trigger warning for rape, domestic violence, child molestation; language
This was originally written as today's Facebook status.
An Apology to A.S. and E.B., or "Cognitive Dissonance - If Things Were Really so Bad, Why Didn't She Leave?"
My mother's continued friendship with my ex-husband and especially her cozy new Facebook friendship with his new wife have really been triggering my post-traumatic stress disorder, an illness I developed as a result of abusive things my ex-husband did to me during our twenty-seven year marriage (victims of rape and abuse suffer PTSD at rates DOUBLE those of combat veterans). The triggering has me revisiting the past, a sign that my illness is bad right now. I have been thinking a lot about my ex-husband, rapist and child molester. One summer when I was away with my daughter and he was staying with my middle sister, he tried molesting three teenaged girls. A.S. was first. She was a friend of my nephew's. My ex-husband gave her lots of alcohol and tried to kiss her. He just suddenly said, "Don't you wanna give me a kiss, baby?" and leaned in. Shocked, she pulled away. At home and in tears, she told her mother. Her mother, furious, called my sister and demanded that my sister kick him out - she wouldn't be letting HER daughter come over anymore but, she demanded, what about my sister's children. My sister refused to kick him out, saying that she'd known him for over twenty years. My sister simply didn't believe it. My mother didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. The girl was, in a sense, easy enough for us to dismiss. She was a "troubled teen." We heard that she was a sometime runaway who had lived on the streets. We heard that she did drugs. We thought she was a mixed-up kid who had developed a weird teenaged crush on this uncle figure and just had a fantasy about him. A.S, if you are reading my status today, I owe you a big apology, baby girl. You, brave girl, were the first to accuse him, but you weren't the last. I'm so proud of you for the woman and mother you've become. When it happened to two girls IN OUR FAMILY too, only THEN did we believe. I'm very sorry that's what it took, A.S. Mom and Miriam, I think you should probably apologize to A.S. too. I can send you her Facebook page. A.S., we simply couldn't believe the man we knew and loved would try to molest a teenager. The man we knew and loved was just SO WONDERFUL! We COULDN'T believe it, so we DIDN'T believe it - I've learned that that's called "cognitive dissonance," when you try to take in something that goes against everything you know, your brain overloads and finds a way to block out the new, contradictory information. I HAD to use cognitive dissonance. As I've realized since my divorce, my whole marriage and magical love with the man I thought was my soul mate was BASED on cognitive dissonance. I used it to block out rape, abuse, alcoholism, pornography and sex addiction, even cheating. Let me illustrate what I mean. When I was 16 and he was 19 and we were engaged to be married, he went on a two week Air National Guard trip and returned home with a huge hickie on his neck. He claimed that he was drunk and merely dancing with someone and she must have given him a hickie while they were dancing without him knowing it. Now, he's 6'2" so how could a woman reach his neck without his knowing it, right? But if I didn't believe him, it would mean that he cheated. That would mean cancelling our engagement. That would be too painful. My heart would break into a million tiny pieces! Surely the man I loved so much, who was SO good to me, SO VERY romantic, OH SO great, with our fairy tale love, wouldn't just CHEAT on me. So I managed to convince myself to believe him, CHOSE to believe that he ACTUALLY got a hickie without ever cheating - LOL! Cognitive dissonance - I was doing it before we were even married and I just kept on doing it after we were married. When we married and got to an Air Force base in England, that base was a non-stop, alcohol-fueled party. He became a drunk who hung out with a group of unmarried drunks from work. Often, he came home from the club or from parties in the barracks very late at night (we didn't have a phone so I had no idea where he was or if he was okay and he never bothered to tell me he was going out in advance, going out straight from work). A few times, he didn't come home from work all night long and I was a frantic, crazy American lady on the pay phone with the slightly patronizing but ever polite British police, convinced he was hurt or dead on the highway. But, after staying out all night, he would come home from work the second day like nothing strange had happened. I blamed his crazy friends, never him. These single, crazy drunks were CONVINCING him to hang out at the barracks partying all night! THEY were a bad influence! I positively HATED them. Surely the man I adored and who said such loving things to me wouldn't just do such a thing as staying gone all night long. Cognitive dissonance! One night, I finally got a ride from a British friend and went looking for him at the barracks. I walked past the dark recreation room and saw two people leaning against the pool table, making out heavily. Other than that, the hall was deserted. I knocked on his friend's door and the people there said he had left the party. I immediately went back down the hall and found him and a woman he worked with standing in the doorway to that empty recreation room. I asked them, "Were you two just making out against the pool table?" They both denied it! He kept INSISTING that it wasn't him, but there was no one else around. Surely he couldn't look me in the eye and just LIE so casually, right? I couldn't grasp such a notion. It was totally alien to me. I just COULDN'T believe it, so I tried NOT to believe it. For a moment, I ALMOST believed him over my own EYES! He had me TRULY doubting my sanity! Cognitive dissonance! One time he left the bar drunk with another woman right in front of me! I saw them in the parking lot, getting into our car! I said, 'What the hell do you think you're doing?" And he said, "Driving her home." I said, "No you're fucking not!" He said, "Watch me bitch!" He left me there at the club on the base, in a foreign country, with no ride home. We lived in town, about 20 miles from the base. A little drunk, I stumbled around the many barracks buildings looking for our car. I entered buildings, asking bemused strangers if they knew him or had seen him. Eventually, the club due to close at 2 A.M., I decided I had to find a way home. Luckily, I had a British checking account and managed to find a British cab company that would actually take a check. He didn't come home until the next morning. He claimed that they hadn't had sex, that she had tried but that he was too drunk. I'd seen him VERY drunk PLENTY of times and it NEVER stopped him from having sex with me! But I couldn't believe the man I loved, adored, would just cheat on me like that, right in front of me even (who the hell DOES that?), so I convinced myself to believe him that nothing had happened at her place - all night long! Cognitive dissonance! Once, during a big fight we had, I was going to leave the house in his prized Mustang. In the hallway, trying to stop me from getting out the door, he grabbed me and tackled me to the floor, spraining my ankle. I had to go to the hospital in the morning. Still, even with my ankle all wrapped up, I couldn't believe he would ever actually ABUSE me. So I excused it as him freaking out about me driving his precious Mustang when, after all, I reasoned, I HAD only JUST RECENTLY, BARELY learned to drive, so he HAD a point in doing whatever it took to stop me from driving the car. Cognitive dissonance! During one fight, he grabbed me, picked me up, threw me from the hallway onto the bed and said, "Fighting with me must turn you on, bitch, you love to do it so much. Here, this is the only thing I've ever found that shuts you the fuck up. I know THIS is what you REALLY want." Then he pinned me down and began to rape me. We were using condoms for birth control at the time, but he started to rape me without a condom. I was FREAKING OUT - we couldn't bring an innocent BABY into this MESS of a marriage! And we were just too young to become parents, just eighteen and twenty-one. I was crying, begging him, "Please no, stop. For God's sake, at least use a condom! Please, please!" And he said, "I thought you wanted a baby. Just not MY baby, huh?" And he proceeded to rape me without a condom. I was crying silently, just lying there, staring at the ceiling in shock. Afterwards, I decided that SURELY he wouldn't REALLY just RAPE me. It COULDN'T be. It just couldn't. It must have been because he was so drunk, he didn't know what he was doing, so it didn't really count. I pretended that it hadn't even happened. It was never discussed, not even during later marital counseling. Cognitive dissonance! During another fight, he slapped me so hard that it broke a blood vessel in my eyelid and turned my eyelid purple. It was bad enough that people at work noticed it. A British coworker jokingly asked, "Who hit ya'?" And I calmly said, "My husband." She said, "Oh. I've noticed that a lot of the American men here hit their wives. Is that an American thing?" (Yep, that was military life.) I had finally had enough. I walked several times the next day to the pay phone to try to call my grandparents collect back in the U.S. to humble myself (everybody had said we were too young to marry, that it would never work) and ask for money for a plane ticket home, but the phone just rang and rang. I later found out that they were vacationing in Las Vegas at the time. That night, he came home from work on time and announced that he had walked into his commander's office and put himself in the Air Force's alcohol rehab program. I was shocked to hear him announce that he was an alcoholic - like I said, I had always just blamed his wild and crazy friends for his behavior. "I saw that bruise on your eye when I left for work this morning and I felt sick to my stomach," he said sweetly. "I realized that if I can be drunk enough to hit a woman, then there is definitely something wrong with my drinking. It has to stop." I immersed myself in Alcoholics Anonymous literature and, poof, all of the above was forgiven. After all, SURELY he wouldn't have raped me and abused me and cheated on me when he was sober, and he DID go to a couple of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, so none of it really COUNTED. It wasn't REAL. It was the disease alcoholism that did those things to me! Cognitive dissonance! Well, actually, sober, he DID hit me a few more times over the years and he DID many times continue to fuck me after I'd said "No" and he DID continue throwing things at me when he was angry. But each time, I still found a new excuse for why it didn't REALLY count - for example, maybe I had provoked him. Cognitive dissonance! When we'd been married for about twelve years, he cheated on me with a woman named Vicky. I dealt with it by managing to think of it as not at all HIS fault but all HERS - obviously, SHE was a SKANK...SHE had had the hots for him since high school...SHE obviously threw herself at a man she knew was married. I directed tons of rage at HER, not at HIM. MY dear husband wouldn't just cheat on me, not since he was sober anyway. It had to be her, that bitch. Cognitive dissonance! (Actually, the truth was that she was a newly divorced (her husband left her for another woman), disabled, stay-at-home mother of two with no job skills and no education. Her alimony was mere months from running out. She was very afraid about what was going to happen to her and her kids. She was desperate for a new man to take care of her. My husband led her on over the phone long distance while I was in night school, letting her think they could be together, when he was really only interested in her as an easy fuck during our upcoming vacation back home to New Orleans. When we were in New Orleans on vacation, he fucked her a few times and then, when she kept calling his cell phone, gave her the cold shoulder, of course going back to his life and his family in another state. I found out much later that when he left, she tried to kill herself and ended up in the hospital. The truth is that he took advantage of a very vulnerable woman, was very cruel to her.) After I'd been married for about twenty-three years, my mother invited me to take a trip with her back to Washington State. It turned out that the purpose of the trip was actually for my family to sit me down, far away from my husband, and tell me some hard truths about him. He had raped my little sister repeatedly, they said. First, when she was just SIXTEEN and he was twenty-five, she had visited us in England. When I was at work and it was just the two of them at home alone, he'd tried and tried and tried some more to get her to give him a blow job. He practically forced her, even unzipped his pants and stroked himself in front of her, but she wouldn't. When we were all in Spokane and she was eighteen and pregnant and living with our mother, he had a key to the apartment because he sometimes did repairs for my mother. My sister woke up one morning to find his head between her legs! She jumped up and puked. When she was still pregnant and a newlywed eighteen year old with nowhere to live, we invited her and her unemployed husband to live with us until they got on their feet. He was, she was telling me years later, constantly trying to have sex with her back then, grabbing her and pinning her down on the sofa and grabbing at her breasts and crotch and trying to kiss her and placing her hand on his crotch. She kept saying "no," but he was relentless. A few times he, twenty-seven years old to her eighteen, suddenly let her go, laughing and saying, "Aw, I was just kidding. I just wanted to see if I still have it, if I could still turn on someone your age." She became terribly depressed during her pregnancy because of it all, when it should have been a happy time. A few years later, she was in her own rental house with two kids and a husband who worked nights. My husband had a key to the house because the landlord, my mom's boss, was paying him to do repairs on the place. One night he came to her house and relentlessly tried to have sex with her. He followed her all over the house, from room to room, trying to kiss her and feel her up while she kept telling him "no" and "stop" and moving away. Finally, desperate to somehow get away from him, her young children sleeping soundly in their beds, she went and stood just outside the front door with the front door open. He followed her outside. There, protected from the neighbors' eyes by a low, tight canopy of bushes leading to the door, he unzipped his pants, took out his penis, and tried rubbing it against her. She kept pulling away. He stroked himself until he had an orgasm right there outside the front door, ejaculating on her walkway. After that, he started waking up early before work and using his key to let himself into her house in the mornings while she was asleep. HER husband had cheated on HER. She was heartbroken and depressed and drinking LOTS of wine, so she slept like a rock and never heard him coming in. Several times she woke up startled to find him in her bed, pants down, already on top of her. She would try to get away, but it was impossible. She would repeatedly tell him "no" and "stop," but he would keep going, saying, "There - doesn't that feel good, baby?" He told her not to dare tell anyone, that she wouldn't want to break her sister's heart. At family get-togethers, she would see her sister watching her husband with the children from across a room, positively glowing with unmistakable love and adoration for him. She knew that he was right, that she could never break her sister's heart - she could NEVER tell. She kept her rapes, her trauma, a secret for many years - a secret just between her and her ever more trusted best buddy, Jack Daniels. It wasn't until many years later when he tried molesting her daughter that she decided she finally HAD to tell. So my family told me on that trip to Washington that he had also tried to molest my teenaged niece, the daughter of my sister who he had raped. He gave her lots of alcohol, encouraged her to rest on the sofa with her legs on his lap, massaged her legs, and worked his way up and up until he was feeling up her crotch. She cried, "Uncle ******!!!" and jumped up off the sofa and ran away to where her cousins were sleeping. After hearing this, I was so sick. I tried desperately to rely on my old marital aid, cognitive dissonance, but had great trouble finding anything there this time...maybe, I thought, just maybe, there was some mistake...somehow. But my family was having none of that. It was all TRUE, they insisted. My mother was furious and firm. She wanted me to stay in Washington with her, leave all my belongings back in Louisiana, and get a divorce. She tried convincing me that he had probably even molested our daughter, while I insisted that he WOULDN'T have, just COULDN'T have, but she was adamant. She and a lawyer friend of hers wanted to lure him back to Washington - he would come if my mother needed him - and have him arrested for child molestation. The lawyer had already formally interviewed my niece. As a experienced attorney hearing her story and observing her demeanor, he found her to be a very credible witness. As a friend of the whole family, he was positively furious. He talked to her at length about what testifying would be like. She said she was prepared to testify. After hearing all this, I got so very sick - my stomach was in knots, I didn't sleep. I cried all of the time, even in front of my daughter. The areas around my eyes were purple from crying and lack of sleep. My eyes burned like hell. I was suicidal - I began experimenting with the idea, late at night, making small cuts on my wrists with a razor blade. One night at 3 in the morning, I suddenly found myself wandering, shivering, fully clothed, in my other sister's backyard pool. I couldn't remember walking in or figure out why on earth I'd done it. I just wandered into a swimming pool fully clothed for no reason. I just did it in a daze. Desperate, having a mental breakdown, I finally called my beloved favorite professor from my days as an undergrad student at nearby Gonzaga. First I asked him if he remembered me. He said, "How could I forget you! You were one of my favorite students ever!" "I'm back in town. I need help," I told him. "I'm in trouble. I'm suicidal." I told him the story. He was a recovering alcoholic who knew a lot about 12 step programs. "For some people," he said, "sex is every bit as addictive as alcohol or drugs. There are sex addicts. There are 12 step programs for them - there is Sex Addicts Anonymous." I researched "sexual addiction" and found websites and bought books on it and learned that sexual addiction really is a thing. I felt greatly relieved - finally, a way out, a way to get my old friend cognitive dissonance to work for me once again! My sweet beloved wasn't a rapist and a child molester - that was impossible! He just had an addiction! HE COULDN'T HELP IT! Yay! Great news! I could still be totally in love with the man I had adored since I was fifteen years old after all! Now I could SUPPORT him, stand by my man, DEFEND him to my outraged family. I could even RESCUE him from an ILLNESS (bonus points)! Defying my mother, I could go back to Louisiana and stay the loyal, loving little wife (It turned out not to be quite so simple. Back in Louisiana over the next few years, I found that maintaining cognitive dissonance over rape and child molestation was much, much harder than anything I'd faced before. The denial this time proved to be just too much for me. I became suicidal, cutting my wrists up with razor blades. I sort of grew to love and rely on my cutting. Feeling SO MUCH emotional pain that it felt like I should have blood oozing from every one of my pores, I liked how cutting made a physical spot on which my terrible pain could be focused. Eventually, I was so suicidal that I had to be admitted to a mental hospital. After that, I became addicted to inhalants for two years. It all started when, returning from the dentist one day, I mentioned to my husband that the nitrous oxide gave me a pleasantly aroused sensation, joking that if I were a dentist I would definitely sneak into the office at night with someone to have sex in the dentist's chair while high on nitrous. Hearing that nitrous turned me on, having been ever since the Washington trip banished from my bed to the uncomfortable sofa, he had nerve enough to ask a dentist friend of a friend where to score some nitrous for recreational purposes. The dentist told him that sex shops sell inhalants that have a very similar effect. So my husband began to buy me inhalants from a sex shop he knew. He was happy to provide them for me - when I was high I would fuck him and allow him to sleep in the bed again. Always one to keep pushing the envelope sexually, he quickly discovered that when I was high, I would do absolutely anything, so he kept me well supplied. He would come home at night with a bag of inhalants from the sex shop and that meant he was going to get laid. Since I would do absolutely anything while high, he took the opportunity to act out some of his fantasies. Predictably, he began trying for anal sex, knowing that I wouldn't do it sober, knowing that painful attempts years earlier had left me with a partial anal prolapse that resulted in permanent constipation. He began tightening plastic bags over my head during sex, suffocating me and then giving me oxygen only at the last possible moment to try to give me a bigger rush. He began tightening his belt around my neck during sex. When I was high, he would choose from among his large collection of sex toys a FRIGHTENLY GIGANTIC dildo, one that he knew perfectly well I vehemently rejected when sober as it hurt me and left me sore and bleeding. A longtime fan of gangbang porn, he arranged online at adultfriendfinders.com for five men to fuck me while I was out of my head, eagerly filming the whole thing. He absolutely LOVED his gangbang tape of me, wanted to watch it together and have sex to it. I told him I'd better NEVER see that fucking thing, that I would destroy it. He kept it in his work van, watching it and rewatching it and rewatching again, masturbating to it in his van during breaks from work. It was only after a long while when my ever growing habit, my desperate effort to escape the terrible emotional pain, began to eat up all of our money that he started to balk at supplying me - but even then, he kept buying it and kept fucking me. Although an addict, I never bought the stuff for myself, not once. Finally, the inhalants had deprived my brain of oxygen so much that suddenly one day my feet went completely numb, turning and staying a deep purple, and I was crippled - one morning, I went to stand up, lost my balance, and fell right over, breaking my finger when I landed. I would try to stand up, I would fall over. With my feet completely numb, I had no balance. Embarrassed, I told my doctor the truth about the inhalant abuse. He had me try to walk across his office, had to catch me with every unsteady step, and told me, forty years old, that he had no hope that I would ever walk again. He said I had chemical-induced neuropathy in my feet. Eventually, I walked with the assistance of a walker and used the wheelchair cart at the grocery store. I tried doing the balancing games on the Wii and eventually could walk with a cane. Seeing me walk across his office with my cane, my doctor pronounced my progress miraculous, the Wii a miracle device that he would happily recommend to future elderly patients with balance issues. I'm happy to report that today, at 45, I can walk unassisted again, although I do still sometimes suddenly lose my balance a bit but I can catch myself before I fall now). So during the trip to Washington, having learned about sex addiction and ready to stand by my man, I called him and talked to him about what I'd learned. He agreed to go to Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings in Baton Rouge - and he did. But even there, at the meetings that were for addicts to get honest about their lives, he still denied ever having had sex with his sister-in-law, claiming to have no idea why she would accuse him; an experienced 12-stepper at a meeting finally challenged him, asking, "What would you say if I said that I think you're LYING?" (much later, he finally admitted to having had sex with my sister but claimed that it was consensual). He admitted to giving my niece "just a few sips out of my drink" but denied giving her her own full cup and vehemently denied feeling her up although again he had no explanation for why she would claim such a thing. Still in Washington, my eyes burning so badly from crying and lack of sleep that I had to really strain to see, I borrowed my mother's car and drove my niece to a beautiful spot on the top of Mt. Spokane. At a picnic table there, I told her that we needed to talk, that I knew what had happened with her uncle, that I believed her (I knew that it's vital to victims' mental health to be believed). I told her that it wasn't her fault and that I would always love her very much no matter what. She quietly said that on the way up the mountain, she had thought I was going there to tell her off, to blame her for what happened. I reaffirmed that it wasn't her fault. I told her that some people have certain sicknesses, that her uncle was a good man but that he was just sick, and that if she agreed not to testify against him, I would see to it that he got the help he needed for his sickness so it would never happen again. She said okay. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I thought I was SUCH a great aunt, that I had done such a GREAT JOB of saying all the right things to say to a victim. E.B., if you're reading this, I want to say that I'm very sorry. I now realize that I was selfish. What I actually cared about MOST was keeping my little family together. I wanted the man I adored, my beloved, in my arms forever, not locked up in some cage. I wanted my little girl in her father's loving arms, not visiting him once a month with a wall of glass between them. I never had a father growing up - he was so abusive that we had to run away and go into hiding when I was six. There was one thing I had always wanted most but couldn't have - a daddy. I had always wanted any children I had to have a daddy! It meant everything to me. Plus, if he went to jail, the military would cut off his pension! He was the breadwinner. What would happen to ME and to MY little girl? Those are the things I really most cared about - me and mine. I guess I cared a little bit less about you having your moment of JUSTICE, of TRUTH, your big moment in court to say, "He did this to me," so I talked you into not prosecuting. I am so sorry. I was selfish and now I am very embarrassed and terribly ashamed. A.S., again, I am sorry to you as well. (I'm not going to mention my niece R.W. here, as she really didn't seem particularly traumatized by her uncle getting her drunk and trying to kiss her. She's still Facebook friends with him.) I am sad to say that my mother's intense anger towards him has cooled over the years and she remains close to him. I think she has some cognitive dissonance of her own going on. He has always been good to her. He was the glue that held our extended family together. Whatever went wrong for anybody in the family, he fixed it. Even now, if she needs help with something, he drives the sixty miles from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to take care of it. They talk on the phone. Even though she KNOWS and BELIEVES that he RAPED TWO OF HER DAUGHTERS, ABUSED ONE OF THOSE DAUGHTERS, and tried MOLESTING TWO OF HER GRANDDAUGHTERS, I think she can't quite process the fact that this "sweet" man is ACTUALLY a rapist, an abuser, a child molester, a sex addict, and a porn addict. She can't quite believe this man who is so good to her is actually a 100% sociopath. Astonishingly enough, she wrote a while back on Facebook when he married his new wife that he is "a good man!" Pure cognitive dissonance! She is Facebook friends with his new wife. Last week, my mother posted on Facebook right there for me to read that his new wife is "a delight" and that he is "a lucky man," fucking outrageously disrespecting me, her own daughter! This woman was involved with him while we were STILL MARRIED and my mom knows it!!! Towards the end of my marriage, I left town for a vacation. From a distance and off of the inhalants, I began to realize how abusive and fucked up my marriage really was. I called home and told him I was not coming home until certain conditions were met. One, he, master mechanic, had to fix my car - he'd been holding me captive in a trailer out in the country with no car and no money for TWO YEARS. Two, he had to go back to Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings - he had long since stopped going. Three, he had to take a long-promised lie detector test about molesting teenaged girls. What I didn't know was that while I was busy issuing ultimatums to my husband, the woman who is now his wife was offering him an alternative to all that - a fresh, new romance. They were spending hours on the phone together each night while I was away. I saw it on the cell phone bill, calls between his phone and one other number, hours at a time, late at night, pretty much every night. That prompted me to check his email. I found emails between my husband and his now wife. She had sent my husband a batch of disgusting photos - photos of her bare breasts and several close-up shots of her naked crotch! He had sent her a video of himself naked and masturbating, calling out her name while he orgasmed. He had sent her love notes, saying the EXACT same romantic things he had always said to me, word for fucking word - not even original material. I'm sure my mom knows that a woman who cheats with a married man is NO GOOD and that a woman who emails close-ups of her crotch is NO LADY and, therefore, not worth giving the time of day. But my mom sees her being loving to my ex, being a helpful stepmother to our daughter, and being all nice on Facebook and she can't quite believe what a nasty skank this lowlife really is (but I'VE seen the close-ups of her crotch and she definitely IS NASTY). Cognitive dissonance! And the new wife - she's FULL of cognitive dissonance! Before they were married, I wrote to her about him, warning her about him. So she knows some of my story. He had already told her that he ruined his marriage to a good woman by having sex with his sister-in-law (He left it implied to her that it was CONSENSUAL SEX though, which it wasn't, it was rape. So she thinks she already knows ALL about it. She doesn't. It was RAPE! And I'm sure he never told her about the child molestation attempts.) (My sister over the years tried keeping her demons at bay by drinking a hell of a lot of Jack Daniels, becoming an alcoholic. She has never learned to drive but in Montana, there was a liquor store a short walking distance away. She drank so much that she began having terrible violent seizures, at home and in public, waking up on the street or in the grocery store with strangers gathered around her, unsure where she was, unsure where home was, bloodied and in pain from having bumped into things during the spasms and from having bitten down on her tongue. About two years ago, drunk, she fell down some brick steps outside and hurt her head. There was swelling on her brain. She was flown by helicopter to the city sixty miles away. Afterwards, the doctor told my mom that my sister really was her "miracle baby," that the doctors in the emergency room here had never really expected her to even survive the helicopter ride. Her in-laws decided to help out by cleaning her messy apartment while she was in the hospital, giving her a nice pleasant home to return to for her recovery. They found Jack Daniels bottles stashed all over the apartment. My sister now has a metal plate in her head. The metal hurts her when she takes a hot shower. She sustained a traumatic brain injury when she hit her head. Her memory is ruined - she called my mother recently, in tears because she couldn't remember the middle name of her youngest child. I'm sure that she, like me, has post traumatic stress disorder. About a year ago, at my mother's insistence, she finally went for a long overdue follow-up with the doctor. They did blood work and, based on the damage to her liver from all the heavy drinking, said that she was dying, gave her maybe a year to live. In her mid-thirties, secretly still drinking even after a stint in rehab and despite the danger of falling again or having another seizure with the plate in her head, she stoically began the task of asking different family members to raise her three children when she died. Finally, with child protective services threatening to take her children, with the state of Montana having sent her a letter asking her to come in to be committed to a state mental institution, and with her second marriage in shambles largely due to her drinking, she left all her belongings behind, took the children, and fled by train back to her first husband in Washington. Where she lives now there is no liquor store within walking distance, thank god. She is sober, has been for a year now. She is on new anti-seizure meds that seem to be working and the doctors no longer say that she's dying.) After I wrote some of my story to the other woman, she wrote back to me that he's never been abusive to HER, never been anything but extremely loving. She CAN'T believe my story, that this GREAT man did all that I claim, so she DOESN'T believe it - cognitive dissonance! I guess she thinks I'm crazy or lying or SOMETHING, I don't know what - I know all too well how much easier that denial route is. If she sees this post, she still won't believe any of it. She even messaged me and basically asked me, "So if it was so bad, why'd you stay so long, huh?" I wrote back and told her she was obviously woefully ignorant about abused women and told her to Google "domestic abuse Stockholm Syndrome." Last week, the day my mother wrote that the new wife is a "delight" and that my ex is "a lucky man," I wrote a long Facebook post in response about the things he'd done (a summary of some of the rapes and abuse) and the things she'd done and asked my mother to stop contact with "these two oversexed creeps" out of respect for me, as it was triggering my PTSD, making me very ill. My former sister-in-law, with whom I have been close for nearly thirty years, who still calls me her sister, forwarded that long post to the new wife. I guess my former sister-in-law, my "sister," defriended me - she surely can't handle the truth about her own brother and must, I'm sure, have her own cognitive dissonance going on. The new wife, the skanky adulteress, has threatened to send the post that my sister-in-law forwarded to her to a lawyer, even though it was MY Facebook status about MY PTSD experiences, I'm not Facebook friends with either one of them, I didn't mention either of them by any names, and it's all THE TRUTH. My Facebook pic says, "Speak the truth even if your voice shakes." I am just trying to cope with my PTSD illness the best I can and, as a survivor of rape and abuse, was speaking my truth! I still am. I won't be silent anymore!