After eight years of marriage, those were my thoughts on that cold day in March 2011. Why would I think those things? He had never even hit me. In fact, people in our neighborhood thought we had the perfect marriage. However, I would later come to understand that I had been emotionally abused.
“You are a victim of severe domestic abuse," the therapist said. "Your husband was born without empathy, but he was a very good actor. He emotionally battered you, which is very difficult to heal.” Then she began listing the traits of an emotional abuser as I painfully replayed our relationship in my head. In therapy I would come to see his behaviors were signs that I was wed to an emotional abuser.
Here are the traits that made my husband an emotional abuser:
He built me up and told me he would be my teacher. Our love affair started off very passionately. My husband (we’ll call him “Tom”) was 11 years older than me and much more experienced in relationships. Despite my insecurities, Tom made me feel like the most amazing person in the world. He told me that I had had very sheltered upbringing, but I shouldn’t worry since he would always be there to teach me. I trusted him and even lost my virginity to him. I felt like such a grown-up – out on my own for the first time and in an “adult” relationship! I was so in love with Tom that I didn’t notice the abuse start to creep in.
He tried to confuse and disorient me. A month or so into our relationship, he started to take a keen interest in how I presented myself in public. When we were going out, he’d ask me questions like “Why are you wearing that?” or “Why did you say it that way?” under the guise of trying to help me be perceived better. Of course I’d listen to him and go with his suggestions because I believed he was trying to help me. In the weeks following, he began to confuse me about things I was very familiar with and instil doubt in what I used to know for certain. One time, he said he’d pick me up from a friend’s house at a certain time, and then insisted I was supposed to pick him up, and yelled at me for standing him up! Instances like this started happening over and over again. I felt like I was losing my mind. And the more I’d "mess up" the more frazzled I’d become. But he looked so hurt that I questioned if I really WAS doing that.
He broke down my self-esteem. In order to “keep me in line,” he began to make me feel insecure about my looks (which wasn’t hard to do). He would say things like “Why are you wearing make-up? You know I hate make-up, so there’s obviously some guy you want to impress, huh?” Of course I adamantly said no, which was followed up by, “You shouldn’t be wearing make-up anyway, baby. Your skin is terrible and that’s making it worse.” The confusing part about all this is that things he would say always had a small truth to them. I was still going through puberty, my skin was that of a teenager. But he would blow them up to epic proportions to make me feel like I had a severe “condition” that nobody else had. The result was me constantly being self-conscious in public. I wanted to prove to him that he was the only one I loved, and I wanted so badly to be “better,” so I stopped wearing make-up and traded my dresses for cargo pants. Still, nothing was ever right.
He accused me of flirting. Eventually, any attention I received from other men, real or perceived, infuriated him and caused him to lash out at me.
He made me believe I was mentally unbalanced. I sank into a deep depression due to the demands of the relationship. I was often late for work, usually because I had done something “terrible” to him the night before and had to fix it. I felt like a train wreck in every aspect of my life. Soon, I lost my job and went into a downward spiral, clinging to Tom like a life raft. My family didn’t recognize me and they were terrified. They blamed Tom for my decline, but I fiercely defended him. He was the only one trying to help me, after all! Up until this point, I had never had a fight with my parents – now we were fighting all the time, which added to the extreme stress of the situation. The depression became worse. My hair was falling out. My skin was scaly. I was bleeding all month long. I had no job, my friends were freaking out, my family was angry and scared, and I didn’t know which end was up. Then one night, Tom solemnly sat me down for a heart to heart.
“Baby, you’re crazy,” he said. “I’m really scared for you. You came from a messed up family that altered your reality. Now that you’re out in the real world, you can’t cope.”
I sobbed in complete and utter confusion. “You need me to move in to your place and rehabilitate you,” he contended. “I love you. And I want us to work. But you’re going to need to listen to me.”
He isolated me. In my depression and despair, I thought an angel had come into my life. In my 20 years on this earth, I didn’t know how I’d become so broken. But it didn’t matter now - because Tom was there to pick up the pieces. Weeks later, he convinced me to marry him, all the while making it look like it was my idea. In reality, it was because he needed a visa to stay in the country.
My family was devastated and showed up at our apartment trying to get me out. I was so brainwashed at that point that I refused go with them. At their wit's end, they tried calling the cops knowing that I was being controlled and emotionally abused. But it wasn’t physical abuse, so it wasn’t a crime. Tom turned this around and used it as ammunition to wound and isolate me further – painting himself as my caring husband who was getting the cops called on him by my crazy, over-possessive family.
He physically intimidated me. Things were so difficult between me and Tom that several times, I started thinking maybe I’d go back to my family. This made Tom extremely angry and he’d list all the ways he was trying to help me and all the ways my family was trying to control me and keep me a child. The more I’d question him, the madder he’d become. He’d start breaking things around me or punching through windows. He said that I was the one who made him behave that way. And being that to everyone in our neighborhood, he was the “nice guy” that was the first to help old ladies cross the street, I believed he was right.
He controlled my finances. I became so brainwashed that Tom had complete control over every action I made – without even having to say anything. He never had a real job and asked that I work while he developed these projects he was working on (which never came to fruition while we were together). Any good wife would support her husband as he tried to build his career; that’s exactly what I did – sometimes working two full time jobs and donating my eggs for money.
Through hard work and an extreme stroke of luck, I became a marketing director at a young age and began making a very good salary. Eventually several of my writing projects were also bringing in money and promise – so Tom softened towards me a bit. He was spending this money as fast as I was making it.
Because of the jobs, I was out in the world more – and I was succeeding! My self-esteem started improving. The things Tom had always degraded me for, employers saw as “assets” and paid me well for them. I found the more that I trusted my own instincts as a person, the better I did. Separately, when I was at corporate parties, I started to see how other men treated their wives and realized that my marriage wasn’t healthy.
Standing Up to Abuse
Eventually, I stood up to Tom. The mind games and control poured out of him to the point where he said that we needed to move away from these people who were “bad influences” on me and have a baby right away. Though it was my intention to work things out and stay married, I wouldn’t back down. That’s when I found myself in that parking lot believing I was going to die...the wake-up call that ultimately forced me to leave.
Sadly, my story is quite common. Emotional abuse is becoming an epidemic and experts tout it as being the most debilitating form of domestic abuse. It leaves no visible bruises, but the wounds are much harder to heal.
With my family and friends beside me again, I worked through my pain. In the midst of my recovery, I wrote The Gingerbread Pimp – a musical based on my story, composed by my long-time friend and collaborator, Will Collyer. We presented the piece at the prestigious New York Musical Theatre Festival this past July to an audience of domestic abuse survivors, celebrities, and the general public.
I turned 30 this year and still can’t believe how different my life is now. I live in a beautiful little house on a quiet street, have my incredible family and friends next to me every day, and a very rewarding job among inspirational people – proof that humans can get over quite a lot…we just have to take action and know when to ask for help.
Molly Reynolds is a musical theater writer whose work has been seen throughout New York and her native Los Angeles. The Gingerbread Pimp is a dark musical comedy based on her personal story of domestic abuse and was most recently seen at the New York Musical Theatre Festival July 2013.
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