Miss Fortune, Part Two

Day 66

In the first part of this post I began describing the various ways in which Zoe presented herself to me as a victim, and the effect that had on me, focusing on her change in profession and living situation. But her escape from home, family, friends, and her old career was driven by much more than mere grad-school ennui.

After a very short time I realized that I had been hearing Zoe make references to her mother, but not to her father. Gritting my teeth because I already guessed the answer, I asked the question and heard what I expected: her parents were divorced and she had no relationship at all with her dad.

She told me that he had come from a very sick background. She told me he had been emotionally abusive to her. She told me that he had serially cheated on her mother. She told me that at some point in her twenties the family had confronted him with an intervention, which hadn't worked, and that her mother divorced him soon after this last attempt. Zoe had then cut him out of her life entirely, to the point of fleeing if she encountered him on the street. She told me that he had been fiercely jealous of her academic success and had sabotaged one of her graduation celebrations by persuading much of her family to leave; but of all the stories she told me this still remains the only clear example of abusive behavior.

Although it's now difficult to trust anything I heard from her at all, I still believe that her father really was consistently abusive. For one, the personality-disordered apple doesn't fall far from the personality-disordered tree; something happened to Zoe that made her this way, and her mother seems like the opposite of an abuser: a co-dependent rescuer and enabler (her brother seems to have taken after their mother in this respect). Although I haven't heard her rather private mother directly say that her husband had been abusive, she didn't object to Zoe saying things of that sort, and it was obvious they had divorced in an unfriendly way.

Of course I didn't blame Zoe for what she had been through; her stories, told openly and with what I imagined was courage, only drew me closer to her and added fuel to my fiery desire to save her and protect her from everything that had gone undeservedly wrong in her life. But if she bears no responsibility for what was done to her as a child, her relationship history, as it was told to me in these early months, was already another matter entirely.

Zoe had been engaged once before, at a too-young age, but had broken the engagement when she realized she had become depressed and couldn't possibly continue. Alarmingly she told me her family acted as though this result had been expected all along. She told me that she never had any contact with this ex-fiancee or indeed, with any of her exes, because why would she want to speak to someone that turned out not to want her? (Sounds healthy, right? It isn't.) She told me that it was fortunate we hadn't met earlier, because less-mature Zoe "would have destroyed you". Most alarming of all, she told me that, at the age of 34, she had never been in a relationship lasting longer than a year.

I didn't break that record either.

Zoe began to say things that revealed what she really thought about men in general:

• How lucky she was to have met me, which I wouldn't be able to understand because I didn't know "what's out there"
• How if not for me she would have given up serious relationships all together
• That "all men are liars", excepting, naturally, myself and her brother

If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be to pay attention to these beliefs, to the stories she told me about her father and about other men. I have since learned that the personality-disordered will eventually find ways to fit you into their system of beliefs, no matter how far from reality they may be. You are only really important to them as an object, as the latest man or woman to play the role in their continuously-running psychodramas. If her father was an abuser, she will find a way to convince herself that you are one too. If she believes all men are liars, she will eventually believe that you are a liar. If she believes that all men have problems with anger, she will do whatever it takes to make you angry to prove it to herself.

Negative beliefs about men are a psychological necessity for her; she cannot allow herself to let these go without feeling her emotional survival is at stake. If she did she would have to face the possibility that her failures in relationships, coming as they have with remarkable regularity, have more to do with her than with her partners. If she wasn't able to eventually include me in that system of beliefs she would have to confront this reality: she discarded, for no reason, a basically decent man who loved her dearly, offered her exactly what she wanted, tried very hard to support her and make her happy, whose only "crime" was taking some measures to protect himself instead of handing over all control of his life wholly to her and her madness. She would have to understand that she did tremendous psychological damage to me, dealt me wounds that are not even close to healing today.

But in those early months, I understood none of this. I thought I was doing great.

At this time my career had reached a new height; I had negotiated a raise and was working on promising new projects; my family was well; I had rewarding relationships with my friends, fun hobbies, exciting travel plans; I was renovating a portion of my house. The contrast between my own life and hers must have looked intimidating, and she expressed it to me. I didn't see things that way, so I comforted her. In those months I had a feeling, probably for the first time ever, that I was incredibly lucky. I told her often how lucky I was. Although my life had always looked pretty damn good on paper, I had never really enjoyed it like I was able to with her. Being with her was finally illuminating how good everything else was.

Obviously I have some serious issues myself, some issues that make me very susceptible to what Zoe was presenting as herself. Disordered personalities don't usually get away with abusing the healthiest people, I expect, and anyway, enjoying as I do a relatively successful and stable and put-together life, why is it that ten months with an emotionally damaged woman skating the edge of psychosis counts as the happiest I've ever been?

It didn't take long for me to understand that Zoe was feeling inadequate. She started verbalizing things like "you're kinder and wiser and cleverer than I am" and "I'm a bad girlfriend". She wondered aloud if she could contribute as much as I could to our relationship. Feeling generally pretty great about my life and about us as a couple, I tried to tell her not to worry about any of that; I understood that she was in a transitional state and that it would take some time before she was fully on her own feet again. I told her I was investing in the future, that one day, inevitably, I'd fall on hard times, I'd be suffering or poor or unhealthy and then, when I needed her most, she'd be there for me.

I've never been more wrong.

Miss Fortune, Part One

Day 64

Looking back for the first signs of trouble is a very natural behavior after the end of any relationship. You don't want to repeat your mistakes, after all. Even I, as unhealthy as I am at the moment, as distasteful as ever dating again feels to me, as much as I feel that I'd take her back if she ceased the silent treatment some day and reached out to me, know on an intellectual level (if on no other) that I'd better learn to identify PD women a mile away in a nanosecond. I imagine it becomes an obsession with all survivors.

In the case of Zoe, many of the red flags were concealed until it was too late. But there was one that was always obvious, a red thread woven into the fabric of her life. She couldn't conceal it if she tried and in fact, she didn't even want to; displaying this aspect of her history and personality openly was part of her plan all along. She must have guessed, and guessed correctly, that she could get away with almost anything if she presented herself to me as a victim.

A personal detail: Zoe works as a flight attendant. I wrestled for some time about whether or not to reveal that fact. Indeed, since the beginning of my recovery I've been navigating the line of how much I should openly publish, as it feels like a betrayal even though I've been betrayed by her about as completely as one can be already. But no one will ever make the connection to her anyway, and it's an important part of the complete story that I mean to tell.

At first her chosen career was an interesting, even glamorous feature of her life. I had a million questions. There is something undeniably fascinating about the world of aviation, and I was able to re-live that every time I introduced her to someone new—invariably all the same questions would be asked again. Everyone's flown before, everyone can relate. And then, of course, there's the promise of free travel, which I even enjoyed here and there during our time together.

But I learned very quickly: being a flight attendant is a terrible job. It's stressful. They're constantly falling ill. The schedules are inconsistent and exhausting. The flight benefits are a lot less beneficial than you might expect. And in the first years, at least, before one climbs the seniority ladder, the pay is abysmal. She was scraping out a living not far from the federal poverty line, in fact.

It might make sense for people in their twenties, people that want to travel a bit and have fun before becoming fully adult. Some of those might even stick it out until the lifestyle becomes sustainable, subsidized in the meantime by parents and partners, no doubt.

Zoe was thirty-four and had been in the job two months when I met her.

I've seen her academic CV. Becoming a professor isn't easy, no doubt, but she had the background; I believe she would have made it. Her degrees and her doctoral work were done at one of the best universities in the United States in her field. She was smart enough. But she had thrown all of that away, and for reasons that were never really explained. Her early attempts included:

• "I had to leave my home town, it was killing my soul". Killing my soul. She would come to use this sort of apocalyptic language frequently throughout our relationship. Eventually, and very hurtfully, she would apply it to me as well.
• References to a lot of interpersonal conflict in her university department, all of it created, of course, by others.

At the time I chalked it up to the usual despair experienced by the graduate student. I can understand that. She still had one foot in the university too: it was possible for her to return if she registered soon, in the next semester, to keep her already-earned credits alive.

When I met Zoe she lived somewhat near the airport, in a "crashpad" condo with four other girls, all of them in their mid-twenties, sharing bedrooms, some sleeping on air mattresses. Very quickly quite a lot of interpersonal conflict made living there almost unbearable for Zoe. Once again, all of it was created, of course, by others.

But this was relatively easy to explain away too; after all I already believed that nothing but chaos and drama could come from living in close quarters with four somewhat-transient and mostly not-really-educated women in their mid-twenties. It was easy to see Zoe as the victim of all that, as the one sane adult trying to keep the extended-adolescence lunatic asylum together and running smoothly.

She began to tell me stories about the other girls, about how they had turned against her and were busy spreading malicious rumors. Once again that was all easy to accept at the time; Zoe is an adorable, shy, introverted, petite woman that knows very well how to present herself as a "nice girl" that's fallen into some trouble. If she's suffering because of conflict with others (and one way or another she is always suffering because of conflict with others), the most natural thing is to believe her story, one-hundred-percent, and accept her anger into yourself—why is it happening to this poor girl, again?

There was something that stuck to my mind even then, however: Zoe signed a year-long lease committing herself to that situation, a lease that already looked like a serious mistake less than a month into it.

I've since realized that when someone comes into your life appearing to be perpetually the victim of circumstances, the kindest rational explanation is that they make bad decisions that cause these situations to occur. A less-kind explanation is that the victim pose is how they get away with abusing others.

If one of those "condo girls", as they came to be known, approached me then and told me any of what they were saying about Zoe, I wouldn't have believed it, not for a second. I'm still inclined to believe that she made a naive error and fell in with bad folk, but I'd be stupid to believe that completely. After everything I've seen, I can't be sure anymore.

But at the time I was sure; my protective instincts were roaring inside my brain and all I wanted was to take my beloved away from that place, wrap her up warm in some of my stability and prosperity, help her to thrive in this new life of hers, and rescue her from a mistake, even if she had clearly made that mistake herself.

And that was my mistake, the first of many.

An Untold Story

Day 63

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."—Maya Angelou

Damn straight. I will continue writing.

Symptoms of Distress

I've felt some disturbing physical symptoms since the breakup:

• Pain in my teeth and face, mostly due to grinding my teeth at night and clenching my jaw.
• Higher-than-normal blood pressure.
• Numbness in my little toes resulting from back pain.
• Vivid dreams of her, naturally.
• Periods of insomnia that last for days, even weeks at a time.
• Vomiting myself awake out of a nightmare (3 times!).
• Loss of appetite and weight.

Don't be alarmed if you experience anything out of the ordinary right now; it's perfectly natural in the wake of trauma. A visit to a doctor for a checkup would not go amiss. Be patient and treat yourself well.

A Song for the Weekend: "I'm a Ruin", Marina and the Diamonds

I'm a ruin, yeah, I'll ruin you
...
And I've tried to be saved
Babe I'm gonna ruin you if you let me stay
...
I'm a ruin, yeah, I'll ruin you

That says it all right there, doesn't it?

The Cost of Recovery

Day 52

I was right: putting together last week's post about my relationship and its "honeymoon period" was risky for me. I've spent the time since on the downward spiral and haven't been writing much lately.

Zoe is like a drug for me. Wanting to reach out to her is looking for another hit of that drug. Some people drink, some people gamble, some people shoot heroin. I try to rescue damaged women from themselves.

One element common to many relationships with Cluster B's: they have a way of creating an unbreakable trauma bond in their partners by using techniques like intermittent reinforcement. Then they disappear, often with shocking abruptness and finality, and leave their now-addicted ex-partners to suffer withdrawal symptoms on top of all the other damage they leave behind.

I've been in three other relationships that reached formal "girlfriend" status. In those cases there was a period of maybe a month, in the beginning, where I experienced that thrill and anxiety of not knowing where I stood, not knowing if my feelings were reciprocated, feeling the need to make somewhat-tactical decisions about when and how often to call, etc. After a little while I would relax into the relationship; that sort of anxiety would only come back when things really were about to end.

With Zoe that feeling never went away, not for ten months. She made sure that it didn't. One day she'd be telling me she'd never loved anyone like she loved me, the next she'd be sullen and withdrawn and, when confronted, claiming it was because I withdrew from her first. The day after that she'd be trying to get me to elope with her that night. Consistency was impossible for her because it would take away some of her control; possessing that form of power over me was the only thing keeping her survival terror at manageable levels.

That is exactly how you should behave if you want someone to be helplessly addicted to you.

In the end I did stand up to her when she picked her last fight with me; that's why it was our last fight and why I'm working on this blog, trying to ensure my own survival now instead of hers. It's likely that I understood on some level what continuing to enable her would eventually cost me. But I didn't expect two things: first, that relatively minor resistance would cause her to end our relationship instantly, and second, how high the cost of breaking the addiction would be. I'm wrestling with that cost now.

A Song for the Weekend: "Girls Like You", The Naked and Famous

"How would you cope if the world decided to make you suffer for all that you were?"

The more pop music I listen to from my new, Zoe-fied perspective, the more I realize the impact that borderlines and their Cluster B kin have on the culture, behind the scenes. There is a type of girl that has songs (or blogs...) written about her, and often not because of her good qualities! This one by New Zealand's The Naked and Famous captures that idea pretty exactly. Notice in this official video that the band is cleaning up their studio, sweeping up debris, hanging a picture and a lamp:

A metaphor for recovery? I choose to think so.

Honeymooning

Day 46

This is a dangerous post for me to write.

I write it now, at the beginning of my recovery, because it's the beginning of the story and I want to tell all of it, as it happened. But to do so I have to remember the good times I had with her. I have to remember the best times I've had in my life. Doing that threatens to throw me back into romanticization, sympathy, and despair. I will have to do what I can with that.

We met online, the way everybody does now. Zoe sought me out first and I was taken with her very quickly; the other women I was in contact with faded into the background immediately in comparison to this surprising, beautiful, quirky, interesting one. Our communications seemed to be progressing at a good but normal pace and I was excited that I'd be meeting her soon. Then she disappeared from the site and ceased communicating with me, which was disappointing but easily expectable behavior in the world of online dating, certainly nothing to get too upset about.

Two weeks later she texted me again, asking if my search was still ongoing. It was! In fact, my enthusiasm for dating had been half-hearted since her departure. She explained to me that she had been dating someone else, someone who had insisted she take down her profile very quickly, and that she had ended things with him because, in public, he would openly show interest in every woman around except her. She also told me that she felt regret in not pursuing a relationship with me instead, and asked if I'd give it another try. Of course I would, she didn't owe me anything yet and I didn't feel wronged in the slightest. This, by the way, is the only time, ever, that she asked for another chance. After that, everything was on me.

Notice what I was asked to believe about Zoe's brief absence and return: that this guy, whoever he is, wanted to move fast with their relationship and insisted that she remove her profile after only a few dates, but that once she had done so, his eye started roving almost immediately. Now, there are all sorts of men out there, and some of them might indeed lose interest quickly once the chase is over, but given what I now know about both her rapid attachment techniques and her paranoid levels of jealousy, I'd be a fool to take that story at face value anymore.

At the time, though, it was easy to believe.

We started dating, a lot. And we started texting, really a lot. I wasn't used to such heavy communication, but I liked it. I felt very quickly that I didn't have to hold anything back with Zoe, and indeed I started noticing that I'd better not hold anything back; sometimes I'd detect signs she was upset, in the form of withdrawal, if I failed to respond to something in a few hours. The natural response, especially if this pattern is new to you, is to chalk this up to insecurity, which at the time seemed cute and even succeeded in flattering me; I told myself that she'd only be this way if she was really, really into me—her insecurity had the effect of easing my insecurity.

She told me in this period that one of the things she most valued in relationships was consistency. I marked this in my mind and resolved to behave as consistently as I could with her, to maintain communication and affection at levels we had both come to expect. Very early in our relationship, within one month, I was already learning how not to disappoint Zoe, and even learning just a little bit about what the consequences of disappointing her were.

We spent our first months together in the coziest, loveliest bubble I've ever known.

There is a selfie I took from inside the bubble, of the two of us lying on a blanket outdoors next to each other; I am smiling, somewhat goofily, at the camera I'm operating in outstretched hand; her face is turned towards mine, gazing at me with perfect devotion. We look very similar to each other in this photo, like one of those brother-and-sister couples. A late-afternoon thunderstorm had managed to turn the light unusually golden; her skin and hair and smile radiate calm and satisfaction and well-being in this, our first photo together.

On our dates we'd sometimes encounter people I know, people who'd be in my ear the next day, excited and hopeful and telling me they'd never seen me quite like this before. They were right.

Older couples whispered "so cute" when they saw us holding hands in the supermarket. Strangers approached our table in restaurants and commented on how adorable and happy and completely into-each-other we looked. "Don't ever change", they'd tell us, and I never wanted to.

I am a person with a very tender turn of mind. For me, events like these naturally seem very consequential; because some of them happened together in a short amount of time I slipped easily into thinking that this girlfriend, still new and mostly unknown to me, was fated to be in my life and that we were uniquely suited to be with each other. It was very difficult for me, almost impossible, to leave someone with whom I share this kind of history, salted as it was with moments of romance and significance.

During her frequent work trips we'd talk all night, she in her layover hotel, me laying on the floor in my darkened bedroom, staring at the ceiling and laughing like a teenager at the hilarious, utterly unexpected things I'd hear, the deadpan jokes and clever wordplay she is very good at. She brought out in those conversations the best of my wit and charm and humor too.

I've never felt so young, not even when I actually was that young.

Disclaimers

Day 43

This blog is mostly for myself and for other Nons. If you are suffering from a personality disorder you are welcome too, but accept at the beginning that you will not like everything you read here, and act accordingly. Actually I would really love to hear from the other side, as it were, so please take the time to comment if you can.

I expect I'll be presenting a mix of my personal story with more general observations on this condition and what it does to relationships. Because I am a man that was in a relationship with a woman, I will probably mostly use pronouns that reflect that; I do this for reasons of literary fluency and do not intend at all to dismiss female victims of male abusers. I am very aware that these disorders are not limited to either gender. Everyone of good will and decent behavior is welcome here. Please replace pronouns to suit your own situations!

As this story unfolds I'll be referencing some people that will need aliases. Additional names may be added as necessary, but here's the initial cast:

• ZOE, the girl this blog is about.
• MELANIE, Zoe's roommate for most of the time of our relationship.
• SIMON, Zoe's gay male friend (I mention his sexual preference here only to dispel any obvious implications of infidelity).
• LEIF, that's me. No, it's not my real name either.

I briefly considered publishing this story non-anonymously, with real names attached, but this blog is meant for me and for other victims; I don't want it tainted with any component of revenge and it wouldn't even help anybody else avoid her. No one starting a relationship with Zoe would believe it anyway. Certainly I wouldn't have. If by some chance her name were googled and this blog was found it would be easy to dismiss it as an attempt at payback by a rejected and bitter man who maybe wasn't good enough for her or maybe has serious issues of his own.

If you're dating Zoe now, I know what's going on and I know what you're thinking. She's telling you what she told me about the long string of disappointing men in her past, with one more added on. She's telling you how very unlike any man she's ever met you are, how you are the one that is going to redeem the male half of the species and indeed, love itself, for her. She's telling herself about how different it will all be this time. You will believe it, because you will want to, and because she has picked you at least partly for that reason, and because she is good at what she does.

But maybe someday, after you've been discarded too, you'll do your own research and find your way to this blog, and feel there is something familiar about it. I hope it helps you then.

D-Day Plus 42

Easter Sunday, 2015.

Six weeks ago, my girlfriend left me.

In ten insane minutes she brought to an end ten months in which I felt the strongest joy, love, beauty, contentment, excitement, spiritual growth, commitment, confusion, despair, anger, self-doubt, pain, and fear. This was not my first relationship, nor my longest, but from the beginning to the end there was something singular in this one, something that grabbed me quickly and still refuses to release me. The experience and its shocking, abrupt end has been so traumatic that I, a life-long atheist, have been brought to the point of praying daily for her and even, sometimes, for myself.

Given what I now know about her disordered state of mind it is difficult to say with certainty that she experienced any of our time together the same way I did.

I didn't see the end coming. But I knew that there was something wrong. She came from a very sick background. She had suffered emotional abuse from her own father, had cut him out of her life ruthlessly years before, but now felt herself victimized instead by almost everyone else. Although very attractive, when I met her she was 34 and had never been in a relationship lasting longer than a year. Although very pleasant and even shy, she seemed to be in stormy conflict with everyone around her. Although very intelligent, she had abandoned a promising academic career and moved far from home for a low-paying yet stressful job, starting from scratch surrounded by women ten years her junior. To this day she has never received treatment or therapy of any kind.

I loved her anyway. I did everything I could to care for her, to get her the help she needed, to give myself a name for what was going on with her, to make sense of what she was doing to me.

I couldn't save her. Now I have to save myself.

A breakup with someone like her will leave you with nothing that could be called "closure". A woman that I loved more intensely than I had ever thought possible detached from me in a couple of hours, "split me black" (a phrase now permanently burned into my brain), and disappeared in a manner so extravagantly dramatic and cruel that I can't quite bring myself to believe it even now, more than a month later. She sent me two text messages after that, both of them absolutely necessary to retrieve her stuff from my house and remove herself from my cell phone plan, a plan that she joined two days prior to breaking up with me. Neither of her messages contained one word more than was strictly required to achieve those goals. I never received any expression of regret, of gratitude, of affection, not even a goodbye. She blocked all channels of communication quickly and thoroughly; she refused to respond to any of my attempts to contact her, even though every one of them was kind and apologetic and expressed concern for her well-being, even though I was still, after the relationship, helping her in small ways that she may not have even noticed, much less appreciated. I gave up reaching out to her only because her behavior and what I understood of her beliefs were such that I feared her next step was to initiate legal proceedings and to claim that I was stalking or harassing her.

Eventually I got so desperate to hear anything at all that even an angry tirade or stream of accusations, even listening to her assigning all blame to me for what happened, one more time, would have done wonders for my mood, or so I imagined.

With a great deal of reading online I've come to understand that although what happened is new to me, it's all part of a pattern that is familiar to those unfortunate enough to love somebody with a Personality Disorder. In romantic relationships, some of the most damaging and most commonly encountered PD's are described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' Axis II, Cluster B—hence the title of this blog, also a reference to a devastating weapon "prone to indiscriminate effects" that "can kill or maim civilians long after a conflict has ended".

Speculation about her particular diagnosis will be reserved for later posts.

Much has already been written and posted all over the Internet by survivors of abusive relationships with the personality-disordered. I am adding my own small contribution to the literature for the following reasons:

1. I need to do this to save myself. One of the most distressing results of my emotionally abusive relationship has been, in its final months, the gradually building conviction that I'm the crazy one. She took active steps, whether consciously or sub-consciously, to encourage me to think this way; at the end she worked hard to create and believe a false story about what happened, a story I've no doubt she has promoted to the people that remain on her side of the breakup divide.

   I need to tell my story too. All names will be changed and I've taken every effort to keep this blog anonymous; the odds are almost zero that she will ever read any of this. But for some reason the idea that the truth will exist on the Internet, forever, comforts me just a little bit. There is no way for me to reach her now. This will have to do.

   Over the weeks I've received quite a lot of validation from friends, family, and a professional psychologist to the effect that I'm not the crazy one, that I did all that anyone could have done, that in the end I was discarded not for doing something wrong, but in fact, for doing something right. But a lot of damage has been done to my sanity, identity, and sense of self-worth. It's going to take a lot of repetition of the facts, a lot of untangling my story by writing it all down, before I can really be healed.

2. Other survivors need validation too. The hardest part of the struggle for me has been the need to prevent sympathy for her from creeping back in, clouding my judgement, and causing me to make bad decisions like contacting her. I find that constant reinforcement from blogs like this one has been uniquely effective in keeping me strong; reading post after post from other survivors and seeing the similarities between their stories and mine is often the only thing that gets me through another day without suffering a setback.

   There are many of these stories on the Internet, but there are still not enough. Maybe adding mine can strengthen someone else who needs the same kind of repetition I do.

3. Not all cases of PD relationship abuse are the same. That is not to say they aren't remarkably similar, they are, and that depressing similarity is one of the things that has helped persuade me that there is nothing I could have done differently because, at her worst, I wasn't interacting with a person but with a sickness.

   However, the disorder presented by my girlfriend had some special characteristics that made the early signs harder to see until it was too late. It's easy to look at lists of behaviors common to, for example, Borderline Personality Disordered women, and to argue yourself out of the correct conclusion because she doesn't do the obvious things like cutting herself or breaking the dishes. Some cases are more subtle than others. Some damaged people act aggressively because they are boiling with rage inside. Other damaged people act passively for the same reason: because they are boiling with rage inside.

   My girlfriend was one of the quiet ones, until she wasn't. Her weapons were mostly those of passive-aggression—distance, withdrawal, escape, silence—until fight replaced flight and I saw naked aggression and hatred from her for the first and last time.

   Maybe telling the story in detail will help someone else understand what's going on faster than I did, and help them do what they need to do sooner.

There's much more to come. Until then, take good care of yourselves.