When a friend of mine found it hard to believe that I had been the victim of verbal abuse, I couldn’t explain it … or I wouldn’t explain it … or perhaps I didn’t know how to. While I was deep in meditation, noble silence and general bodily pain, I had extracted in these operations this piece of my pathology and, as the springs sprung out of my head and it felt like I would be the one this time to be escorted off the property and medicated, it was a tough one for me to process, having always defined myself as a strong, self-assured woman. Struggling to identify with this part of myself, a friend explained that it isn’t so much the words as the intention to undermine, emotionally withhold and make the other person feel like they deserve it. It isn’t so much the verbal as it is the non-verbal that constitutes verbal abuse.
So I did what I advise all people not to do when driven by a need to self-diagnose … I Googled it. As I consider the ripples of this post, I must confess to a very long alternate document with a ream of words, explanations and websites to try and fully explain what it feels like to be a strong woman at the mercy of a controlling partner. But I looked again at the Paulo Coelho quote from the previous post and concluded that his simply stated truth applies here, and having to justify, prove and defend only makes me seem more crazy than I can rightly take credit for.
You’ve got Google. So use it if you dare. And while you search and sift and read the parts relevant to you alone, I will continue to process … and “with a calm and equanimous mind” I will embrace that I have moved and shifted and that even while the sediment is settling in my ever-flowing river, the law of nature dictates that nothing is permanent and the rapids will come once more. And the waterfalls will throw me off my feet. But there will be calm again too.
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