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turtling
134 M Embraced 1
PathStep 4 Compassion hearts10 Forum posts5 Forum upvotes17 Current upvotes17 Age GroupAdult Last activeOctober, 2021 Member sinceDecember 9, 2019
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My domestic violence experience was discounted
Trauma Support / by turtling
Last post
 February 14th, 2020
...See more I've been in this legal tangle with my ex, you can see other threads, and he demanded I be assessed for parental alienation since our daughter doesn't want to see him. The alienation assessor had access to the domestic violence police reports, pictures of the kids with bruises on them, various CPS reports (none that found him guilty, all just "unable to be determined"--he'd sued them the first time) and she found that there was no reason to believe that there was abuse in his house now NOR WAS THERE EVER ABUSE IN HIS HOUSE. Furthermore, she said I demonstrated a longstanding pattern of deception because I characterized him as aggressive starting from the time of the divorce and continuing to this day. I just don't understand. She had the evidence in her hand. How could a therapist and a woman discount what is clearly my legitimate and honest truth in this way? I feel completely unseen and I feel like all those years I spent being locked in closets and choked to unconsciousness and having my face held into the mattress while my 3 month old screamed hysterically next to me were just erased. Like they never happened. But they DID. They did happen. I have police reports! My therapists all say I have all the symptoms of someone from a domestic violence situation. It's a real thing. He's still cyberstalking me now, she was using to evaluate me blog posts I wrote under a different name and locked tweets and locked Facebook posts. I still feel like he's following me around and locking me up in some ways but according to the report which is part of the legal record, none of it ever happened. I don't understand. Please help.
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Sometimes I look at a scalpel and wish I had more courage
Depression Support / by turtling
Last post
 January 26th, 2020
...See more That's all. I'm already dead, but every day I'm alive I'm just constantly fighting for my family and they don't love me and don't want me. It's gotten to my point now where my husband considers my crying an act of hostility and responds in kind. Scared? I'm starting a fight. Hurt? I'm starting a fight. Heartbroken? I'm starting a fight. Living life on three hours of sleep and coming home in tears from an unsuccessful attempt to get the teenager's school to excuse the time she spent in the mental hospital and thus avoid a trip to truancy court? OBVIOUSLY I'm starting a fight. God grant me courage. I'm out of hope.
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I'm feeling really hopeless and isolated right now
Depression Support / by turtling
Last post
 January 4th, 2020
...See more I'm going through some stuff. But the really biggest issue is that after 9.5 years of basically conflict-free living, my husband has become really intensely unpleasant to me. Really very much so. Starting last spring when he took a new job without even discussing it with me, even though it dramatically changed his work/commute schedule and therefore *my* schedule as well. Not to mention income/benefits and just generally, it's a major life decision I should have been a part of. But it just is every.single.thing. Yesterday I got home from running an errand and found he'd left the 16 year old unsupervised with the toddler, which is a no-no, she's still on self-harm watch from her last suicide attempt and isn't meant to be left alone at all, and he hadn't even secured the house before doing so. He'd left scissors on the kitchen table--she could have been dead. I texted him in a panic about it because that was horrifying to me, we're under strict instructions about keeping her safe from the mental health people and that's a major lapse, and he said, oh, I just thought I'd run some errands, no big deal. And I said, ok, well. I appreciate that, but it would have been better to wait until I got back or to have taken her and the toddler with you. Next time, can you either wait or take her with you? And he snapped, so now I know never to do you any favors because you don't appreciate it or care. And then when he came home he yelled at me for twenty minutes and refused to eat dinner or come to see the light show we were going to. And he's still not speaking to me today. Every day is like this. I can't stand living like this. But I can't leave him, either, because we're 2.5 years into a custody fight with my ex for that 16 year old and it's in a dicey place already. A broken home here tips the scales towards him and she's said she'll kill herself before she lives there again, so that's no good. And the toddler is autistic and needs special care but my husband doesn't do research and always wants to take the easiest option, which means right now we're fighting because he wants to put the toddler into special needs pre-k at the local elementary school which is 1) not appropriate care for autism, they don't even do ABA there 2) will terrify the toddler, he freaked out from the noise of the hallway when we went there to see the school. If I leave, the kids are screwed. I used to see a therapist but I missed my last appointment because that was the day my husband spent screaming at me for 3 hours because the kids let the dog out in the morning on the way to school and I wasn't able to catch her because again, I HAVE AN AUTISTIC THREE YEAR OLD TO MANAGE and it's basically impossible to catch a herding dog on foot while working with a special needs toddler. I don't know how to explain that missed appointment to her or her office. "Sorry, I missed that appointment because I was being called lazy and told I wanted my dog dead because I was unable to catch her whilst wrangling a toddler, and that took many hours of explanation." I don't know how to do that. I don't want to have that conversation and I don't want to have the session that conversation will prompt. (note: the dog is back now and not dead) I only really had two people I talked to, my sister and my friend from high school, and they're both burned out on this. My sister additionally sends me pictures and videos of her kids, the one that's 6 months older than my toddler and not at all special needs and so far ahead of him I can't even see him in her, and the one that's almost two years younger and doing things he can't do yet. It's incredibly demoralizing. Generally both of those people just ignore me if I text them about any of this stuff, the husband, the teenager, the autism, the custody case. The husband is in therapy and sometimes it seems like he wants to make it work but those are rare moments. Mostly he just seems disdainful of me and contemptuous of me all the time. I'm really alone. And there's no where for me to go and no way out. And it just keeps getting worse.
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