On the third, Persephone and I joked about how Phil squanders his money. I mentioned the tithe-disagreement when he said he’d handle our finances, and she said, “I’m never gonna marry him. I’m not crazy!”
On the fourth, I wrote in my diary,
“I’m a better person when I’m not around you.” Hogwash. [And also, from accounts of his next girlfriends, not at all true.] You’ve got to take responsibility for your own actions, since nobody makes you act cruel unless they hold a gun to your head or something.
If you treat me like dirt, if you feel like a bad person around me, that’s your problem, not mine.
On the fifth or sixth, Saturday or Sunday, my roommies and I were walking back from lunch when lo and behold, I saw Phil and Persephone off in the distance, walking on the drive over by the marshy field beyond.
I couldn’t believe it. I have recorded many different times when Phil and I somehow “happened” to be in the same place at the same time, no matter how unusual.
When we had class at the same time and in the same building, it was understandable, but this often wasn’t the case. It was as if Phil knew where I was at all times and made an effort to be in my sight.
If, in those days, American society had already grown paranoid about stalkers (which they were in the late 90s), I probably would have asked the question, Is Phil stalking me?
As it was, I was very upset, seeing yet again a reminder of how quickly he threw me away and looked for a replacement chick, after having insisted for months and months that we were truly man and wife.
On November 3, I had just prayed for help forgiving Phil. I had also just written in the Journal to my friends the day before about the hurt and anger I didn’t know how to deal with.
I had to shelve new books in the Religion section of the library. So I looked around for books on knowing God’s will and other spiritual questions.
Then I saw this little, white paperback with the title, Forgive and Forget: Healing The Hurts We Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smeade. (Here is an interview with the author which describes the book’s philosophy.)
I snatched up the book and put it on the cart to check out.
It said hatred was stage 2 of forgiveness. It said that in order to forgive, first I must confront the person who wronged me–say how he wronged me, and that I hated him for it. It had to be done, or I wouldn’t be able to release him in my heart, and he wouldn’t know that he did something wrong.
On pages 141-2, the author described a college teacher who trusted the chairman of her department to put in a good word for her. Instead, he stabbed her in the back, and she lost her job.
She knew about it, but he didn’t know she did. She pretended each day to day that it hadn’t happened; each night she’d go home and throw up. Finally, she told him he’d done her wrong, “and I hate you for it.” After that, she stopped throwing up after work.
Dr. Phil McGraw also says that sending a letter is sometimes necessary:
As you consider your own triggering event and the nature and degree of the suffering you’ve endured, what is your MER [Minimal Effective Response]?
Maybe you don’t feel the need or have the courage right now to do either one of the kinds of things that were contemplated for Rhonda. Maybe what you need to do is write a letter and write down all your thoughts and all your feelings. Maybe that does it for you.
Maybe you even need to mail the letter, if your event involves another person. Perhaps, like Rhonda, if you can’t mail the letter, then you might need to go to the offender’s grave and read it to him or her in the cemetery.
Whatever your MER is, you need to identify it and you need to do it. You need to emit that response until such time as you can say, “OK, that’s it. That’s enough. My lens is clean. My emotional business is finished and I am free to go back to being that person that I now know that I am.”
So I confronted Phil in a letter, which I let sit, told my dad about, and then showed to Pearl for advice before sending. It’s often said that we should confront people rather than just complaining about them to other people, that the pain of confrontation is brief in comparison to the pain of having a problem continue.
The letter went into detail about the emotional abuse Phil had put me through.
It made clear that I saw him with my last letter coming out of Muehlmeier, and that I felt there was nothing about that letter to upset him. It chewed him out for showing it around rather than considering it.
It gave my perspective on the marriage, which is that it was real and valid.
The letter explained that I had to confront him if I ever hoped to forgive him.
I prayed a lot over the letter, asking for guidance, for the proper words and content, for God to work his will through it, soften Phil’s heart for it, convict him through it….I felt it was God’s will for me to send it.
Phil never responded to the letter–probably because I told him not to unless he sincerely repented. I didn’t want to talk about it. I’d already had quite enough of his dismissals any time I tried to tell him he did something wrong.
I wanted him to stop sitting with us at meals and getting mushy with Persephone, to stop greeting me in the halls; I wanted to be left completely alone so my anger would cool down.
I wrote, “No more will I be walked over.”
Persephone found the letter accidentally, but after talking with me about it, decided she had nothing to be angry with me about.
After reading this letter over again almost 20 years later, I would have deleted some things, though I put them in there for a valid reason. But they could be misunderstood or seen as arrogant.
But I understand them: I was furious with him because, as I have shown over the course of these memoirs, he had emotionally, psychologically, and sexually abused me since we started dating.
I expressed so much anger because he ripped my spirit in two with his constant psychological abuse, gaslighting, playing hoaxes, and attempts to force me into painful or disgusting sex.
He sexually assaulted me.
He tried to change history on me and lie to me numerous times about my own behavior, to make me think I was bad, when I never did what he accused me of.
He shamed me and cut me down over and over again for things which were not wrong, such as solving a puzzle on a game differently than he would, simply so he could control me with his fury and verbal abuse.
The pain was still raw, and immediately after breaking up with me, he started up with a new girl. He sat with my friends and me all the time to be with this new girl, and got cuddly and cutesy with her right in front of me, deliberately rubbing in my face that he had moved on already.
He told lies about me to his friends, a smear campaign to make others think I was the abuser. He was still trying to control and abuse me after the relationship was over.
5 years later, I still saw it as an excellent letter, though I already saw the things that needed changing. Even 12 years later, when I posted these accounts on the Web in 2006, I still thought it was a good letter, with nothing to be ashamed of.
In any case, the letter never threatened or begged; it gave my point of view completely, and told him to stay away from me so I could calm down my anger. It was brief, only about 4 typed pages.
I did not yet know the terms emotional abuse, sexual abuse (forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do), psychological abuse, or gaslighting.
But this and the previous letter described many of his abuses, and begged him to get counseling for himself. It even directly accused him of abusing his authority as head of the wife.
It’s a relief to read this many years later, because I did indeed confront my abuser with his abuses, and do not have that “unfinished business.”
This part I would not touch; it is the best part of the letter:
During our marriage I may’ve done a few things I shouldn’t have, but you’ve done your own things that make me think you just don’t know how to respect or love a wife. Some of the things you say to your own mother were warnings to me, but I hoped you wouldn’t treat me the same.
And your refusals to respond to my needs in so many situations–only your “subconscious” really knew the proper way to treat a woman, and that’s why I fell in love with him.
Then I discovered he wasn’t even real, and that it wasn’t easy to get you to act like him, even though you said it was. He was you, you said. Yeah, right.
He was reasonable, unaccusing, cool-headed. He could compromise. He didn’t demand his wants over my needs, nor make me feel like I had to be a meek little slave to please you.
He wouldn’t flat-out refuse to do something I needed done just because he didn’t want to, he’d have a legitimate reason. He wouldn’t force himself on me in ways that pained me, he’d slowly get me to want them.
He wouldn’t take and take all I was willing to give, which was a lot, and then not give me what I asked for. He wouldn’t be chauvinistic nor treat me like a silly and naïve woman, when really I could often reason better or was better informed.
[At first this seemed arrogant, but then I saw that he treated me like “a silly and naïve woman.” It wasn’t about arrogance, but protested being treated like an idiot.]
He didn’t abuse his authority as head of the wife, or be a tyrant.
This isn’t a question of being meant for someone, this is a question of examining yourself and the way you treat your wife, changing what you can change and not taking the defeatist attitude that you can’t, learning to compromise, and thinking how your stage of rebellion (which really isn’t against me) can be gotten through without hurting and alienating the people who love you the most.
I feel sorry for Persephone, who has yet to learn these things about you.
Since he never apologized or repented during that time (at least, that I ever heard), and carried on his behavior to subsequent relationships, I was probably talking to a brick wall. But somebody had to confront him.
Persephone also confronted him, calling him an a–hole for things he did to me and told her about. Knowing her, she probably also confronted him about things he did to her.
So there you have it: First, I went to him directly with my concerns. Then I discovered that Persephone told him off for the things he did to me.
Yet he did not repent.
Since we had no church in common, and he no longer went to InterVarsity meetings, there was no way to “tell it to the church.” The next stage, adapting Matthew 18:15-17 to my situation, was to stop associating with him.
On the 8th, praying on the way, I pinched the letter as a symbolic “laying on of hands,” then dropped the letter in the Campus Center mailbox. I went into the Campus Shoppe for a bit, then started out.
But who should open the door for me, but Phil! How did he, a commuter on a campus with more than 1000 students enrolled, always show up in the same place and time as me?
I stared straight ahead and walked past him. As I wrote in my diary the next day,
It is done. It makes me nervous, but there’s also that consciousness of doing the right thing–facing up to my tormentor, taking no more of this abuse.
Pearl also has a theory on why I keep running into him all the time: Maybe God’s trying to teach me endurance. Hm.
Index
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)
Table of Contents
Freshman Year
September 1991:
October 1991:
November 1991:
December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:
March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?
April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign
May 1992:
Sophomore Year
Summer 1992:
September 1992:
October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:
November 1992:
December 1992:
January 1993:
February 1993:
March 1993:
April 1993:
May 1993:
Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams
September 1993:
October 1993:
November 1993:
December 1993:
January 1994:
February 1994:
March 1994:
April 1994:
Senior Year
June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:
July & August 1994:
January 1995:
February 1995:
March 1995:
April 1995:
May 1995:
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