Battle of the Brain
By: Aubrey Cole
Tags: Domestic Violence, Emotional Abuse, Healing From Trauma, Domestic Abuse, Narcissistic Abuse

Battle of the Brain

I wrote an article some years back which is included in my book, Bodies in the Basement, called “FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real.” Never in my healing process was anything as big and looming a challenge as the battle for freedom in my own head. I lived in FEAR with that false evidence I had been taught to believe was absolutely real. Years of gaslighting and control had left me with a completely altered view of myself. Like other survivors, I continued the abuse for the abuser long after he was out of my house and I had gone no-contact.

More daunting still was dealing with those messages during the holiday season or any sort of life event. There is truly nothing more disheartening to a survivor than achieving something and having no one to share it with, or having to shoulder a disappointment in isolation. Worse yet is the imagined failure of not meeting the Norman Rockwell expectations of the “perfect” family holiday that I had worked so very hard to portray to the rest of the world. I had friends…lots of them. But I had gotten so skilled at hiding the reality of my life that I felt I couldn’t go back to them and ask to be included in their holiday celebrations.

You’re Doing All the Abusing for Him!

My first Christmas without my daughters was hell, and that’s putting it mildly. I couldn’t even stay in my own home, forgoing all the traditions I had built with them, seeing the joy of their faces on Christmas morning, baking cookies and driving around to look at Christmas lights. I left the state. I was fortunate enough to have somewhere else to go and I went. I tried to make the best of it but my older daughter was utterly miserable with her father and would tell me multiple times each day. Then her father would complain to me about her and tell me to “fix it.” It was an exercise in torture, only made bearable by not having to sit in an empty house.

All the while, those miserable messages flowed through my brain, telling me I was a failure…telling me if I had been a better wife he could have stopped abusing us…telling me that if I had been a better mother, my kids wouldn’t be in New York while I was in Georgia. As my then-therapist said to me, “He doesn’t even have to be here. You’re doing all the abusing for him!”

Becoming Your Own Defender and Protector

As I got healthier and cleared my brain of all the skewed thinking, I realized that there was only one person who could be there for me all the time and have only my best interest at heart: me. I don’t mean that I am an island or that nobody could take care of me better than I could. I mean that only I had access to my own thoughts and feelings 24/7 and therefore I was best qualified to nurture those thoughts.

Whenever I would start berating myself or feeling all those yucky pre-escape feelings, I realized how awful I felt both emotionally and physically. So I began to ask, “What would you say to someone who was speaking that badly about your best friend?” Sometimes I would be angrily defiant, standing up for my friend and demanding that the behavior stop. Sometimes I would gently say, “That’s no way to talk to another person” or “My friend does not deserve that from you.” I was my own friend. I was my own defender and protector and confidant. It was a long, challenging, extraordinary evolution.

That evolution in my thinking was necessary to stave off all the times when, no matter how much I had grown, I felt like a colossal failure for not perpetuating that Norman Rockwell visual I had worked hard to present to the world.

Now, with 8 of those Christmases behind me, I can confidently say that what made me a better mother, a better friend, a better employee, and now a better wife, was learning to nurture myself better than anyone else could. It is critical. It is magic. It is a gift that nobody else can give you, but which you deserve above all else.

You are not what your abuser said.