[Nas]

Thank you, Treasur. In the middle of the night, just a few hours after it had happened, I was sorting my feelings on it but I should clarify that I wasn’t diminishing myself, if that makes sense. When I say he was further diminishing me by bringing it up, I think my frustration and anger was in the fact that – and I can speak with real authority on this unfortunately– sometimes survivors of long-term abuse just really want to be seen as people and not abuse survivors. I’m not talking about not having a support system or people they can lean on and talk to. We desperately need and want that but it’s one of the ways we we empower ourselves, by choosing who we want to let in to that side of ourselves and support us, and there’s a huge level of trust that needs to be there. Professional colleagues? I don’t want them seeing me as a Survivor, my work stands on its own. And I was lamenting the fact that he had even been witness to that part of my life.
Some part, you correctly point out, was a bit of shame that I was in that sort of marriage for so long without recognizing that it was abusive, but that shame didn’t take root last night because I have made tremendous strides in therapy, so it was more a bit of grieving for the old me that never had the childhood or relationship/marriage that I deserved, and when you learn that you have to be all of that for yourself and not rely on someone else, there’s grieving in that also.

But with this author, as I said, we’ve never had anything but a working relationship that ends every time a project ends. We don’t keep in touch in between. But he knew I was separated on the last book project a few years ago. And we have had many prep calls for this new project that gave him enough information to know that I am living alone and single.

I mean, what would he have done if he had asked me about such a personal painful memory and I had responded “oh no, he’s not gone, he’s right here. We’re giving it another go“? Or did he expect me to give him personal information about the whereabouts of my abusive husband or the status of our relationship? I mean I could ask a bunch more questions about his intent because there was really no purpose in him asking that question and there was no response that I would have felt comfortable giving him beyond what I did tell him, which was to reiterate that I live alone and I’m single. Again, not some thing I ever really should have to tell someone I’m working with.

We LBS meet and form varying levels of relationships based on sharing about a traumatic thing that happened in our life. But in real life, the people around us who don’t know us that well don’t get to just pry into our lives. It’s a flag I always recognize that usually ranges from a light pink to a bright red depending on the situation. Here I would not say it was glaring red but, again, there was no reason for the question other than “ hey I remember you used to be married to a guy who seemed like a real @$$hole…”

Again, any survivor of long-term abuse deals with issues of identifying as more than just their trauma. Anyone who has dealt with complex trauma desires support, people in their lives who can listen and be sounding boards and just care about them despite their past. It’s essential to healing. But the flipside of that is that it’s a label. It’s like a very heavy name tag made out of lead that weighs you down a tiny bit no matter what. I am so much more than my trauma and it would’ve been nice to just go into working on this project without having to wear the heavy label, without even having to think about it. He didn’t need to bring it up. He wasn’t seeking a solution, he wasn’t seeking to rectify anything. It wasn’t interfering with the project, it had nothing to do with anything. So it was just a reminder that when you endure abuse, no matter what situation you’re in and how much you’re kicking ass in it, some of your identity to other people will always be associated with that abuse. And again, it’s not done in a malicious way, but it’s a label that makes you “different” from everyone else, which is problematic because that being different is also part of past trauma. You don’t realize how heavy that label is until it’s hung on you.

[Treasur]

Sounds like your instinct was that his comment was about HIS needs and that you resent that uninvited intrusion. Sounds fair enough to me. And ok, regardless of his intent tbh.

Do you intend to do anything with your conclusions? Or adapt the professional relationship bc of it?

I get some of what you talk about with labels, but I have not experienced some of the things you have experienced so lots of it not so much. I am instinctively cautious of labels if only bc my experience is that humans are so much richer and interesting than how we label them. I can see that some people, at some times, find a given label affirming or motivating. And I would want to honour that if called on to do so. But I hated - in my darkest days - people ra-rahing me about being a ‘survivor’. Partly bc I didn’t feel like one. And it didn’t help me. Mostly bc I just resented being labelled bc of the effect of someone else’s behaviour; it didn’t feel like it belonged to me and I didn’t choose it as a shape of me. And yet it was true that I had survived some awful experiences that I thought I might not….and learned to value my own progress bc that motivated me….but I think perhaps it’s a difference between describing a situation as opposed to describing a person. So, for example, I had been a victim of damaging things done to me by others but I would not describe my persona as a victim if that makes sense. Both felt true to me. That label ‘weight’….I think I get that.

Sometimes just saying No (or f**k right off) even just in your own head is a rather good feeling, isn’t it? 

[Nas]

I think I’m at the point in healing where I’m learning to distinguish an instinct from a reaction, if that makes sense, so often I have to distance myself from the situation enough to make the distinction. Which I suppose means I still don’t trust my instincts entirely, understandably it’s a long process. I don’t really know what my gut was telling me quite yet but some part of me wonders if he just blurted that out because he felt like he should have said something back then. But I’m not going to spend time trying to get inside his head because that’s impossible.
I know we can’t control the labels people put on us. The existence of the label itself is beyond my control, my childhood happened, that led to the choices I made in later life…It just sucks sometimes. As I said, depending on where a person is in their healing, being labeled as a victim or survivor is akin to being labeled as “different” and can be triggering. A small child being made to feel different because they are being abused and not having anyone try to save them, that self-blame and “identity“ takes a lot of work to shed. You just want others to know that you’re more than that and if you had the choice, that wouldn’t be part of your identity. It’s not something I chose, but I’m choosing to heal from it because that’s the part I can control.

It goes to the rah rah survivor crap you mention. I always talk about how I can’t stand when people refer to cancer patients as a “warriors.” we don’t battle cancer, we get treated for it, and the people for whom treatment doesn’t work are not “losing.” Same thing with trauma. One aspect of trauma, particularly long-term complex trauma, is a desperate desire to be understood, that we don’t want to feel different, that we didn’t put ourselves in a position where we have to go through a grueling process to heal ourselves from something we didn’t cause. That it’s not our fault even when we spend so much time blaming ourselves. So when another person sees us through the lens of trauma and relates to us accordingly, it can feel a bit minimizing, condescending, or simply that we are not understood as a whole person. It’s pointing out that “different” part of us, the part that made us smaller and scared and unsafe. It’s almost like they are deciding for us how we were impacted, that by shining a light on painful parts of our history, they are telling us they don’t see past that, or that anything we accomplish in life is colored by that, anything we struggle with in life is colored by that… When we all know that trauma contains layers that sometimes we haven’t even reached yet. And like I said, one of the ways that we can empower ourselves in our healing is by choosing who we let into those layers, the ones we’ve already tackled and the ones we’re just uncovering, and how much of that they get to see.

Oh, and to answer the question, once I completely figure out my conclusions, I don’t know that I will do anything with them except business as usual. I hope and don’t think it will come up again, but I’m not in a position to lose this job so I guess I will face it if it does happen and go from there…

[Nas]

Every time I try to type the word vanisher, my phone changes it to banisher, which I realized is a little bit fitting since I feel like I’ve been exiled from my own being and have been making a long, harrowing journey back to self. 🤷‍♀️

Anyway I do have a quick vanisher story. I slept last night in a sleep lab, where they hooked me up to a whole bunch of wires and monitors to figure out what the hell is going on with my crippling insomnia.(I unfortunately did not even sleep long enough for them to get enough data.)

The sleep tech was a woman about my age. As she was hooking me up to about 7000 sensors, we got to chatting. She said the reason she trained to be a sleep tech was because years ago, she suffered from insomnia so bad she could not function. She said it was during a very stressful time, that her husband of 20 years had basically woken up one day, packed a suitcase and left. She was blindsided and devastated. She couldn’t sleep, and then when she did sleep, she was waking up feeling like she couldn’t breathe. She said she lived in hell for about two years before she finally went to the doctor, they sent her for a sleep study, she needed a job to keep herself busy and so she decided that she could train to be a sleep tech in a fairly short amount of time, and so now here she was, years later, hooking me up to 7000 sensors.

I did not tell her that I could sort of relate to her story. In fact, when she asked me if I was married, I simply said no. That’s how I answer that question more often than not these days. I asked her if she ever heard from her husband again. She said it’s been 8 years and he lives in their vacation house several states away. She’s never tried to see him. They are still married, he still deposits everything into their joint accounts, he’s never missed a mortgage payment, he still communicates with their financial planner and some things have been moved to solely her name. She has not seen or spoken to him since he left 8 years ago. She called him “the ghost who pays the mortgage.“

I asked if she misses him. She said, “I miss the ghost of him, but only because there’s no closure. If I saw him in the flesh, I don’t think I would miss him anymore. I don't think I'd think about him anymore if I just saw him one more time and had a conversation.” And that made a lot of sense to me.

The ghost of a vanisher lingers in a way that seems to almost taunt: “I’m always here in the farthest darkest corner.” That's a piece of what troubled me when the author brought up my husband's display of rage from years ago - it's never a good thing when the ghost of him pops up, and it's always when I least expect it. But if I’m being honest, I’m terrified of the day he shows up to divorce me. Not because I’m afraid of divorce. I’m afraid of how much worse he will make things for me - because he will. He can still hurt me in a number of ways, and that’s not just me giving him power, it’s a sad reality. And even if he has grown a conscience enough to not try to cause me any further damage, I know it will re-open a wound, no matter how much work I have done (and in terms of him, I feel very proud of the work I’ve done there. Emotionally, I let him go a long time. He can’t hurt me there, but he can cause damage in other ways.) In some sense though, it’s his ultimate abuse, like he’s out there somewhere holding a corner of the Band-Aid knowing he has the ability to rip it off as slowly and painfully as he wants, and I’m sure he loves that. 

https://youtu.be/T1OlkjTluU0?si=tWwmldYXELuzmByA
People are good
Whisper it under your breath

[MadLuv]

Hope this is ok to post, but ran across these articles I saved on escapism which I think is a huge factor in vanishers and wanted to share. One on thr unhealthy aspect vs healthy aspect

https://personalexcellence.co/blog/escapism/


https://abettermandotblog.wordpress.com/2023/07/26/would-you-rather-live-in-a-fairytale/

[Nas]

Just a quick anecdote. I knew in the early days there was a woman my former husband would have preferred over the OW (because she had a lifestyle he preferred), and I also know that he cheated on OW with this other woman. This was in the very, very early days, before I really knew what was happening.

Today I was scrolling through my Twitter “for you” feed, looking at my usual clips of baby animals ( and my latest favorite Twitter account, which is called View Porn and just posts pictures of various gorgeous locations around the world). A post from a local newspaper popped up with a story and I instantly recognized the picture. It was this woman that my husband cheated on OW with, and apparently she’s all over the news everywhere for basically being an evil unhinged sociopath.

My reaction to this was almost as though I was recognizing people I had seen on a TV show in my youth or people I knew a long long time ago. It evoked no emotion really.
Except this: I suddenly had the realization that all of the women that my husband was involved with in any way, shape or form just before and after BD were so much like my mother, it’s almost shocking to think of and has me feeling some kind of way about it. I never really put it together before. It’s almost like he hated me so much, like he was seeing me through the eyes of my mother who also hated me so much. I need to mull this over (or maybe I don’t need to but I’m curious) because it’s such a weird realization. He was truly the only person in the world I had talked to about my mother, and yet he was drawn to women like her. I wonder what Freud would say…

🎶 https://youtu.be/ALfcpiLDwJc?si=IgBImJy6ZYNXf-SU

[Nas]

“Attachment constrains our vision so that we are not able to see things from a wider perspective.” Dalai Lama

Upon reflection, I’ve decided it’s just a coincidence, the type of women he was drawn to. Though I’m not attached to him anymore, I have to admit that, at times, I am still too attached to the idea of assigning an answer to “what happened.” I admit it’s something I had to work on and it still pops up. I just wanted to update this for newbies, because you will have reminders, even years down the road, and the unanswered questions might remain unanswered questions forever. But there will come a time when it will be a passing “hmm” and not a persistent “WTF…”

[Treasur]

That makes sense to me, Nas.
I think the truthiest take is that very little of their crisis has anything to do with us, including their choice of ow/om. True too, I suspect, that there is an ow ‘tyoe’ and that this pool probably scores higher on some kinds of personality disorders bc, after all, what kind of people do what these folks do seemingly without much concern about the pain or damage they cause. Who seem to justify it or think it’s ok as a price of getting what they want at least. But whatever the MLC itch is that they feel so driven to scratch, it isn’t our itch, is it?

Good though that it only took you a short time to process that and look at it from a more detached pov. That’s the kind of thing that tells us we are not where we used to be, isn’t it?

[Nas]

I’m sitting here reading the Sunday news and the story about this woman has exploded even more. It’s wild. She is the kind of truly terrible person that scares the hell out of me because they just seem to have no ability to control their emotions. I think it makes sense that I was drawn to him because of my childhood, and so it makes sense that he would be drawn to people who are like the people from my childhood. So in a small way, it’s another piece of my own puzzle leading to forgiving myself for choices I made throughout my earlier life that were based on what I knew, because all I knew was trauma. I’m turning 50 this year and I’ve been grappling with the irony of finally believing I deserve a healthy relationship now that it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to experience it because of my circumstances, which are largely the results of choices I made over decades of living a disassociated existence. I don’t need a relationship to feel complete, but I do think that it could be extremely affirming to engage in a healthy, mutually “conscious” connection. Even if it didn’t last, the experience would be beneficial, a kind of proof of concept for little Nas who couldn’t even conceive of being loved  even fleetingly.

Funny how this one time OW inspired this line of thinking, and now that I think of it, it wasn’t even because of her connection to my ex but more her resemblance to my mother. The more I work through the old trauma, the less my former husband factors in, even with all the terrible things he did.  The weeds of trauma grew and overtook too many decades of my life but now I’m pulling them out at the root so what’s left of my life can grow into something better (that’s a clumsy garden metaphor in honor of you, Treasur 😉).
Anyway, I stumbled across a little bit of the buried MLC crazy, it spurred some thinking, and now I move on…

🎶 https://youtu.be/ZkJwpYrcAko

[Treasur]

Fwiw I think I think about trauma like bindweed