From Hell.

This recording was made in 2019. 

My husband...

I was still trying to process what had happened - how he had stayed behind after work to have sex with a colleague. When I made this recording he had promised that the relationship was over.

Except?

It really didn't feel like it!

And I needed to know the truth. 

I didn't feel loved, I certainly didn't feel valued. I also felt terror. I had believed that I'd only got through what had happened because I knew that I was loved....if that wasn't so, if I wasn't loved, then how could I continue...

The audio recordings were instrumental in my recovery. 

Truth creates choice.

I'd urge anyone going through awful experiences to make the recordings, keep them safe, and when it's all over - listen to them. It is truly a difficult thing to face, and it took me many listens to begin to hear that one person requesting emotional truth from another, isn't out of order...

This lesson segments into what came next! [+]

Looking back at some older posts, I came across my description of how any attempt from me to get to the truth of things, would end. His threats to walk out when I tried to talk about how I needed the truth, went beyond my threshold of endurance. I believe now that he did this to prove his point 'that I was too mad'. 

He and his colleague ran the same narrative as justification for lying. She portrayed her husband as violent and irrational. 

And he said what about me? 

That I'd just go on and on, and would always be crying...I guess.

The shared fictions were important and precious for him. The fantasy made the drama of sex in the car so much more exciting.

But lying creates cognitive dissonance, and that is devastating for me.

Weaponized epistemic injustice...

Otherwise known as gaslighting.

It took me seven months to unravel, to get to this place. Seven months of sensing the truth, and trying not to believe it - because if I was right, it meant that I was being lied to.

Seven months to stop telling myself that I was imagining things. 

And I couldn't just shut up.

I would not let him verbally abuse me without showing him how much it hurt me, without speaking up for myself. At the time I wouldn't sacrifice my core sense that the visions I had, the feelings I had were true. I would not internalize his view, I would not call myself mad. 

But it was a close thing.

It feels so much safer to blame yourself, take the Citalopram, be good...shut up!

In May 2020 I discovered that he had been lying to me for a year about ending the relationship and that in November 2019 he had started  'giving her lifts home' and going into her house while her husband was away.

When I found out the truth the feeling of relief was indescribable. I would be OK

My visions and feelings had been startlingly accurate. 

Everything now made sense. .

But back in November 2019 when it really started up again ? The sense of it, the aura of it, the feeling of it made me feel as if I was living with Blue Beard. 

Intuition and common sense had placed the key in my hand, and I kept on trying to open the door so I could see what was actually happening, so I could take back control of my reality. 

He knew that I'd would never have agreed to marry a Bluebeard - he knew that. So he'd lied to me when I asked him to tell me why I should be his, before I agreed to marry him. It took me 25 years to understand suddenly that I had seen it...I had known his true identity.

In the Bluebeard story, the locked room contains the bodies of the murdered wives. The wives who had to open the door to find out...Bluebeard demands that you never know what he is really up to, or what he has done. Because if you do find out, you will be another body hanging off the meat hook inside his room! 

By November 2019 he was murdering his love for me, murdering his image of me as 'the one'.  

He knew that I had the key (But I didn't know this!). But the recording isn't of a wife being complicit and unknowing....

And when he knew that I knew, he knew that he would have to kill me...

And yes, he tried it, he told himself it was an accident? He told me that 'he'd just been so angry'...meaning that I had to believe that he hadn't meant it.

I remember cowering by the radiator, completely lost, pleading for help....I was out of my mind at that point. He had tried to kill me. He said it was an accident. I wanted to believe that, I couldn't accept the truth...not at that moment, the shock and fear were too much. 

I'd gone into the final stage - fawning...

It is interesting that before he tried to kill me I'd felt the possibility and accepted it...

So when I think of Kit saying, 'how was it when you handed over to your husband' it makes me want to curl up and howl in frustration and fear - because that fear has not gone, will never go! 

21st November 2019. 

Please!

A word I've been using a lot.

Please.

Please don't do this, please don't be angry, please hear me, please help me.

Please don't be angry comes before.

Before terror, before Hell.

And I'm not hysterical yet, I'm not in terror, not yet.. 

I know that if he speaks to me with disdain and voice full of warnings I am going to start keening, I cry as if bereft, a woman weeping for her lost love. I cannot understand what has happened, who took my beloved from me? 

Why is this man treating me in such a cold, cruel way? 

I say, "Please, don't talk to me in that way" and he walks out the room.

That's when the keening begins; grief overwhelms me, the full weight of abandonment. I am a child again and no one will come...I cannot, will not accept his disdain - but by speaking up I open the gates of Hell.

The pattern is old and entrenched, and I am well into despair. 

"Please don't do this" is when he puts on his coat and says, his voice quiet and low "I'm going". 

That is when the tsunami of panic hits me and I shatter. 

At this point I will not, cannot let go of him. 

I hold onto his legs, I am hysterical. 

He says - voice controlled, quiet and low "let go, fuck off, just get off me" and I'm screaming in terror. As his tone becomes more angry he shouts at me "I can't even leave my own house, fucking hell, just fuck off!" My eyes are shut, I'm holding on to the fracturing edge of the universe. I'm holding onto nothing, no one. No hand reaches out. No kind word is given. Between my arms, he is nothing except a tiny shard of splintering mirror glass. Hologrammatically it contains all my memory of love. It fixes me above psychic dismemberment and crushing, above the taste of blood, above my absolute ending. 

I am hanging above slow grinding cog wheels into which I will fall if I let go.

I cannot let go...

The end of pain is nothing to fear, end of all hurt. 

I want him to kill me.

He isn't that kind of man, he doesn't hit me, he wont kill me. 

And I will not let go, and this is making him hate me. 

I wish he would kill me for then I'd be safe. 

I wouldn't be making living worse.

How did it come to this. 

Why did I say the wrong thing. 

I should not, must never speak... 

Now only death is safe.

And now is not safe, nothing is safe.

Grief overwhelms me. 

I give up. 

Black despair slows my heart, I crawl as if through air as thick as mud, upstairs. 

Lights off.

Into the dark where I crouch, on my knees, head to the floor trying so hard to be as small as I can. 

Unseen. 

Silent. 

Trying not to drown in my tears, and to not make a sound.

Silenced, bound and gagged in bonds of fear and poison.

And so dear reader, this is a postcard from Hell. I've been camped here, slowly traveling closer and closer to the inner circle of psychosis since May. 

I need to describe this to myself, for myself if I'm going to get through this...