Just a quick note to let you know that the protest against the AVFM Conference at the Doubletree in Detroit is happening right now. You can check the hashtag #NoMRA on Twitter for live updates. Here’s a Ms Magazine blog piece with more details.
I’ll have some thoughts on it all later.
Photo from @Katie_Speak on Twitter.
:: sneakily removes bottom of Barrel of Free Hugs, allowing it infinite capacity :: 😛 ^_^
So many hugs if you want them marinerachel. I am so, so glad you are being looked after. These are the hugs I want to give you (polar bears!):
http://gallery.photo.net/photo/12279224-md.jpg
And thank you David, as well. It’s so good you were able to work out where she was.
Marinerachel, I’m so glad they were able to find you and that you’re safe now. I’ve dealt with depression, too, and I know how bad it can get, but you can definitely get help and get meds and get better. I’m so glad to hear you’re getting help. We all really want the best for you. You deserve to be happy.
If any of you want to email marinerachel directly, email me and I can pass your info on to her. (Marinerachel, I’m assuming the email you signed up with is still an account you use.)
Also, I can remove any comments/info from this thread if you’d like.
I am very glad you’re ok marinerachel. You are worth the world and I hope you end up in an amazing place. Please keep coming here because we all really appreciate you, ok? I am really really glad you’re ok.
@marinerachel hooray. But seriously, nutella and a spoon is an awesome combination. 🙂
Marinerachel: good luck. I’ve wrestled with depression too, and … well, I’m worried this will put you off, but do keep an eye on yourself when you go onto meds. Sometimes the first one doesn’t work as well as it should, but when you find the right one it is so very freeing.
I’m so, so glad marinerachel. All this happened while I was afk.
As for your feelings of misery and hopelessness, remember that a lot of that is a great heaping helping of hormone chaos on top of your depression and relationship shitheap. A few days after the miscarriage is fully dealt with and the hormone rush recedes you and your friends and your healthcare professionals will be in a much better place to assess your longer term needs.
But whenever you manage to sleep, remember every time you wake up that we all care about you.
::more hugs, more fluffies::
@marinerachel
I am so happy and relieved that you are okay. Well, not okay now, but you will be.
Hugs.
marinerachel, Nthing all the hugs, adding every cute critter of your choice to the barrel o’ cute, and echoing the sheer relief that you’re safe and with us!
Huge cheers and thanks to David and the Mounties.
I’m coming in so late to this, but I echo everyone that’s gone before me:
You are not weak, you are not worthless. You’re strong. Stronger than you think you are.
Anyone who treats another person like he treated you is worthless, and knows it. They seek validation from the pain of others, and that’s not the actions of anyone but a selfish, insecure tosspot.
@contrapangloss, anyway I could contribute to that care package? I live in London, but I’ve got some spare cash if you’d like some extra
He has the potential to be the right one for me. I’m just not worth it to him. He doesn’t care about me nor does he have interest in bettering ourselves in order to build a healthy relationship. He just wants to do what’s easy. He never wanted what was easy with his exes. He really poured his heart into those relationships. I wasn’t worth that effort to him. I poured everything into our relationship. He didn’t care. I wasn’t worthwhile. I literally am incapable of eating or taking pleasure in anything. I have no self worth or love for myself left. He’s taken my love and holding it hostage. I’m hopeless and it’s only made worse by the knowledge he does not care. I put everything in and now all of the hurt is on me. I am a fool.
He’s not the right one for you. Not if he’s going to be a jackass and take you for granted. As someone pointed out earlier, you only have his word that he bent over backwards to make previous relationships. From what you’ve said, I doubt he was telling the truth.
@What is this Gravitas,
Don’t know if I’ll be able to work out sending it yet, but if you or anyone else wants to jump in, let me know.
Generally, we fill packages with favorite feel good things, like chocolate, pretty pens, books, photos of pretty things/friends/family/critters, and suchlike.
If anyone wants to contribute, shoot me an email with what I should attempt to track down on your behalf. I won’t give you donation or payment info until I know I can find it in my dinky town and that I can actually get it to her.
David, would you be okay with being my email intermediary as well? The one i signed up with is still reachable.
Marinerachel, all my hugs.
I don’t want to get too deep into it as I don’t want to get worked up before bed so I’ll tell the first part of my story tonight and finish tomorrow:
I’ve been “moody” all my life and very anxious. In my teens I received cognitive behavioural therapy and was put on meds for depression. At nineteen I hooked up with my ex, moved in with him at twenty. He nurtured me and built up my self-esteem unlike my parents ever had. I got a real job and started school at twenty-three, after years of being built up by him.
Our relationship was very much a parent-child dynamic though and we were both unfulfilled and dissatisfied. I left him. It was devastating, ending a five year relationship with my best friend. No love had been lost. We just weren’t happy. Both of us suffered extensively during that time.
I very foolishly became sexually and then emotionally involved with a man I actually strongly disliked around that time. He was very upfront and honest but gave me nothing I needed. After six months the hurt was too big. I sunk into a deep depression, suffering from the loss of my real relationship as well as this distraction I’d engaged in. I would struggle with suicidal ideation for eight months, feeling horrible guilt and shame over the loss of my real relationship and extreme anger with the other guy, who I felt had teased me, giving me some of the things my ex hadn’t but failing to give me everything else I needed. It was a very, very dark period.
He really did give his exes everything though. I know he did. By the time I got to him he was burnt out and directed a lot of resentment my way, none of which I deserved. I developed a lot of resentment towards him for basically getting left with the angry, fed up, impatient, unkind leftovers after his girlfriends had experienced the indulgent, kind, patient man he’s capable of being but wasn’t with me.
I am immensely bitter about that.
As inadequate as these tend to be, I send you every bit of comfort and hugs that I can over the internet.
Well, you’ll soon be going to bed for a lie-down, a nap or a long sleep. Try to hang on to the warm snuggly critters we’re all wishing you had to cuddle up to – even if we can’t offer a real life shoulder or lap to lean on.
Be as angry, bitter, sad as you need to be to get through the next little while. We’ll be there in spirit when you wake up. Some of us will be here when you next get back to the keyboard. We’re willing to be sounding boards, or advisers, or sponges to soak up whatever you need to let out. Just let the next few days happen as they come along in their turn.
@marinerachel: I just got out of bed, nad I’m so, so glad to know you’re okay! You have no idea how relieved I am. Olease take goog care of yourself over the next few days. Only things that make you feel good!
Re: your ex. You mention that he treated you badly because his ex-girlfriends screwed him over. In “Why Does He Do That? Inside The Minds of Angry and Controlling Men,” Lundy Bancroft says that this is an excuse abusers commonly use in order to justify their abuse. I don’t know if you’ve read this book, but if you haven’t, maybe you should check it out once you feel up to it. But you already know that the way he treated you has nothing to do with you, it was all about the drama in his head.
As for his proposal to be friends? Fuck him. He knows perfectly well that he treated you wrong, and if he can get you to be friends, then he can tell himself he didn’t treat you so badly.
Big, big hugs to you. Please be welll.
Alright, mammotheers!
David has agreed to be my intermediary. Operation mammotheer’s care package is in effect.
Email David to get my email. Any and all suggestions are welcome. If I can find it, I’ll put it in.
Marinerachel, we’d all love to help in any small way we can. You are worthwhile, and we really think you’re a fine individual. Sleep well and safe at your friends place, and all the luck facing tomorrow.
I’m rooting for you, all the way.
marinerachel – have you any evidence he treated his former girlfriends any better? Like girlscientist said, this “they done me wrong” line is so common to abusers, and this guy is an abuser; he’s treated you shamefully. None of his behaviour has anything to do with your worth as a human being: it’s all him wearing you down, controlling you, undermining you.
I’m not buying that he could be Mr Wonderful to them, then suddenly turn into Mr Piece of Shit just because the relationships didn’t work.
Everything about him, everything you’ve said of his behaviour to you, says he was never a good person, never worth being with. Good people don’t do that sort of shit.
For all the dreadful pain you’re feeling now, you’re so much better off without him. He’s chewing gum on your shoe, only fit to be scraped off in disgust.
Yay contrapangloss!
marinerachel, I know you really, *really* believe right now that he could have been good for you, but there is *no excuse* for his behaviour. He chose it. He did it. It doesn’t matter why, he chose to treat you badly. And that is all on him.
You deserve so much better.
I agree with the others, get the bitterness out. He was a mean person, and you deserve better, and that hurts.
But, and here I agree with the others as well, there isn’t like a niceness pool that we’re all born with, and being nice to others in relationships means that the pool eventually empties so the next person we’re with gets screwed over emotionally.
The shit that happened to him before, that’s his crap to deal with and Not. Yours. So what if his previous partners were shits? That doesn’t give him any “rights” or “reasons” to be a shit to you. This is like a toddler stage of reasoning with respect to how to treat others.
He was a shit to you Because. He. Chose. To. Be. A. Shit. To. You.
And no, he doesn’t get a pass because he had fucked up relationships before. I assume everyone (at least all of us over 40) on this blog have had at least one fucked up relationship where we were treated like shit. Does that then mean we have a hospital pass to go out and treat others like crap? No it bloody well doesn’t. And minimising why he did what he did to you is an implicit method of minimising the abuse. Abusers are already capable of minimising their culpability in their own minds, he doesn’t need any help.
And none of us are perfect. I’ve lost my temper at people, or said mean spiteful things, and you know what – my behaviour embarrasses me when that happens. So much so that I apologise to the person I have done it to. I then try to work out what my trigger was for the incident and then try to stop it being an emotional pushbutton for me in the future. Because I’m an adult, and that’s what adults do.
Please focus on your healing, I really want you to be in a safe happy place again as soon as possible.
You are such a valuable and worthwhile person. And soon you will start feeling about yourself that way again.
If you’re comfortable, please pass on my thanks to your friend as well. And let them know that I think they are really awesome for being there for you. 🙂
What pallygirl said. Plus, if he was Mr Empathetic Wonderful Person, and had been treated like shit, how come his Wonderful Empathetic Empathy short-circuited so completely that he started doing the same shitty things – and doing them, moreover, to you, who had nothing to do with his exes’ alleged behaviour.
If you’d seen him being cruel to another person, telling them they were worthless, would you think “Oh, well, yes, that person must be worthless.” No, you’d be rightly angry that he could do that to them. Same applies to you. Who the fuck does he think he is, taking out his purported hurt and wrongs on you?
This is classic abuser stuff.