I Won't Forgive What You Did (37 page)

Attending day care terrified me. It meant admitting I was unwell, but as time went by I realized that the therapists and patients just accepted me as I was. They didn’t judge me, bully me or expect me to do anything I didn’t want to do, and though I couldn’t speak in groups they encouraged me in other areas, and I found an emotional outlet in painting. I was no artist, but that didn’t matter in the least. It wasn’t about becoming the next Monet or Picasso. While the tears flowed incessantly, I had no words to articulate my distress. With painting, however, I had a voice. I painted in red and black – I didn’t want pretty colours, and my paintings were always of body parts: hands, fingers, mouths making noises, dirty teeth, penises – and when I could no longer stand looking at each picture I used to roll it up and go with the therapist to the shredder and watch while she shredded it for me. I couldn’t seem to cope with doing this task myself, and would just watch as the picture turned into scores of tiny strips and fell into the bin.

I did this for many weeks, until eventually I could bear it if other members of the group looked at my pictures. I still couldn’t talk about them, as they did – both theirs and mine – but somehow that didn’t seem to matter.

Despite the support I received from the team at the Priory, my recovery continued fitfully. At the same time I was undergoing a further frustrating eighteen months of therapy with a private therapist I’d found, but I no longer held out hope anyone could help me. I truly believed therapy didn’t work for me, because I was too pathetic to engage properly with the process, and because my problems – I was beginning to realize – were so severe.

My private therapist told me I wouldn’t get better unless I left Warren and attended a group she supervised. I did attend the group a number of times, but I still couldn’t talk about my experiences. Looking back on that time, I don’t think even
I
knew what those experiences were. In any case, it was too soon for me to attempt to share such things with a group of people I didn’t know.

Yet again, this ended abruptly. Ended with the realization, with the help and support of Jennifer, that if a therapist started crying and telling me she wasn’t up to her own job, then she wasn’t going to hear
my
cries for help. Stopping seeing her, having invested so much time and money, was a real watershed moment – especially as I’d been a decade with the one before.

However, I still failed to leave Warren. I knew we couldn’t continue living as we were, yet again and again I convinced myself of the fiction there was still a chance we could mend things. It’s odd, reconsidering that time, but I really seemed unable to grasp I could have any sort of future without him. I didn’t
want
to leave him, despite everything he’d done to me. I still hoped the tiniest crumbs would come from his direction and sustain me sufficiently to continue. I was just like a small child listening intently to a fairy tale: I
had
to believe in the happy ending.

Only now do I realize the extent of my denial. Of
course
I couldn’t confront why I let him treat me as he did – doing so would have exposed all my earlier abuse and the floodgates would surely have opened. So perhaps, in staying in such abusive adult relationships, I was keeping those gates locked, for my own emotional protection.

Once again, I felt the best thing was to move. Financially, our position felt precarious. I was worried I might not get my early retirement pension, and Warren was already carrying on about my not working. There wasn’t a shred of reassurance from him about how we’d cope if we stayed where we were, and as usual it was only once I set wheels in motion to downsize that he was suddenly full of ideas about staying, and therefore recriminations about the action I’d taken. It was almost as if he wanted out of the marriage himself, but was waiting for me to make the decision and the move, solely so he could act the wounded party.

It was heartbreaking selling my home. Having lived in it for eight years and done so much to it, I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else living there. I cleaned it lovingly for the last time before I handed over the keys.

Though even as I was packing, there was a tiny spark of strength growing inside me. Because as I did so, I was secretly packing ‘mine’ and ‘his’ boxes, perhaps as a way of being ready when I did find the strength to get away. It was a very conflicted business; I did it because I knew I must acknowledge the possibility, but at the same time I kept alight the flame of hope he’d change and these separate boxes wouldn’t be needed.

I was preparing in other ways too. My therapist had previously advised me to open my own bank account and to ask our solicitor to split the proceeds of the sale between us, thereby protecting my share. This annoyed Warren greatly, but I stood firm, and we moved into a rented house, just down the road, on a six-month lease, while we decided what to do next.

It was during that time the decision was made that we should move to London. I had barely ever spent time in any city, let alone the capital, but London was where Jennifer lived, and I wanted to be close to my daughter.

It was Jennifer, who, encouraged by my belief, was by now having therapy herself (unsurprisingly, given all the traumas of her young life), that provided the final key to my recovery. She encouraged me to embark on new therapy myself, with someone who came highly recommended by her therapist. Warren was characteristically furious at the expense, but it was my money and I no longer cared. I felt so suicidal that doing nothing was not an option, and no price would be too high. Before we made the move to London, I would drive there twice weekly – a round trip of 160 miles – just to see her.

Straight away I saw what therapy should be like, and how what I’d been receiving for the last thirteen years couldn’t be classed as ‘therapy’ at all. Initially this revelation made me angry and despairing for the many years I’d wasted. But even then I realized I mustn’t allow such feelings to take over. I had never been taught to trust myself or my feelings, and routinely accepted everyone else knew much better than me, when they didn’t. Indeed, I soon understood that the ‘therapy’ I’d received was abusive in itself. But just when I’d started to make inroads into my psyche, I received the final push to take the step that would undo the continuing damage my marriage to Warren was still creating.

We had found a house together in London and the week before we were due to sign the documentation before moving a letter arrived, correctly addressed but to Warren’s brother. I couldn’t believe how something like this could have happened. Why would anyone connect our address with Warren’s brother? Warren’s brother lived miles away. Some sixth sense telling me all was not well made me decide, then and there, to open it.

Inside was a summary of shares Warren’s brother had sold, together with details of the payment that had been made – to
Warren –
of £25,000. Confused, I confronted him when he got home, only to be told he
had
planned to tell me – he’d lost some money gambling, and had borrowed this from his brother in order to make up the shortfall. I couldn’t believe either what he’d done, or that he had intended to tell me, and asked him if he really believed we could have a life together if that life was to be built on more lies.

I insisted Warren pay his brother back straight away, and it was when I was checking we still had enough money to complete the purchase that he was forced to confess he’d lost even more money and had actually already borrowed on a credit card in order to ensure we had enough. The loss, in total, came to at least £40,000 and it was hard to find words to convey how I felt. Thank God my half of the money was still safe.

Warren was predictably defensive. Why should I be so upset? It was, after all,
his
money he’d lost, not mine – his to do whatever he liked with. And when I suggested words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘trust’, he got angry and just said the same again. With hindsight, I don’t believe he had any intention of completing on the house, but at the time it was simply the route to clarity. I knew I had to move to London for my sanity. Similarly, I had to escape
him.

At long last, finding a courage I didn’t know I had, on 4 June 2008, I finally left Warren. I was fifty-three years old, and this was the most significant thing I’d ever done for myself in my entire life.

On arriving in London I rented a small flat because I’d elected to spend my share of the house proceeds on daily therapy – without it my emotional sickness was still so great I was afraid not only that I’d be tempted to return to Warren, but, worse, I might take my own life. And as I did so, the enormity of what had been done to me gradually, and painfully, became clear. The sadness and betrayal was enormous, almost too much to bear – and for the most part I felt incredibly alone.

Even so, I made the decision, if I was going to heal properly I must give up contact with my birth family. It was the first time I’d walked away from an abusive situation, but instead of feeling free I felt desolate. The feelings of loss following this decision were immense. I had given up my home, the county I’d lived in all my life, the countryside, my husband, my birth family, my job, my income – my financial security and my career. It would be just me and my children from now on.

London was different in every way to anything I’d ever known. So many people, houses, noise – everything felt so fast. The only people I’d see who I knew were my daughter and her partner of seven years, Oliver, a nice guy who over the years I have come to respect and rely on. Without them I really, honestly feel I wouldn’t be here now to tell my story.

I needed justice to be done, and I needed to be heard, and I decided to start writing down the events of my life. I did this initially to help both myself and my children come to terms with the reasons why our lives had been so unhappy, unsettled and distressing. To write about the abuse and the inevitable chronic domestic violence I went on to suffer was painful but also liberating; I found a peace and calmness I’d never had before.

Throughout this ongoing process I acquired a diploma in psychotherapy, which helped me understand what psychotherapy was. My thesis – and one could say the topic chose me – was on the responsibility therapists have to ensure they are ‘up to the job’. But writing this book was also to take back responsibility for the events of my life – to finally, unequivocally, tell the truth.

And now, here I am, in the spring of 2010, and the process is all but complete. Except, as it turns out, not quite.

I don’t know why – it’s just a niggle in the back of my head really – but one day in 2010 I decided to check the day of my birth. I suppose I think if I actually see it, written down, it might be in some way cathartic. Might help me to finally internalize the travesty of being told (and so having always lived my life in the belief) that I was born a Wednesday’s child, full of woe. It takes little time to check it and even less to take it in. I had actually been born on a Monday.

The purpose of this book was to help me and my dear children understand our lives better, and, with the help of my therapist, I believe we have achieved that. She has been and continues to be considerable in my life. Without her wisdom, compassion and recognition, and the great mercy she has shown me, I could not have come close to sharing with myself what my life has really been like. By moving away from all the chaos and abuse of how my life
was
and acknowledging and beginning to come to terms with my experiences, a huge empty space has been created –
a space I can at last reclaim as belonging to me.

Why
did
the people I should have been able to trust the most end up hurting me the most? The reality is that there
is
no reason. I didn’t even exist as a person to them. I always wanted just one of them to acknowledge what they did and say sorry. Now, for the first time, I recognize that no amount of apologizing, which none of them will do anyway, would make any real difference. Nothing can ever justify what any of them did or make up for the enormous upset and injustice that has taken place. My new maturity, and acceptance of my right to life, has given me back the power they took from me.

For my family, Alfie, Jennifer, Melli, Oliver, George and me it is a new beginning, a beginning in which we do not have to hold back, we can say what we believe and feel without fear of punishment and riposte. We can for the first time be a family, an honest family, with no more secrets, no more make-believe and no more betrayal.

I am about to start sitting as a Justice of the Peace again and am actively looking for a new job in advocacy or something similar. I have purchased my first home on my own and I own a little bit of a two-bedroom house with a garden that George and I are working on.

Jennifer was rewarded with a BA (Hons) 2:1. She then started a year-long trip, backpacking round the world with the girls she shared house with while at Uni. When Jennifer returned, Ozzi, the landlord of the house they had rented for their time at Uni, and who she also worked for during weekends and holidays, asked her to go into a business partnership with him. She had been planning – and had an interview – to work as a diplomat, so it was a big decision and an opportunity she hadn’t been expecting. But Jennifer decided to take up Ozzi’s offer and go into his hair and beauty business. I am very grateful that Ozzi and his family have always been there for Jennifer and have treated her as one of their family. They have together gone on to make a good and prosperous business partnership, developing and expanding their company and, more importantly, remain best and trusted friends.