Book Preview

Following is a preview of the Prologue from my forthcoming book, Bodies in the Basement, which is almost ready for publication.  I look forward to publishing my full collection of essays chronicling the journey from escape through liberation and deliverance from covert/coercive domestic abuse.

 

 

At the age of 15, I fell hard for a boy without even knowing what I was supposed to be looking for.  No one ever told me what made for a good boyfriend or the type of boy to avoid, except to the extent that he shouldn’t be a criminal or do drugs.  I was so fresh-faced and naïve, a girl who didn’t even understand what a boyfriend should be.  I married him at 18 and then suffered through 25 years of the most insidious, mind-altering, reality-skewing, soul-crushing abuse imaginable.  It wasn’t until my fourth attempt at freedom, with no job, two young daughters, and what I later learned was a misdiagnosed medical condition, that I was able to put distance between us.  1,000 miles of distance, in fact.  Geographically, I was free.  But I had no preparation for just how the abuse would continue and even escalate.

 

Ours was not, in any sense, a “high conflict” divorce, which makes my story all that much more baffling.  I told him I was filing for divorce, I presented him with a proposal, we worked it all out, and he signed.  Of course, this was my fourth attempt at doing this.  Neither of us hired an attorney (although he said he consulted one) and he didn’t even appear for the final hearing.  All he had to do was just go away and live by the terms he agreed to freely.  Abusers being what they are, however, this meant that once he realized I had actually gone through with it on my fourth escape attempt, the next years were spent fending off continued abuses, stalking, court actions, threats…in other words, worse than I ever imagined or bargained for.  What I didn’t realize at the time was there was freedom to be found in that, too.

 

More than three years after my escape, I learned of many horrible things he had done to others.  Dozens of others.  Even while terrorizing me and my daughters, and bankrupting us with legal proceedings which he filed on utter lies, he found a way to cost other people dearly.  Once I truly understood who and what I was dealing with, I was free to accept that I had spent a quarter century convincing myself that this illusion was the man I wanted.  However, being faced with this reality helped free me to accept that the abuse was never about me, but about a pathology I could not have changed.  It is a terrible thing to realize that the entity you believed you loved existed only as an ethereal concept created to keep you entrapped.  It is like finding out you were married to a serial killer when the police show up and uncover the bodies in your basement.