In my efforts to reach a settlement, I offered not to seek any spousal support, despite the fact that he has the house and nearly all the money, and was earning three to four times what I was at the time.

He’s now claiming that he’s probably going to be laid off in a few weeks, so I should be ordered to pay him maintenance (in addition to not paying child support any more). He claims that I can always go out and get a second job in order to support his household in addition to mine. He has no plans to look for work.

He also plans to re-file his demand that I be psychologically evaluated and then committed, because I’m mentally incompetent and so cripplingly shy that I can’t work.

His naked greed is breathtaking.

My husband wants any divorce settlement to award him the dependent-child benefit on his taxes. I’ve been taking this exemption since he locked us out of the house, because our child has been living with me. My husband says that “the only remedy” would be to award him the exemption for the upcoming years.

But he already makes more money than I do, receives loads of work benefits that I’ll never have, and pays only about fifteen percent of his income in taxes. How would it be “fair” to make the inequality even greater?

Unfortunately, the overriding ethic in family court seems to be “splitting things down the middle”, but in favor of the man. So my husband may actually receive this award.

Of course, that will only happen if my husband allows the divorce to be finalized. At the rate he’s going, the issue won’t be up for a decision until after our child turns eighteen. Which would be almost funny.

But maybe, together with my Twelve-Step work for my codependence program, aging is helping me “unclench” a bit. I don’t have to be “perfect” anymore. I’ve been through enough that I’ve earned the right to screw up and “just deal”, rather than hyperventilating non-stop.

It helps to have kind friends and good advice. Thanks to these new assets, maybe my next few decades won’t be quite so fraught. That would be really nice.

Really?

These sorts of statements get my back up, but I think they’re meant to say something other than what they appear to. When people say things like the above to those of us who have had fairly miserable backgrounds, they don’t necessarily mean that everything is as we would like things to be. They mean instead that things could hardly have gone any other way.

Suppose somebody is in a high-rise, and, for no good reason, a bad guy pushes him off the deck. The man falls fifty stories, bounces a couple times on the pavement, and then is run over by a Mack truck. Did he deserve to have this happen? Did he want to have his body end up looking like hamburger? No. But, given the circumstances (the bad guy shoving him, falling that height, bouncing a couple times, and being squished by the truck), it is perfectly reasonable that his body has ended up looking like hamburger.

Given the actions and the circumstances which led up to the coroner’s van pulling up, it is to be expected that the dearly departed would be in this condition. It’s not that it’s “right”; it’s that no other outcome could reasonably have been expected.

It’s “exactly as it should be” in the sense that the immediate events could not have ended up any other way.

I think this is what people mean when they tell me that, (for example) as lousy as my current court case is, it is “exactly as it should be.” Given the man who is divorcing me, and given how profitably I made it for him to behave as badly as he has; given the “shark” of an attorney he’d hired, and given how “nice” and “patient” I’d been for way too long; there could have been no other outcome. It’s not that the way I’ve been treated is “right”; it’s that the circumstances — some of which I created — could not logically have been expected to lead anywhere else.

The terminology still rankles, but at least it sort of makes sense.

By “being patient” (with people who were knowingly doing wrong), “being understanding” (with people who were knowingly deceiving), “being supportive” (of those who were intentially harming my interests), “being cooperative” (with those who were openly manipulating the system), and just generally “being nice” (by being a doormat while waiting for people to “do the right thing”), I enabled bad behavior to succeed.

Why am I now surprised that bad behavior is so strongly in evidence? Why do I ask myself why it has continued for so very many years?

The abuse began and has continued because I made sure that it worked well — for those who were doing the abusing. Of course the abuse continued! Why wouldn’t it have, right?

Yes, it’s nice to be “nice”, but only when one is being “nice” in a global sense. When all one is doing is being a doormat for somebody who wants a “thing” on which to wipe his feet, one isn’t being “nice”; one is being a doormat. It’s not the same thing.

This is, I suppose, what I get for “being nice” all those years. If I’d been insistent on fighting back, on defending myself against false charges, and on pointing out actual infractions, maybe the judge would be willing to at least consider my side’s evidence and arguments.

I am so tired of this. People have been telling me for three years now that “it’ll get better” and “some day, this will all seem so silly”. How many more years will I have to wait?

Or maybe this is kinda the point of having a sponsor. I’ve gotten a couple phone numbers. Maybe I’ll call someone tomorrow.

What a shame, all those wasted years before and during my marriage; so many wasted opportunities for happiness. I’m glad I’m working on leaving that part of my life behind. What I see ahead of me is so promising and pleasing, even delightful. I can hardly wait!

She’s hallucinating, and my sister says that she’s “Gramma” only maybe ten percent of the time. My sister has no idea what course of action to recommend. Pull my son from school for a couple days and make an immediate visit? Wait for the weekend and see what happens? Neither of us knows.

Gramma has been alone for so very long. Her beloved Danny died decades ago, and her own son neglected her and then rejected her. He’s had no contact with her since she told him that she knew what he’d done. She’s told me more than once that she often wakes up in the morning and wonders why, exactly, she’s waking up. What does God want?

I don’t know what I’m feeling; I keep veering all over the place. I pray that Gramma finds peace and rest, in whatever way she can. Maybe she will soon be reunited with her Danny. I hope she will be, and that she finds happiness again.

It has been proposed that people who suffered sufficient degrees of abuse (especially women, and especially those subject to intimate terrorism) eventually manifest this same tendency. This is used to explain why “she doesn’t just leave him”.

However, others have observed women in these situations, and have contented that the women do not demonstrate this behavior. In fact, they do still “rebel” in various ways. It’s just that that ways aren’t particularly useful or effective. Therefore, the thinking goes, the women are not “helpless”; they are just… well, they’re something that makes the results pretty much their own fault. “Hysterical” or “immature” or “manipulative” or something.

I think each position has merit, but is too absolute.

Another metaphor for “learned helplessness” is the elephant who was trained in its early years not to fight the chain holding him to a stake in the ground. When the elephant is small, that stake is sufficient to hold him fast. If he fights, he only tires (and perhaps injures) himself. Fighting has no positive result, and potentially negative results.

Once the elephant is grown, he has more than enough strength to pull the stake from the ground, but he never tries. Instead, he may toss its head, trumpet, give his mahout a dirty look, or otherwise generally act cranky or resentful. He does “rebel”, but not in effective ways. He learned long ago not even to try. Pulling the stake doesn’t even occur to him as a valid option.

This, I think, is a better model of the ineffective patterns resulting from prolonged abuse, especially when it started in childhood. The diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) generally includes the accusation of manipulativeness, but also condemns the sufferer for her ineffectiveness and clumsiness. The abused spouse is condemned for staying with her abuser, and her staying is used to accuse her of making it all up or blowing things out of proportion.

But the problem is simpler than that. She makes those dysfuntional decisions because she honestly can’t conceive of other options. She is ineffectual because she learned, long ago, that the effective means of rebellion were not options. Fighting for help (as a child) or leaving (as a spouse) simply never occurs to her.