Grace

Therapy was really intense last night.  There are so many different things that were said that I feel I need to process further.  I'm going to start with something really important that I had lost sight of.

For about three years of my career fairly early on, I worked directly with victims of domestic violence.   The first year and a half was mostly just through phone contact as I did intake and worked with an attorney to help them get a restraining order.  The second year and a half was physically in a domestic violence shelter and part of every day was spent in the District Attorney's office and/or courtrooms as I sat face to face with victims and walked right along side them through some really hard stuff as they tried to escape the cycle.  It was an eye opening experience.

One thing that surprised me was the fact that so many of the women I worked with were highly educated, quite intelligent, and at one point had had a strong sense of self.  These were strong, amazing, kind women.  I heard women express a lot of shame that they had fallen for the manipulation, that they had stayed, that they hadn't picked better.

Another thing I learned was how powerful manipulation can be and how damaging it is.  These women were experiencing some pretty significant manipulation on top of the physical and/or sexual abuse.  

In recent days, I have been able to see with clarity so many ways my ex-husband was manipulative and I'm still working through the damage it did to me.  I'm not trying to compare it to what victims of domestic violence went through but I need to use what I learned from working with them to give myself a lot more grace than I have been.  Honestly, I have more grace (and concern) for his new girlfriend (in her mid 40s) who I keep saying doesn't even realize what he is doing than I do for myself who was only 20 years old when I met him.

It's easy to get influenced by the online rhetoric that women just need to pick better.  And it's easy to listen to that inner voice of doubt that questions why I didn't see or chose to ignore the signs, why I tolerated what I did for so long, why I didn't know better.  But that ignores the power of manipulation and the toxic and destructive behaviors of some men.  It can't be on women to pick better.  It needs to be on men to collectively be better.  

So although it is my responsibility to learn from what I experienced so that I can try to spot red flags earlier in the future, it is not my fault that he was able to successfully manipulate and shrink me for his benefit.  It is not a reflection on me.  It is a reflection of who he is and on his character (or lack thereof).

It is in my humanity that led me to fall for my ex-husband and stay with him so long.  It is in my humanity the ways I learned to cope and grow in that relationship.  And it is in my humanity that I have approached my healing and stepped back out into the world after it ended.