A story about abuse and recovery
Oct. 14th, 2025 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnpalmerImagine if, when you were little, you had to obey a bunch of extra rules that didn’t make sense to you, and if you didn’t, you’d be hurt. You’d also be hurt, and called weird, all the time, for things that seemed natural to you, or that you couldn’t avoid. Eventually, you’d learn to avoid the “weird” looks and behaviors when you’re with people – with effort. Better to expend the effort than to keep getting punished!
You can imagine a person who grew up with such abuse; you’d probably imagine they’d flinch away from social contact, because it takes effort just to look normal, and they don’t want to be hurt again, when they slip. In a perfect world, such a person learns to stop flinching away, because decent grown-ups don’t mind a bit of weirdness in look or behavior, though they might want to understand “when you’re ready and willing, why the weirdness? Only if you don’t mind my asking!” They would stop being hurt, you see? Eventually, their fears would fade, and maybe they’d heal from the effects of the early abuse.
Now, imagine me, where people still hurt me if I’m weird in look or behavior, for things that seem sensible or natural to me, and they still hurt me for violating certain rules. I’m really smart, so, for me, it was trivial to create a public face that met all of the visible, and even many invisible, rules. Regardless, at any time, someone could claim I’d broken the rules, and hurt me deliberately, to punish me, as if I were a naughty child. From their perspective, I was – they don’t feel they caught me in a quick nose-pick, they feel as if they caught me wiping boogers on something not-mine. Why? Because of my neurology, I might moan in pain, or make a face, or mumble something, or show emotion, or… anything. Anything “too weird.”
So I am still living in the same scary childhood that teaches me to flinch away from contact, I’m just much better at playing along and not getting hurt too much, too many times, and, in not flinching away too visibly, because that makes you “passive aggressive”. Fun fact: if you flinch, and say “you hurt me, I’m angry,” you’re an asshole; if you say “fine, I don’t care, hurt me any time you want,” you’re passive aggressive. I’m sure there’s a way to say “wait, I don’t want to hurt you; how can I avoid that, so you stop hurting me?” but I haven’t found it. Obviously, since they are hurting a disabled guy, for something that’s not his fault, I should be able to say “suck it up, buttercup,” but again, that makes me an asshole, because no one understands the whole “can’t help it” thing.
It’s not anyone’s fault, because the reason I’m vulneable is, my neurological pain makes me vulnerable to being hurt. It saps my resources, and makes me less able to manage my emotions (it takes energy and effort!), and it can trigger emotions – negative ones, like anger, frustration, etc. – as well as causes bad memories to surface. It can also, spontaneously, cause me to grimace, flinch, mumble, etc.. See the difficulty? I might look angry, and grimace. It’s got nothing to do with anything but my neuro pain, but, unlike someone with a sore leg that aches when it rains, no one understands that I sometimes just feel pain for no known reason, or that it can produce complex effects.
So I have reason to fear someone being hurtful, as if they’d caught me wiping boogers, and be as sharp as they’d speak to a child who needed more maturity and politness whipped into him by his parents, because I am in pain. And that adds a big helping of extra pain, and, it’s so loneliness inducing, you need to think “lifeboat, no oars, single occupant, that might make it to shore, if the ship sank during the correct tidal timeframe, which it probably did, but you won’t know for a long time.” Or, if you prefer, “it was devastatingly lonely, but includes some hope that it should end… eventually.”
Anyway. That was my life, when I walked into a virtual Callahans Place, and it was the worst mistake I’d ever made for my own survivability. (No offense to anyone I helped – I’m not expressing regret.)
See, people told me they understood my struggle, they loved me, they were my friends, and, when the Big Bad Time came, I wouldn’t have to go through it alone. I’d have friends, like Pat, and Barbara, who would keep me from wanting to blow my brains out.
See, Pat started as someone who I thought was my best friend, and whom I loved. I was still young enough and stupid enough to think that meant she loved me. I made a lot of positive changes in her life. I was trustworthy, loyal, and loving, for one thing, and laughed my way through breaking her “curse of the coast.” But for specifics, I taught her intentionality. When I say I love you, when I kiss, when I caress, when I cuddle, I try to bring my whole self to it. When you look at a woman, like she’s the sexiest centerfold ever, and drink in her beauty, sip by sip, and it shines from your eyes, she can tell. When you whisper love to her, because you want her to be happy, she can tell. Oh, you don’t have to make a big production out of every “I love you” utterance, but, when you do, it means something.
I taught her to mix that into ritual, both high and low, and how to play and have fun, regular and sexytimes fun. I taught her some BDSM-y stuff that, at the time, she swore she enjoyed, and I believed her, since it mixed her theatrical love with sexytimes fun, and, audience participation.
And I tried to be a good boyfriend to her, travelling twice a month, most months, to see her. And right here, we already see why the relationship should have seemed abusive to me. See, she demanded we visit twice a month – I liked her being that eager, so I agreed – and for her, travelling was a “big deal” so I did almost all of the travelling. She knew that it mattered to me – she knew that my doing “almost all of the travelling” was super, super, important to me, yet never guessed why. It’s not like driving four hours is excruciatingly painful… right? Even if your disabled boyfriend describes some special nightmares about driving while disabled… right? If your disabled boyfriend whines, like it’s excruciating to drive four lousy hours (okay, sometimes six, with Portland traffic), she figured, it was because he was whiny, and that should be held over his head.
Because it couldn’t possibly be that it really is excruciating to drive four effing hours down, four effing hours back, even if you’re disabled, because that would require a baseline assumption that you’re a real human being, and if you complain about something, it really matters. And that, boys and girls, is why I describe the relationship as abusive. When one person’s concerns are auto-dismissed, that person is the target of some abuse. Don’t get me wrong: we were fine pals, I suppose, she just never really took any of my problems with any seriousness. Well, that also prevented me from taking my problems with the proper level of seriousness. Remember: when I get tired, my brain shuts down. Her travel schedule meant that I was too dull to recognize how much travel was dulling my brain. She could have noticed that, but, hey, if she had, I wouldn’t be writing this.
Anyway: I tried to be a good boyfriend along with the travel, and tried to do things that were of interest to us both, but, again, I was always exhausted, always struggling for energy, and always struggling with a lot of other issues, that I didn’t yet realize were caused by neurological pain. Pat wasn’t the kind of girlfriend who’d say you’re able to handle emotional issues – she’d just criticize you when you failed, finally remembering that you’re not normally that way, right? So, she’d acknowledge that she was wrong for taking me to task, but only after she’d already hurt me. It took Deborah to realize how emotionally healthy I was – Pat just assumed I was a psych case. Meh, it happens, people die.
Anyway, eventually, 2010 came, and my life started going to hell, and I was the only person who seemed to notice. Pat just assumed I was shrinking, becoming less, and loving less, and caring about her less. I was actually dying. I couldn’t feel pleasure any more; my life was being torn away from me, bit by bit, by pain and exhaustion; I didn’t know how I could live, unless things changed, and no doctor could find anything wrong. She didn’t notice, or care, apparently.
Eventually, shortly after a heart-attack scare gave me cause to hope a cardiologist would find something wrong with me (nope!), Pat and Barbara seemed to have decided they knew what was up, without talking to me. They knew I was a cruel, unfeeling, uncaring, rapist asshole, who did not deserve the companionship Pat had “offered” – remember, she had demanded I come down twice a month, to the bitter end! – because I was such a terrible, terrible person since 2001. Yes, it was 2014ish, but, I’d hidden my evil so, so, deeply it took 12, 13 years to find out, just so they could ream me.
And of course, the people who promised me I’d never have to face my worst nightmares alone were the ones who created my worst nightmare, without ever once asking if I was okay, before their Big Bad Times of Pat reaming me so badly, it would play a starring role in my nightmares for ten or more (still counting) years to come! Man – just think of what they’d have missed, if they’d spoken to me, to get my input! They might have prevented their own attempt to kill me! But they didn’t, because I’d sealed my own doom.
See, the problem was, I’m polyamorous. Pat wanted to have sex with a normal guy, so I said “sure!” She has sex with a normal guy, with my active encouragement, and she loves it. Now, she’s pissed that I’ve deprived her of the very sex I told her to go get. If only they had been to a Polyamory discussion group in the past, they might have realized that NRE in one relationship can highlight problems in another, and set them into stark relief, and, you shouldn’t just flush your old relationship, especially not with a pack of hateful lies. You should evaluate what’s wrong, and COMMUNICATE. Remember, talk to me? But if they’d ever studied anything about how to live with polyamory and in polyamorous relatinships, they’d clearly decided the rules don’t apply to weirdos, like me, which is a thing, that happens, and sometimes, people die as a result.
Near as I can tell, that’s when Pat and Barbara decided that a disabled weirdo isn’t really human, because eeeew, I didn’t fuck like a normal guy, and, I didn’t take her sightseeing in Seattle very often (I never went sightseeing, without bringing Pat – yes, my life really did suck that much, I was not holding back!), I did take her to BDSM activities, so, obviously I only care about myself (because I introduced her to BDSM, see?), and thus, I am an abusive asshole, thank god they found out within the first dozen or so years of the relationship, by examining only the last few years, during which I’d been completely debilitated! Time to make me feel like total scum for ever assuming I was worthwhile to one of the “cool kids.”
Anyway. I couldn’t talk to anyone here, not once Barbara told me it was toxic to share stories of how the breakup was affecting me. I knew she was a stuffed shirt know-it-all who told all kinds of stories that she pretended were about her (when they were often copped from Reader’s Digest – cheap story thief!), but I was astounded she once told me she loved me, and didn’t even think about talking to me, ever, about what was going on. How can any human being use the word “love” one day, and call you an abusive asshole weirdo later, without even checking the basic facts of the story? Obviously, I wasn’t aware that “you are someone that I love” meant “...but you’re still my little butt-monkey! Dance, monkey, dance!”
That’s what hurts, deep down. You have to feel so stupid for believing in people like that, before you can heal from the injury. I was an idiot for believing that meeting those people in a Callahan’s wannabe meant anything other than they enjoyed fiction of a certain type. I was an idiot for believing in professions of friendship and love when I was always a weirdo, that those people didn’t understand.
And that means, the only hope for my life is to try to be a weirdo that people do understand. So my next step is to try to sow some understanding.
You can imagine a person who grew up with such abuse; you’d probably imagine they’d flinch away from social contact, because it takes effort just to look normal, and they don’t want to be hurt again, when they slip. In a perfect world, such a person learns to stop flinching away, because decent grown-ups don’t mind a bit of weirdness in look or behavior, though they might want to understand “when you’re ready and willing, why the weirdness? Only if you don’t mind my asking!” They would stop being hurt, you see? Eventually, their fears would fade, and maybe they’d heal from the effects of the early abuse.
Now, imagine me, where people still hurt me if I’m weird in look or behavior, for things that seem sensible or natural to me, and they still hurt me for violating certain rules. I’m really smart, so, for me, it was trivial to create a public face that met all of the visible, and even many invisible, rules. Regardless, at any time, someone could claim I’d broken the rules, and hurt me deliberately, to punish me, as if I were a naughty child. From their perspective, I was – they don’t feel they caught me in a quick nose-pick, they feel as if they caught me wiping boogers on something not-mine. Why? Because of my neurology, I might moan in pain, or make a face, or mumble something, or show emotion, or… anything. Anything “too weird.”
So I am still living in the same scary childhood that teaches me to flinch away from contact, I’m just much better at playing along and not getting hurt too much, too many times, and, in not flinching away too visibly, because that makes you “passive aggressive”. Fun fact: if you flinch, and say “you hurt me, I’m angry,” you’re an asshole; if you say “fine, I don’t care, hurt me any time you want,” you’re passive aggressive. I’m sure there’s a way to say “wait, I don’t want to hurt you; how can I avoid that, so you stop hurting me?” but I haven’t found it. Obviously, since they are hurting a disabled guy, for something that’s not his fault, I should be able to say “suck it up, buttercup,” but again, that makes me an asshole, because no one understands the whole “can’t help it” thing.
It’s not anyone’s fault, because the reason I’m vulneable is, my neurological pain makes me vulnerable to being hurt. It saps my resources, and makes me less able to manage my emotions (it takes energy and effort!), and it can trigger emotions – negative ones, like anger, frustration, etc. – as well as causes bad memories to surface. It can also, spontaneously, cause me to grimace, flinch, mumble, etc.. See the difficulty? I might look angry, and grimace. It’s got nothing to do with anything but my neuro pain, but, unlike someone with a sore leg that aches when it rains, no one understands that I sometimes just feel pain for no known reason, or that it can produce complex effects.
So I have reason to fear someone being hurtful, as if they’d caught me wiping boogers, and be as sharp as they’d speak to a child who needed more maturity and politness whipped into him by his parents, because I am in pain. And that adds a big helping of extra pain, and, it’s so loneliness inducing, you need to think “lifeboat, no oars, single occupant, that might make it to shore, if the ship sank during the correct tidal timeframe, which it probably did, but you won’t know for a long time.” Or, if you prefer, “it was devastatingly lonely, but includes some hope that it should end… eventually.”
Anyway. That was my life, when I walked into a virtual Callahans Place, and it was the worst mistake I’d ever made for my own survivability. (No offense to anyone I helped – I’m not expressing regret.)
See, people told me they understood my struggle, they loved me, they were my friends, and, when the Big Bad Time came, I wouldn’t have to go through it alone. I’d have friends, like Pat, and Barbara, who would keep me from wanting to blow my brains out.
See, Pat started as someone who I thought was my best friend, and whom I loved. I was still young enough and stupid enough to think that meant she loved me. I made a lot of positive changes in her life. I was trustworthy, loyal, and loving, for one thing, and laughed my way through breaking her “curse of the coast.” But for specifics, I taught her intentionality. When I say I love you, when I kiss, when I caress, when I cuddle, I try to bring my whole self to it. When you look at a woman, like she’s the sexiest centerfold ever, and drink in her beauty, sip by sip, and it shines from your eyes, she can tell. When you whisper love to her, because you want her to be happy, she can tell. Oh, you don’t have to make a big production out of every “I love you” utterance, but, when you do, it means something.
I taught her to mix that into ritual, both high and low, and how to play and have fun, regular and sexytimes fun. I taught her some BDSM-y stuff that, at the time, she swore she enjoyed, and I believed her, since it mixed her theatrical love with sexytimes fun, and, audience participation.
And I tried to be a good boyfriend to her, travelling twice a month, most months, to see her. And right here, we already see why the relationship should have seemed abusive to me. See, she demanded we visit twice a month – I liked her being that eager, so I agreed – and for her, travelling was a “big deal” so I did almost all of the travelling. She knew that it mattered to me – she knew that my doing “almost all of the travelling” was super, super, important to me, yet never guessed why. It’s not like driving four hours is excruciatingly painful… right? Even if your disabled boyfriend describes some special nightmares about driving while disabled… right? If your disabled boyfriend whines, like it’s excruciating to drive four lousy hours (okay, sometimes six, with Portland traffic), she figured, it was because he was whiny, and that should be held over his head.
Because it couldn’t possibly be that it really is excruciating to drive four effing hours down, four effing hours back, even if you’re disabled, because that would require a baseline assumption that you’re a real human being, and if you complain about something, it really matters. And that, boys and girls, is why I describe the relationship as abusive. When one person’s concerns are auto-dismissed, that person is the target of some abuse. Don’t get me wrong: we were fine pals, I suppose, she just never really took any of my problems with any seriousness. Well, that also prevented me from taking my problems with the proper level of seriousness. Remember: when I get tired, my brain shuts down. Her travel schedule meant that I was too dull to recognize how much travel was dulling my brain. She could have noticed that, but, hey, if she had, I wouldn’t be writing this.
Anyway: I tried to be a good boyfriend along with the travel, and tried to do things that were of interest to us both, but, again, I was always exhausted, always struggling for energy, and always struggling with a lot of other issues, that I didn’t yet realize were caused by neurological pain. Pat wasn’t the kind of girlfriend who’d say you’re able to handle emotional issues – she’d just criticize you when you failed, finally remembering that you’re not normally that way, right? So, she’d acknowledge that she was wrong for taking me to task, but only after she’d already hurt me. It took Deborah to realize how emotionally healthy I was – Pat just assumed I was a psych case. Meh, it happens, people die.
Anyway, eventually, 2010 came, and my life started going to hell, and I was the only person who seemed to notice. Pat just assumed I was shrinking, becoming less, and loving less, and caring about her less. I was actually dying. I couldn’t feel pleasure any more; my life was being torn away from me, bit by bit, by pain and exhaustion; I didn’t know how I could live, unless things changed, and no doctor could find anything wrong. She didn’t notice, or care, apparently.
Eventually, shortly after a heart-attack scare gave me cause to hope a cardiologist would find something wrong with me (nope!), Pat and Barbara seemed to have decided they knew what was up, without talking to me. They knew I was a cruel, unfeeling, uncaring, rapist asshole, who did not deserve the companionship Pat had “offered” – remember, she had demanded I come down twice a month, to the bitter end! – because I was such a terrible, terrible person since 2001. Yes, it was 2014ish, but, I’d hidden my evil so, so, deeply it took 12, 13 years to find out, just so they could ream me.
And of course, the people who promised me I’d never have to face my worst nightmares alone were the ones who created my worst nightmare, without ever once asking if I was okay, before their Big Bad Times of Pat reaming me so badly, it would play a starring role in my nightmares for ten or more (still counting) years to come! Man – just think of what they’d have missed, if they’d spoken to me, to get my input! They might have prevented their own attempt to kill me! But they didn’t, because I’d sealed my own doom.
See, the problem was, I’m polyamorous. Pat wanted to have sex with a normal guy, so I said “sure!” She has sex with a normal guy, with my active encouragement, and she loves it. Now, she’s pissed that I’ve deprived her of the very sex I told her to go get. If only they had been to a Polyamory discussion group in the past, they might have realized that NRE in one relationship can highlight problems in another, and set them into stark relief, and, you shouldn’t just flush your old relationship, especially not with a pack of hateful lies. You should evaluate what’s wrong, and COMMUNICATE. Remember, talk to me? But if they’d ever studied anything about how to live with polyamory and in polyamorous relatinships, they’d clearly decided the rules don’t apply to weirdos, like me, which is a thing, that happens, and sometimes, people die as a result.
Near as I can tell, that’s when Pat and Barbara decided that a disabled weirdo isn’t really human, because eeeew, I didn’t fuck like a normal guy, and, I didn’t take her sightseeing in Seattle very often (I never went sightseeing, without bringing Pat – yes, my life really did suck that much, I was not holding back!), I did take her to BDSM activities, so, obviously I only care about myself (because I introduced her to BDSM, see?), and thus, I am an abusive asshole, thank god they found out within the first dozen or so years of the relationship, by examining only the last few years, during which I’d been completely debilitated! Time to make me feel like total scum for ever assuming I was worthwhile to one of the “cool kids.”
Anyway. I couldn’t talk to anyone here, not once Barbara told me it was toxic to share stories of how the breakup was affecting me. I knew she was a stuffed shirt know-it-all who told all kinds of stories that she pretended were about her (when they were often copped from Reader’s Digest – cheap story thief!), but I was astounded she once told me she loved me, and didn’t even think about talking to me, ever, about what was going on. How can any human being use the word “love” one day, and call you an abusive asshole weirdo later, without even checking the basic facts of the story? Obviously, I wasn’t aware that “you are someone that I love” meant “...but you’re still my little butt-monkey! Dance, monkey, dance!”
That’s what hurts, deep down. You have to feel so stupid for believing in people like that, before you can heal from the injury. I was an idiot for believing that meeting those people in a Callahan’s wannabe meant anything other than they enjoyed fiction of a certain type. I was an idiot for believing in professions of friendship and love when I was always a weirdo, that those people didn’t understand.
And that means, the only hope for my life is to try to be a weirdo that people do understand. So my next step is to try to sow some understanding.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-14 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 03:11 pm (UTC)I think it makes all of us prone to trying to shove people into our need-based holes.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 10:29 pm (UTC)>to be a weirdo that people do understand. So my
>next step is to try to sow some understanding.
This sounds like a good thing. You've always been kind to me, and I admire and respect that.