Kim’s Story: PTSD after an abusive marriage and high conflict divorce

Looking back into my marriage it is hard to tell when I started believing that I was crazy. Now that I am two years out of it, I realize how disturbing things were. Things got worse over time and I guess I became desensitized to the dysfunction. It didn’t help that my own upbringing wasn’t great which made the family I was marrying into seem somewhat normal. My father in law groped me when I was 24. My husband said nothing and I was silenced and made to feel like I was crazy for seeing it as a problem. My husband had a pornography addiction and he always asked me to wear specific clothing before we had sex. I was objectified always. It wasn’t until my daughter was 4 years old and I found him watching pornography while she was sleeping in bed with him, that I realized how bad things really were. I kicked him out of our home and reached out to his mother for help. She dismissed it and I was again led to believe that I was the one with the problem and perhaps crazy. He lied to me for years about STDs and put me at risk. Sometimes I swear I would taste women on him, and I again, I was crazy, paranoid and jealous for asking. He regularly frequented Asian massage parlors and when I found a website called rubmaps on our computer history (a website dedicated to helping you search for happy endings), I was again crazy for considering he might do something like that. He was a polysubstance abuser, sex addict, and I was under financial control. One day, I was at the dentist and I needed to get fillings. I called to make sure it was okay. He said, “you can get fillings as long as you ask for a prescription for vicodin.” His addictions were so extreme that he actually thought asking for a prescription for pain meds after a filling was normal. This was only 4 years into my marriage, but it slowly got worse. I was eventually stripped of all self worth and had low self esteem. There seemed to be no way out. I was financially tied to him and had two children with him. The best I could do would be to protect them from the dysfunction and make pretend things were normal. My perfect life was a lie,