room, I went to the bathroom. I wrote “help” on the back of an index card and slipped it under the door of our therapist. She came out and met me in a small powder room. Tucked in around the toilet, I lost it. I was crying and shaking.
“Are you being abused?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I didn’t know. Abuse looked like being hit, bruises, choking, stuff you could hold onto, prove. This was… something else.
Later that afternoon I went to my individual counselor. Things felt so crazy and out of control that I started seeing her twice a week on top of weekly marriage counseling.
“I guess that’s what I’ll do,” I said to her. “Just lay in bed and wait for him until I figure out what else to do.”
Thankfully she cautioned me against this approach.
I once again steeled myself, pulled out the courage that was still inside me, just stuffed way way down, and I went home. I walked into my bedroom where X had been masturbating, waiting for me.
“Listen asshole. Either you learn to respect my boundaries and treat me like a woman who deserves love and respect or you get out of my house.”
I still didn’t leave.
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As my world began to unravel, and I started to question everything that I believed about my family and the previous ten years of marriage, I started researching. The problem was that I was terrified of X. He seemed to know where I was, what I was doing, and who I was talking to AT ALL TIMES. How was I going to research my situation without him finding out (just as a PSA – if you are worried about how to google without enduring the wrath of your husband, I give you FULL permission to read that as a huge RED FLAG and get the hell out of there!).
I wasn’t sleeping much as it was, my anxiety about the situation growing. The problem with waking up to the reality of an abusive marriage is that once you are aware, you have to do something about it. You CAN stay, but even that becomes a choice once you are cognitively awake. X liked to stay up until the early hours of the morning before going to sleep. So I would wake up about 4 am, sneak downstairs, curl up on the couch, and hide under a blanket so he couldn’t see the websites I was visiting if he did wake up. I wasn’t certain whether there was a keylogger on my phone monitoring my web traffic – I considered it at least a high possibility. But I needed information, so I took the chance.
I don’t remember how I got to narcissism from my search terms. Despite growing up in a toxic and abusive family system, narcissism wasn’t a word I was particularly familiar with. Boundaries were definitely not a part of our vernacular! One of the websites I found was Out of the Fog, which helps those whose family members have personality disorders. I read a lot of personal stories there, which finally gave me the words to describe what was happening. It’s one of the reasons I share my story. Reading academic text is fine, but it’s others’ stories that truly connect us and help give us the strength to make different choices.
One early morning, I found Tina Swithin through One Mom’s Battle and her book Divorcing a Narcissist. While I was becoming aware that there was probably no way forward in my marriage, the One Mom’s Battle blog showed me what I would likely face if I decided to get a divorce. X had sent me something he called a Holographic Postnuptial Agreement that gave me full custody and all of our assets. But I didn’t trust anything he said anymore, and I didn’t know how the court would intervene even with that document. X also said on several occasions that if we got divorced, the kids and I would never see him again (spoiler alert: he lied).
I’m going to jump ahead a bit in my story, and I will go back in another post and fill in the gaps. After I asked for a divorce, I scheduled a call with Tina. I didn’t know what a divorce coach was. In 2016, I don’t think that’s what we were calling them. All I knew is that she had been there and that I needed validation. A LOT OF VALIDATION.
Some people use divorce coaches regularly. That wasn’t quite my strategy. I needed someone to hear how crazy things were, let me know that I wasn’t out of touch with reality or overbearing for wanting to protect my kids. I also found that Tina Swithin knew strategies and techniques (like asking for a nail test instead of just a hair follicle test for drugs).
When my ex-husband’s parental rights were terminated, one of the first phone calls I made was to Tina. I think I was a blubbery mess! I wanted her to know that I was free and that I couldn’t have done it without her.
Tina and One Mom’s Battle now train others to become high-conflict divorce coaches. I am certified through her program, the High-Conflict Divorce Coach Certification Program. Tina has taken the knowledge she has gotten from One Mom’s Battle, from Divorcing a Narcissist (Sociopath) and made it accessible to many more of us. I have the knowledge of my own divorce and family court battle, but I also have the collective knowledge from Tina and all of the other high-conflict divorce coaches who have been through the program.
I will forever be grateful to her for sharing her story, for finding her one early Spring morning, curled up under a blanket, not knowing where to turn.
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It should have been the highest moment of my life, being recognized as one of Idaho’s Women of the Year at the age of 34.
Instead, it was one of my lowest.
Outwardly, I had achieved everything. I had helped lead the social media campaign that raised $12 million to save my college. I was married to a seemingly successful entrepreneur who had invented virtual reality technology that got us meetings with Disney, Samsung, Google, Intel. I had two beautiful children.
I had outer success, external validation.
But inside? Inside I was a mess.
It had been a mere week or two since my aha moment where I had entertained the possibility that I was in an abusive marriage. After I had gotten home that day, I started keeping track of all of the bizarre goings on with my husband.
“I think I’m being emotionally abused,” I said to him, still unsure what to even call the last ten years of marriage. I thought if I told him that his behavior was abusive, he would change. Or I would fix him. My husband had a way of making you think he was incompetent instead of deliberately manipulative. And then we could go on pretending that everything was fine. I would still have to ignore the multiple Ashley Madison accounts and the emails I had found soliciting women on Craigslist. In my mind, those weren’t character problems. They were impulsive one-offs. At least that’s what I believed until that February day.
Bizarrely, my husband said in response, “I’m so happy. I’m so happy.” It seemed like an odd thing to say after your wife tells you they are concerned there is a decade of abuse to untangle. “You will be honest with me now” he added.
He then got down on one knee (which is more than he did when we got engaged, to be honest) and said “If I change, will you marry me in six months?” I think he was trying to distract me, turn my focus to planning a vow renewal. But I wasn’t interested in that, not this time. I was already starting to see that words weren’t enough. I’d have to see actual behavior changes.
Over the next week, he would say things like “I can sense people’s emotions so I know when you are lying to me” or “Everyone thinks you’re a bitch.” It was unnerving, at best.
What I started to notice were the ways I was being forced to stay in constant contact with him. If he sent me a text and I waited even ten or fifteen minutes to respond, he would accuse me of ignoring him or doing something deceptive to undermine him. Once we started talking, I would endure ongoing rants that could last for thirty minutes to an hour – or longer. It was exhausting.
On the night of the Women of the Year banquet, my mom, sister, husband, and the few friends I still managed to stay in touch with came to honor and celebrate me. I already knew that my husband hated that I was getting this award. He thought it should be him (even though he wasn’t a woman). He especially hated that a man nominated me for the award. All day long, he sulked about my being recognized. And then once we got there, he started acting like I was going to be given an even bigger award. I knew that I wasn’t. And I wondered if he was trying to set me up for disappointment.
It was finally time for all of the honorees to be called on stage and individually recognized for our contributions over the previous year. I stood in the dark behind the stage with my head down. I’m a fraud. I don’t deserve this. How can I accept an award when I can’t even stand up for myself?
It would be easy to blame X for those thoughts. He certainly made me feel small and undeserving. But these weren’t his thoughts – not anymore. These were mine.
I looked like I had it all from the outside. But no one could see the inner turmoil and struggle. If I was the strong woman they were about to celebrate on stage I would leave. But if I was the good girl, the pleaser, the fixer, the person I believed that the world truly wanted me to be, I would stay.
I held back my tears and plastered my fake smile across my face as they announced my name. Wife. Mother. Leader. Friend. Imposter.
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In 2016, after 10 years of marriage to a controlling man, I looked tired all the time. I felt dead inside. Eventually the joy did come back, but it took a lot of work!
I was in an abusive marriage for 10 years. But I didn’t know it.
On February 18, 2016, my life changed. I woke up, or I pulled myself out of the fog, as they say in narcissistic abuse communities.
X and I had a startup together. At one point I walked away from running it, but eventually, I got sucked back in, managing the day-to-day operations, trying to secure funding, and giving away all of my money to my partner to fulfill his dreams. As a startup founder, I was invited to a local networking group that met weekly-ish. That February morning, I dropped the kids off at school and rushed into town to meet up with the group.
Several years prior, half of my face had been suddenly paralyzed (a couple of months after my house burned down and a few weeks after my first son was born). It wasn’t a good year! When I got to my networking group, one of the other founders also had Bell’s Palsy, the facial paralysis. While we talked a bit about business, I also talked to him about what helped me and my own health journey after.
I left the co-working space and walked out into the chilly winter day. My plan was to get in my car and head home to work. As I was walking down the street, I was thinking about how to hide this meeting from X. I knew he didn’t like it when I attended.
What if he finds out?
Those words initiated the alarms in my head. It was as though the batteries to the smoke detector had been dead for far too long, and that phrase was a brand new rechargeable set that alerted me to the fact that the fire was in the building.
What if he finds out?
I stopped and stared at the concrete. Was I in an abusive marriage? Was I in a controlling relationship? Was my husband creating fear and doubt in all of my relationships to isolate me so that I would depend on him, and him alone? Why would he get mad at me for attending a business meeting, especially one that was for the benefit of his company? In part, he didn’t want me attending alone. Wherever we went, it had to be together, always in sight of X to monitor my movement and behavior. Part of it was that he wanted to be the one invited. The product was his idea. Why was I the one to be asked to join the group? But mostly, it was because there were men there.
I was in my mid-thirties. Why was I not allowed to speak to other men?
This was my aha moment, the one that shifted everything else that would come after. It was the moment I started to question if I was in an abusive marriage. It was the first step in getting out. It was the thought that had me retracing the previous ten years, sifting through my memories looking for every red flag as though I were a contestant on Double Dare on Nickelodeon.
I believe our lives are made up of critical junction points that define our Befores and our Afters. That day, that moment, that thought, was one of the most important pivot points of my life.
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