Worse Is Better

So therapy is doing good, the talking is good. I always knew I needed the conversation, I love conversation, but I didn’t know how much it was missing my life. I used to talk to anyone, about anything. I even made games of it when I was younger, a game I find myself playing again. I just always needed to talk, and I am finally getting a chance to re-establish that back in my life, after so many years of being ignored. I have even found myself re-establashing some connections with friends that I have not talked with in quite some time. I need more of this in my life, the conversations, the connections, the just feeling like someone else in my life wants to understand me, that they are listening, and it isn’t just superficial. These conversations have me playing “ask me anything” again with my friends. Really, I love to talk, or write. I love to express and just get the words out. Word vomitting, a phrase I have borrowed from another friend of mine.

The therapist has given me little daily tasks, prompts for each day as to little things to write about. All of them positive. Much of it seems to be related to some research I read about ages ago on the effects of diaries. The short and skinny was that writing about positive events in a diary help re-enforce a positive worldview, and writing about negative events help reenforce a negative world view. That people that regularly keep diaries (and to a large degree participate in “bitch fests”) ended up having worse mental health than those whom don’t unless they selectively avoid writing about negative events or they destroy the copies of the negative events once they are written. After I mentioned this research to my therapist they had a book their desk called Burn After Writing which reflects this same premise.

One of the topics my therapist has brought up was gaslighting and understanding and identifying it. I generally knew, or thought I knew, what gaslighting is as I am familiar with the movie Gaslight which the term stems from. Still, my therapist gave me a worksheet which helps define the whole concept and identify various things people do that we associate with Gaslighting. Of the 8 items on the sheet, 5 where all things my spouse has done to me with some regularlity with a 6th item that is hard to say if they were actively doing or if I always just felt it was implied by their past behavior.

• Denial: The gaslighter tells the victim an event or conversation didn’t happen, or didn’t happen the way the victim remembers it.

  This has been a constant oddity in our relationship, and I didn’t realize how bad it was until I had to go collect emails between by spouse and myself to refute their latest claimsin their declaration (more about that later). Ultimately, my spouse regularly would try to re-order events, or change events. I ended up keeping every email and ever chat log I could simply because it was my only defense against their regular alteration of history. More frustrating is that, whenever they got caught altering events, they would insist that they simply hadn’t remembered it that way and that their confusion over events is what lead to them being embittered about things; those statements are also captured in emails from my spouse to myself.

• Distraction: The gaslighter interrupts the victim or tries to change the subject.

  My spouse did this less often as a verbal distraction, though that did happen occasionally, but the primary method they would use to attempt to distract a conversation was also one of the things I regularly felt the most hurt by. Their regular usage of sex as a way to stop, redirect, distract, deflect any conversation they were not in the mood to discuss; which was quite often. When it wasn’t sex it was some random topic. We would be discussing a problem and they would suddenly start reflecting on some random research article I had mentioned, or some comment from a self-help video we had watched together and they would try to talk about this semi-related topic instead of the topic at hand.

• Ignoring/Avoidance: The gaslighter refuses to engage in conversation with the victim or address their concerns.

  This was pretty much ever day. We couldn’t have “how do you feel” conversations, we couldn’t talk about the past, we couldn’t work on anything, we couldn’t build a relationship. My spouse was regularly upset that I wanted to discuss our boken past and work through the hurt, instead they wanted to just “move on” and never discuss the past ever again.

• Minimization/trivialization: The gaslightr makes light of a serious situation or accusation.

  Again, my spouse insisted that having conversation was something that only happened in relationships that were not “meant to be”.

  Similarly, during one of my spouses attempted affairs (as opposed to one of their successful ones) they attempted to downplay the whole thing because they hadn’t actually done anything at that point and so it wasn’t really an affair. I had to explain to them that what an emotional affair was and why in some cases it was more damaging than a physical affair.

• Projection: The gaslighter accuses the victim of the very behavior in which they are engaging.

  This was not really common in our relationship, but spectacularly my spouse has leveraged this to a significant degree in their Declaration to the court. One of my regularly complaints about our relationship was that the regularity with which my spouse would break promises, go back to procrastination, or try to have an affair was happening more and more often. Yet my spouse has tried to claim a revised version of this complaint in which they claim it was all about the regularity with which I was “raving”. It was a pretty shocking claim to be made considering we have DKIM signed emails going back almost 2 decades which refute this, and every other claim they tried to make in their Declaration.

• Threats: The gaslighter threatens a negative outcome for not trusting them or their perspective.

  This is one of those wishy/washy ones for me. My spouse never really made explicit threats, they never really talked much at all about anything really. Instead they were talking to other people and threatening me in their discussions to them. The plans they were going to do, the ways they were going to hurt me. You know, things like, turn our children and friends against me, leave me with all the debt, and then get the court to fource me to pay maintenance. So it is a little weird because there was always this implication that they were going to simply repeat whatever thing they did last time when they didn’t get their way; which they eventually always did.

So yah, my spouse was gaslighting me for pretty much our entire relationship and I never realized it…

With some guidance from a life-long friend I have attempted to reach out to our children again. I have tried to avoid sounding like I am attacking their other parent, that I am insanely sorry things had to go this way, and that I still love them all, more than anything else in the world. Still no response, but I am hopeful that one day I will hear from them again.

So far as work, I am currently taking every Monday off, which is going to destroy my PTO, but it is for the better really. It is a little weird, but I feel like I am more productive this way. I have been trying to understand what it is, and I really just think 5 days of grind is too much back-to-back “not for myself” time. I don’t think my brain is recovering after only 2 days of break after 5 days of work-stress. Right now I am working 4 days, and so I am taking on less work related stress, so there is less to decompress from. Once the weekend starts I don’t feel like I want to just sit around. Yes, I do spend some time decompressing, playing games, and ignoring life for a little bit, but I do end up doing more around the house, doing more for myself. I also get all day Monday to do personal items when the rest of the world is operating on a 9to5 shift. Basically I take on less work related stress, I decompress/recover faster on my weekend, and I am more productive in attending “me” on the weekends. By the time I get back to work I am really excited about working and so I start early and end up working longer. Curiously, I think I have been working more hours at work doing a 4-day work-week than I did when doing a 5-day work week, and I have been enjoying doing it.

Lastly, my spouse has decided to change their story, writing a fairly massive Declaration and asking the court to issue a temporary motion in order to start receiving maintenance. The declaration isn’t something I can even discuss in a single post, it is just that large. They have also decided to alter their story, for the worse, make up huge swaths of lies which they self-contradict within their own declaration, and made false claims about our finances. What is fundamentally amazing about this path of escallation that they have taken is that, this is a divorce in public courts, which means everything they say, and all of my response, is more public than this blog. Names, dates, other parties involved, the declarations, all of it becomes public record in public courts. They have chosen to make a huge swath of claims, and I am stuck refuting all of them, with any evidence I can provide to do so, and it will all end up in public record.

On one side of things, it was spectacular to see my spouse suddenly make out-right lies. In the past my spouse has, so far as I am aware, mostly only practiced lies of omission to other people, but in their declaration they have flat out simply made stuff up. Some of it is fairly spectacular because, as mentioned, they contradict themselves within their own declaration. The most interesting thing about their Declaration is that they did not spend almost any time discussing the divorce, but instead attacking posts on this blog. They also claimed to have attempted a cease-and-dissist which I have no knowledge of; I am not even certain their claim is true. On the flip side, they did eventually get me the codes to the safe; a month after they left, after cards were all cancelled, after I no longer needed them, and after my spouse apparently this blog…

They also did enroll our youngest in an online school so that they could finish highschool, again, apparently after reading this blog; we are trying to get enrollment confirmation which will also tell us the date in which our child was enrolled.

Soooo, in the end:

• I am in therapy, and medicated.. I would rather not need to be doing these things, but for now this is my new reality.

• I have been learning how to re-evaluate my failed marriage and really see how insanely unhealthy it really was, both financially and mentally.

• My spouse has decided to raise the bar on their claims, which again, will need a whole slew of posts to even address and come to terms with. While these claims are full of misinformation, sight of hand, and some outright lies, in the end they are all claims that can be refuted, with evidence and it goes into public record. So as hurtful as it is to have my spouse demonstrate their willingness to continue attacking and hurting me, they have actually done me a favour as they have made claims which I can disprove, in court, via the emails they wrote to me in the past. And I will be able to point at this case and present evidence to my friends and family that my spouse’s claims where all lies that they used to justify their behavior when they left; which is looking more and more like it is only about money.

As bad as it is, it is actually doing better in a weird kinda way.