Vanilla Fudged 19

[Vanilla]

Zelda, Joe and sunny thank you for the kind and generous words.

V is for Vanilla seems the popular choice.

I have often asked why stand, why did I change my mind and stay. I was clearly a WAW very soon after M. I asked was it pride? I don't believe it was although of course there may. Be an element of that. Was it innocence? A little perhaps.

In essence I think it was the sweet cycle, although as soon as I realised there was something wrong it got worse as if WH had no limits. It started really deteriorating as soon as I enforced by boundaries. If you like DB made things much worse for me because in truth I was abused. Initially of course some of the changes appeased WH. When I joined the board I had been DB for about 4 or so months. I was a lurker, but my holiday in October 2014 was so abusive and I needed help.

The screaming banshee was on hold by then, that stopped almost immediately I started to DB in about June 2014, and I do see that as both protective and reactive abuse. I. Have never shown this before and truly hope never again. I believe WH wasn't too much affected by it as it came from button pressing. I do own it and am regretful for it.

Sunny I am very clear there is a difference between being a target for abuse and seeing oneself as a victim. Targets deny abuse and victims point to it. Most of the targets I can see here on the board take too much self responsibility (not control) for their R. They deny abuse. Faux victims wish to deny responsibility. Control tends to lie with the abuser and breaking free is hard. For Z it appears harder than for me, my WH was covert until October 2014 and then became so overt with public abuse in front of others who he saw as connected. Such abuse is public and demeaning, easier to acknowledge. The person this demeans is WH.

I know very little of MLC but what I did see persuaded me WH wasn't in MLC. His core was as it had entered into our R, so if he was MLC then it had been so all along. It was as if WH had released some kind of spring, or like Alice through the Looking glass had grown when eating. It took a long time to understand, Jim described WH behaviour as thrashing that was eye popping. My IC asked what I was getting from the R and suggested challenging WH. That is a very dangerous thing to do with an abuser, they need safely ejecting from your life. A later abuse counsellor IC suggested texts instead and eventually that worked. WH came into the R like this, it was part of his personality which he hid. I do see this tendancy mainly in OP on the board. One or two WW are enthralled by OMs of this type. Gg describes it as being used like a tissue and discarded, most unpleasant when we realise that.

I called WH on his lies, he thrashed and left, before that I was living in a corner of my home, a house I own. A PWAW living in fear of an outburst and a man who is in actuality a mean drunk. Z is different, her sitch is softer, her WH seems like a user WH, a resource gather. His overt appears to have come to the fore when he received his settlement and had resources of his own. Mustardseeds sitch is more like mine as is yours Joe, and Schermans. There are a couple more here but it isn't appropriate to raise that here it's more for their threads, since they as yet haven't had a big enough spell breaker. Gg was my guardian angel, bless her always. You too Sunny.

So it's ironic that DB has got me to a place where I don't want an R with WH. I am DB for me, so is this a failure? Absolutely not, DB is a good process if it allows those who are abused to be released. I am not sure that was the intention for DB, but it is being used by me for that. Sandis guidelines help us to become someone only a fool would leave and in doing so we are freed to become true lovers, spouses and friends. We regain our control over ourselves and develop as human beings. I believe this is a good thing.

I am posting this at the end of this thread. 1 to 9 were about hope, 10 to 19 about breaking free and 20 onwards, I want to be about recovery.

A new chapter starts at post 20 recovery.

V