When There Are No Bruises

I could never picture growing old with my ex-husband. I’m not sure when I realized this. I think maybe it was just after our daughter was born.

Like most new mothers, I feared the loss of my daughter more than anything. These thoughts would flicker at the edges of my mind while I watched her tiny chest rise and fall. Then came the certainty: Our marriage would never survive that.

I knew this well before the jagged spiraling out of our marriage. It bothered me. I would then try to picture us in the future, after our daughter was grown, and I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see us sitting in rockers side by side on a front porch, watching grandkids run barefoot through the grass. In fact, I couldn’t see anything at all. It was a blank wall, a dark cliff.

---

Our daughter was a month old when my husband hurled her baby bottle through the glass of the living room window. He was home alone with her. She was crying and wouldn't take the bottle from him. I came home to glass shards littering the front shrubbery and a hole in the window. He found a glass repair business, had it replaced, and it was like it never happened.

This was the beginning of a long line of, what our eventual marriage counselor would call, “tantrums”. My sensitive, jokey husband would disappear and be replaced with a sneering rage-filled stranger. “Where are you?” I would plead. “What is happening?”

He was furious and I couldn’t follow the trail back to what had happened. I only knew that I was to blame.

I could feel your mood in the driveway! Thanks for ruining the night. Why do you have to be such a bitch?

I started Googling my husband’s behavior. Of course, this is a bad sign. I know this now. But when you are in it, you are just, well, in it. I didn’t want to consider the possibility of leaving this person, whom I had just joined with and created a third—a precious innocent completely dependent on us.

Yet, his inexplicable cycles of rage were becoming intolerable. It was a circle with no end, like a nightmarish carnival ride. No one was there to stop the ride and let me off. I kept trying to find the off button and he seemed to be waiting for me to find the off button too. What I didn’t realize was that he possessed the controls. Did he know this?

I can’t really say. When we were married, I didn’t think so. I believed that he was struggling, that he was damaged by childhood trauma, and that I could help him to heal. I thought he wanted to heal.

We would have long talks about it after a rage episode. He was apologetic, contrite. He seemed to want to change. What I didn’t notice was that he didn’t take any action to change. He said the right words and I believed him, because he was my husband and I loved him.

I also believed him when he called me a bitch, when he told me I was miserable to live with, when he called me a failure. Because he was my husband and I loved him.

He wasn’t always like that though. Often he was full of curiosity and wonder. He was loving to our daughter. He played with her and helped to take care of her. We laughed a lot.

But, something always seemed off. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, I couldn’t name it. The way he made me wait 1..2…3…4…5 seconds before looking up when I asked him a question, or held out his coffee cup, or tried to hand him the pen he had asked me for.

How he would so often “forget” to do what I had asked him to do.

The way I never felt like he was listening to me, as if my words just fell to the floor.

How sometimes, after I told him I felt like he wasn’t listening, he would then look at me like a person acting like they were listening.

How I felt invisible.

How, when we hugged, it inexplicably felt like he was taking something from me.

The way his jokey comments made me feel bad about myself.

How he would take the vulnerable things I shared with him and use them against me when he was angry.

“Overt abuse - such as raging, threatening, put-downs, name-calling, breaking items, or physical abuse - is almost always combined with covert tactics of abuse.”

“There are numerous covert tactics of control, such as lying, blame-shifting, withholding, minimization, gaslighting, weaponized joking, and more.

“Because they are difficult to discern, few people, regardless of how intelligent they are, have the emotional awareness and accurate language required for recognizing covert abuse or describing it when it is happening.”¹

Here is an example that epitomizes the confusing frustration I felt in our relationship:

I used to pile the dishcloths on top of the dryer to be washed separately with vinegar to get the smell out. For some reason, he would toss dirty clothes right on top of them. I would ask him not to because it made the clothes smell too, and was very difficult to get out. He would nod and say, “Roger that,” and then do it again the next day.

Over and over, I would ask him not to, explain why, he would agree, and then do it again.

Is he stupid, is he really forgetting, or is he doing this on purpose?

This was the question that went through my mind hundreds and thousands of times in different situations during our eight year marriage. I knew he wasn’t stupid, but couldn’t fathom a reason why he would do these things on purpose.

“Countering: Regardless of the victim’s requests and how reasonable the request may be, the abuser may initially agree to comply, but they ultimately do the opposite.”

But, I couldn’t articulate any of these things. Separately, they seemed so small, no big deal. I was too close to see the pattern they created.

Meanwhile, like spokes on a wheel, the rage attacks would cycle through him, leaving me drained and despondent. Which only seemed to fuel his anger more. I truly believed though, that these rage attacks were beyond his control, that he was suffering because of them, and needed my help.

I couldn’t name the covert abuse, and I excused the overt. Plus, he had never hit me. All of this rendered me blind to the truth: I was in an abusive relationship.

---

When our daughter was three, at my insistence, my husband and I started couples counseling. My health had deteriorated. Fatigue threatened to flatten me to the ground. I was plagued with a mysterious chronic cough and back pain. It was all I could do to get through my long days as a massage therapist in a busy chiropractor’s office, and take care of my girl. I could not keep battling with my husband.

To me, our counselor said, “You need to cut back at work and take care of yourself or you're going to end up in the hospital.”

To him, she said, “You need to man up and help your wife. Stop throwing tantrums.”

That was the jist anyway. And for a while it worked. Somewhat. Until it didn’t.

Several years later, a second round of counseling failed to slow the crazy making ride that was our marriage, and in 2018 we got divorced. I still didn’t understand what had happened. I believed something was wrong with him, but I didn’t know what. ADHD, bipolar, borderline, narcissism–nothing quite matched up. His Jekyll and Hyde behavior remained a mystery to me.

With time and distance, and with the help of my new husband, I began to see my ex-husband's behavior more clearly. And it started to matter less to me what the cause was. I realized that whatever it was, whether trauma or chemical imbalance or mental illness, it didn’t excuse his behavior. I began holding him accountable instead of letting everything go. As a result, things got much much worse with him, and much much worse for my daughter.

He began treating our daughter the same way he had treated me. In some ways, worse. Eventually, she became old enough and strong enough to stand up to him. She wouldn’t let him get away with lying, or manipulating her. She saw it with a clarity that astounded me. I was so proud of her, and at the same time deeply saddened by her loss of innocence.

He wouldn’t tolerate being held accountable from her, though, just like he wouldn’t tolerate it from me. Last year, he gave up his parental rights and my new husband adopted her.

---

Psychological abuse is hard to spot, even for the victim. It took me a long time after the divorce to see it. And it’s hard for others to believe. Even friends. Even family. He seemed like a “great guy”. I had no bruises. Every couple fights. It takes two, right?

“Covert abuse isn’t necessarily loud or obvious, either to the victim or those who witness the relationship. Most often, it appears as if ‘something is off,’ but there’s little you can pinpoint.”

When I asked her if she had talked to her friends about her dad, my daughter said, “I mean, nothing really happened.” I don’t know if it is fading from her memory, if she has blocked some of it out, or if she is falling into the collective belief that if there’s no bruises, there’s no abuse.

Psychological abuse is slippery because it can be disguised as so many things: concern, love, forgetfulness, misunderstanding, joking, good deeds. If someone hits us, we know it. When the abuse is of the mind and heart, we can’t point a finger at it and say, “Here, this is where they hurt me.”

Victims of psychological abuse often doubt their own perception and experience. Especially when everyone around them thinks the abuser is a “great” person.

Recently, my daughter was talking to me about someone else in her life who is manipulative and hurtful. She said, “But sometimes they’re nice!”

I said, “Everyone is nice sometimes. It doesn’t excuse their bad behavior.”

Abusers are not abusive all the time. Nor are they abusive to everyone in their life. The image they put out into the world can be very different than the one the family sees behind closed doors. Outsiders often don’t see it, and if they are told, don’t, or can’t, or don’t want to, believe it.

Not being believed by loved ones can add to the trauma, and damage relationships. My daughter and I have both lost family members who would not or could not believe us.

---

From the beginning, I could picture my new husband and I growing old together. This made me happy and I took it as a very good sign. We already often sit together on the front porch of our house, watching our dogs sniff through the grass. Our three kids come and go, stopping to talk, then move on to the next thing, becoming their future selves.

I look at my husband’s beard, and can picture it all gray, his eyes crinkling with deeper lines when he smiles at me. I look out at the perennials I planted last year, glowing in the sunlight, and I believe that they will come back each year, and that we will be here together to see them. I believe this because he is my husband and I love him. And he loves me.

1. All of the quotes came from https://themendproject.com/covert-abuse/

---

​​I’m so happy you’re here! All of my content is free, but I do offer paid subscriptions for anyone who would like to support my work financially. You can also follow, hit the like button, leave your thoughts in the comments, leave a tip, or restack to spread the word.