The nightmare begins!

Many many years ago in a previous life a naive 19 year old got chatting to a much older man in the pub she frequented.  A few months later, she was 20, things had moved on and she had started to see more of him, he was almost 11 years her senior.  Things at home weren't great, she had what at best would be called a difficult relationship with her Step Father, and this was deteriorating with time.

As things at home got more difficult, it became more obvious that she wouldn't be able to stay much longer and she started looking at what her options were.  One day she was talking to Older Man (OM) about looking for somewhere to rent when he came up with the idea they get somewhere together.  Because things were so bad she thought it wasn't a bad idea and the seed was sown.  They bought their house as her relationship at home hit an all time low.  More and more her life revolved around OM and his family.  The family collectively came to the conclusion that the next step was engagement and on her 21st they got engaged. This was followed less than 2 years later by a wedding.

The wedding was another family affair, they organised most of it, with her input really only being paying for it.  Even her dress was chosen by someone else.  In some ways it didn't even feel like her day, and if she's honest, she knew in her heart she shouldn't be doing it, but didn't know how not to.  In fact most bizarrely on the day she felt like she watched the whole ceremony happening to someone else. She stood at the back and watched the girl in the pretty dress get married.  Most strangely however, it was her wedding day that started her journey out of the nightmare she was stuck in.  The wedding was the start of the end of her marriage, and of the control he had over her.

Looking back it started slowly, so slowly she didn't even realise that anything had changed.  Because they had moved into the house she didn't go out as much.  He worked a lot of evenings so she found herself home on her own a lot.  When they did socialise it was with his family.  More and more she was distanced from her friends, not in a sudden way, she just saw a little less of them as time went by until she hardly saw them at all.  Thankfully. she carried on with her hobby, mainly because his family were involved in this too, and this  eventually helped her escape.

At the same time as distancing her from her friends he started to chip away at her confidence, only very subtly at first, but slowly he knocked her down.  It started out as jokes.  Little jokes that put her down.  She was fat, she couldn't cook, she was useless at pretty much everything.  Upping the anti slowly.  Eventually convincing her that she was no good at anything and that no-one else would ever want her.  When she talked about learning to drive he soon put that one to bed, he was quite happy having her dependant upon him, he wasn't in a hurry to see her independent.

Someone once asked her if he hit her, she answered a categorical no, and he hadn't.  What she chose not to admit, even to herself, was while he hadn't actually hit her it didn't mean he wasn't violent or physically abusive.  What he did used to do was throw her at the wall.  Sometimes from across the room, but always hard. Sometimes so hard she would hit the wall and land in a crumpled heap on the floor crying.  Was she scared of him?  Absolutely!  While he wasn't significantly taller than her, he was very stockily built and considerably stronger, and as much as she would never have admitted it, she was intimidated by him.

Something else that she has only recently come to terms with, and indeed it was only years after it ended that she finally managed to acknowledge it had even happened, was the sexual abuse.  I won't go into detail, but suffice to say she was made to do things she didn't want to, despite the fact it caused her pain and discomfort.  This has an effect on her to this very day, and probably always will.

But despite it all every day she painted on the smile for the outside world and went to work, or went about her business, hiding from the world what was going on behind closed doors and what was going on inside her head.