Imagine meeting this person and it’s like God had created them just for you. Like your life is now complete and you’ve met your soulmate and you start to picture life years down the road and this person makes you feel invincible. It’s like this person was created just for you and WOW it feels indescribably incredible
Then months of maybe years down the line they start making you feel like you’re doing something wrong, like your a problem. Ever so subtly. You’re not sure what you did wrong because they’re not communicating with you properly and when they do communicate they tell you if you didn’t do this I wouldn’t be upset with you
Then you, being a sweet compassionate person, take that into account and think yourself WOW maybe if I didn’t do abc then he wouldn’t be so upset with me. So then you go as far the fuck out of your way as you see possible to make this person happy compromising your own self and losing sense of who you are strictly to make your partner happy.
You can’t wrap your brain around it but this person whom you love so dearly, YOUR FUCKING SOULMATE is going out of their way to make your life miserable and left feeling inadequate and then your left feeling angry and lonely because HOW could this person who just went from loving every single thing about you now despise everything about you. The one person who broke me, who made me feel less than worthless now becomes the one person who’s capable of fixing the damage because the only person I seek any type of validation from is the one hurting me.
But, it’s not always like that. Some days he brings me gimmers and echos of the life we once lived – happily ever after.
I’m frequently told to “move on”, or “get over it” when plagued with the grief I have of losing this man I loved more than life itself. This is not only ridiculous and inappropriate, it is also impossible. I’ve been abused and endured extreme trauma through the words and hands of Chris Willey. Do I think the man that I loved never existed? No. But, I do understand that he will never be and had never been the person I wanted and needed him to be and his memory can’t be flooded with false reality either. I have to live with knowing that my abuser will never be able to take responsibility for the pain he caused me, i’ll never receive closure.
I find it hard to heal from my abuse I think mainly because I was so intensely betrayed by someone I intimately trusted and I felt defenseless against him more times than I can count that I repressed my pain but I was repeatedly triggered.
“We, in essence, have to heal and grieve from multiple doses of betrayal and the accompanying toxic shame and self-loathing and exaggerated feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness.”
I don’t trust anymore. I don’t let anyone get to close, but at the same time I’m completely open and almost emotionless when it comes to talking about certain things that have happened to me. And some things I can’t even get myself to talk about because the pain from it’s memory is too overwhelming.
I miss Chris. I miss his touch, his smell, his energy and his spirit but I don’t miss his hateful words, his anger, his hate for himself and seeing him sick. Because God knows he was sick. He was conflicted about so many things about himself that no one ever knew about. He hated himself, he hated drugs, he hated hurting me and being hurt by me. Because I did have a part to play in with the pain caused in our relationship.
Today though, today I feel better. I smile more even though I can’t stand seeing my smile in the mirror. I miss Chris but I’m moving forward in life now. I strive to become someone he would have loved more and been proud of because I still seek validation from him, even in afterlife
Allie Willey 