Homefront Nightmare

         Being married to a veteran who needs special care is hard enough. Being a war veteran married to a war veteran who needs special care is something else. Public awareness of struggling disabled veterans is widespread these days, which can be both beneficial and detrimental, depending on who you talk to. I encourage every one of those individuals to keep pushing through in their pursuit of the life they want. Those spouses/caretakers out there have their work cut out for them. My story does not highlight a problem in the majority. Most of these men and women want to help themselves and, in turn, heal their families through all of it. That is not what life was/is like for a fraction of us. What follows is my personal account.


         When we met in 2008, he seemed to be a very kind, charismatic person. We were deployed to Afghanistan at the time. I was a welder for the Army, and he often came to my shop to help us when he didn't have his own work. He encouraged me to open up to him and responded supportively. We had long conversations about ourselves at that time. We seemed to have much in common and similar desires for our future lives. We liked all the same music and movies. He even had a similar sense of humor to mine. Later, I realized he was mirroring me in order to make it seem as if we were perfect for one another. He shared his childhood experiences and pain with me. The empathetic side of me wanted to help him heal. I was smitten. Neither one of us was single. We were both unhappy with our current relationships and ended them upon returning home. I'm not proud of that. I certainly had a lot to learn about cultivating healthy relationships.

         Once we were back in the States and together as a couple, his mask began to slip. Especially after we discovered I was pregnant. Things changed quickly. We started living together immediately. He asked me to marry him. I agreed. Then he began to act differently. I noticed that he would say things that I thought were cruel and unnecessary about other people. He would limit communication with me, responding passive-aggressively instead. Some days he barely spoke to me. On the day I went into labor, he was hardly in the hospital room. My epidural anesthesia didn't work, and when the IV wore off, I was left to bear it naturally. Luckily, a friend stayed with me the whole time. Coaching me through it. My husband showed up in time to see our son born.

         I suspected he was cheating. I just couldn't prove it. If I questioned him with my suspicions, he would say I was controlling and crazy. He started to ask me what was wrong with me and claimed that I must be paranoid. I now realize that he needed to reverse the blame in order to make me doubt myself. The more attention he was getting from elsewhere, the less he needed mine. He felt he didn't have to idealize me anymore. That phase was over. I had trapped myself. Without having the slightest idea aside from my constant intuitive alarm being silenced.

         Around the same time, he began having lower back problems and was diagnosed with PTSD. We were also in court proceedings to try to get partial custody of his older son. There was a lot of animosity between us and his other child's mother. He encouraged me to argue for him. She and I became easy enemies. Little did I know that they'd had a recent affair, and she had been strung along by him. I was having increasingly severe anxiety issues. Sometimes it would feel as if I was having a heart attack. When I told my husband, he said I was fine, as if I was making it up. My body was screaming warnings at me.

         I began to believe my own suspicions of cheating. Another woman he was messing around with was a friend of ours, so they were able to make it look like a friendship for months. I was frustrated because I knew something was happening, but I couldn't catch him. I ended up in treatment because I was so confused and depressed. I had squeezed a wine glass so hard that it broke in my hand. I stood over the sink and watched the blood drip from my fingers, not caring if I was hurt or not. He called 911, and I let the ambulance take me. I didn't want to die, but I didn't want to live either. The devaluation phase was complete.

         I checked myself out of inpatient care after only a few days, believing that the worst was over. I chose to take most of the blame for the failure of our marriage. I purchased books on healing marriage after affairs and tried to start applying their principles. Within a month, he told me he wanted a divorce. His reason for the discard was my mental state. I was devastated at the time. I moved in with friends and filed for divorce, believing that was the logical next step. My husband and his lover stopped seeing each other a few months later, which coincided well with her husband returning from deployment. I assumed it was her doing, but you can never be sure. With her out of the picture, I soon began to get apologies and requests to reconcile. He convinced me to cancel the divorce after he had what seemed to be a change of heart. I fell for it. It took me months of him acting like the perfect husband to finally agree. I would later realize that was hoovering, my mind wanting any change to be better than it was before.

         During the split, I made the decision to surrender my life to Christ. I became someone who had a deep desire to forgive. I went back to the books on marriage after affairs and believed that we could move on. He used the opportunity to "play Christian" as part of his plan to get me back. We even went to marriage counseling for a short time, where he learned how to deceive me even more efficiently. He tried to convince me we didn't need to go anymore. I continued to go alone. I knew I had my own issues to work out, and I chalked up any residual problems to that narrative. That I was the one who needed to change.

         The next year we moved back to his hometown. He made a few short-lived attempts at employment. By 2014 he readily agreed with the VA to go ahead with surgery on his back. I believed that surgery was extreme. He wanted the pain to go away (who could blame him), but he also knew it would render him completely disabled, which has a lot of benefits. His disability made the employment problems all go away. I realize that sounds horrible, but nonetheless true. Our bathroom was a poly-pharmacy. For those who don't know, that's a cache of multiple prescriptions. Trazadone, Gabapentin, Duloxetine, Prazosin, and the list goes on. He used the excuse of taking his prescriptions, though not taken regularly or as prescribed, not to seek behavioral therapy that would have provided insight and solutions for better self-care. He never said he didn't want mental health treatment. But he rarely went to behavioral health appointments. The VA mental health system is a shambles making it very easy to do this. It was apparent when a major breakdown would happen, and the VA never followed up.

         He continued to become more controlling and irrationally jealous. He didn't like my attention being off of him. Not for family. Not for friends. He did not voice this. It showed in his actions. He would punish me for not giving him the admiration he thought he deserved by showing me very little. He used the children to that effect, showering them with attention and ignoring me mostly. A constant and daily reminder that I was the problem. I would later realize that this was manipulation. When I did get to the point that I was fed up, he sensed it. He was very intelligent and intuitive. He would be very nice to me for a while. Breadcrumbing things to me, like love notes or buying me something. Then the cycle would start over. The attention I did get was often infrequent, mostly sexual, and disrespectful. My protests were laughed off as if I needed to lighten up. I was gaslit like that for the better part of a decade.

         When I attempted to address problems, he would shut down or walk away. The lack of communication caused blow-ups on both sides over unexpressed feelings. It got to the point where I frequently felt like I had to defend or explain myself. I did not feel safe in any way. When we argued, he sometimes tried to stop me from leaving so that I would have to stay near the house. He tried to disable my car a few times by disconnecting something under the hood. I began to prepare when I would anticipate an argument by hiding my phone, wallet, and keys and making sure my car was locked. He often fought with his father as well. Mostly over trivial things, and sometimes it would come to blows. Once, it happened in front of our son when he was only five. He still remembers that.

         My husband did not encourage my hobbies or passions; in some cases, it seemed like he wanted me to give them up. He would do this by ignoring them completely or trying to make me feel guilty about choosing them over family time. I spent a few years working on various distance running goals, but he was rarely at the events I trained for. I completed five half marathons and usually stood there by myself after crossing the finish line. He did not encourage me to make healthy choices. At the peak of my marathon training, he would tell me that I was too skinny. It made no sense to me because I was eating healthy and at a recommended weight for my height. The healthier I looked, the less he liked it.

         He offered no support for my career goals aside from a "do what you gotta do" attitude about them. He did not show enthusiasm for my accomplishments unless he talked to other people about me. Keeping up the appearance of the doting husband was important for his image. When I finally finished my undergraduate degree, I hung my diploma on the wall, and that was it. He was happiest when I wasn't working. The less of my own money I had, the more control he had over me. He never told me I couldn't work. He would sabotage my functioning instead. He started arguments when I needed to leave for work, was loud when I was trying to sleep, or implied I wasn't around for the kids enough. Coming from someone who didn't need to work anymore didn't make it any easier to endure. I found myself envying him. Relationships like that can bring out the worst in us. In the mental health community, they refer to this as "crazy-making behavior.

         Date nights were non-existent or scarce. If I requested that we go out, he would often insist that we bring the children. His lack of trust in me showed by his questioning my motivations. He would comment on how nice I smelled for just going to a yoga class or that I was packing some pretty tight jeans for my work trip. It got to the point where I would hide things that a person should not need to hide. I would try to stop doing those things altogether. I only wore flattering clothing if I was going somewhere with him. Even then, it didn't make much of a difference. There was no pleasing him.

         Some of my friends stopped reaching out to me. I was sacrificing them on the altar of keeping things calm at home. A few refused to give up, pressing me to see my marriage for what it was. After my husband forcibly removed me from a bar for forgetting his debit card pin, one of them told me he was very worried. Part of my role as an NCO (non-commissioned officer) in the Army Reserves is to be cognizant of the welfare of my soldiers between drills. A soldier called one evening because he was drunk and depressed. I didn't answer the phone and let it go to voicemail because I knew my husband would flip out. The soldier ended up drinking himself to death. I was devastated, and I blamed myself for years. The Army is overwhelmingly male, and so is the veteran community that I get so much support from. I was beginning to lose both.

         Our money situation was always a problem. He made large purchases without consulting me first. I often felt that I needed to handle all the finances, even having a separate bank account from the beginning, because of the lack of financial trust. He lied often. Sometimes it would take me months or even years to get him to tell me the truth about something. He went through periods where the behavior would slow down, but it would return when his condition would go downhill. The lies weren't often outright. Rather, he would omit or distort facts in order to deceive me. After I discovered the third affair, I stopped digging. I'm sure they never stopped, but I was tired of caring about it. After I left him, I found all kinds of evidence, including ads on Craigslist for anonymous hook-ups.

         If someone asked him about me, he would go on and on about my accomplishments. Remember, he's a great guy. By most outside appearances, people could not have seen why I would've wanted to leave. He loved to chat with friends he'd run into when he was out and was very polite to strangers. Church people were his favorite people to impress. He'd cut their grass and help with camp, but it was a show. His best side was his mask. It wasn't all an act, but it's hard to tell. It wasn't that he didn't have any feelings. I'd seen him get sad or cry many times, but it was never for anyone else. Always when something was happening to him.

         Once or twice a year, a major destructive event would occur; a car 'accident', a physical fight with a family member, or a complete breakdown. He did not see any of it as related. For instance, he would say things like "I haven't cheated on you in five years." (that you know about) or "That was an accident. I didn't mean to hurt you." and he would always insist that I clung to the past and had problems with forgiveness. I resorted to alcohol to deal with the stress of living in that environment. I was drinking every day, and he was fine with it. It made me weaker and easier to handle. It probably would have been worse if I hadn't tried to keep it under control to hide it from the rest of the world. Only those closest to me had any idea, and that group kept getting smaller. He would tell me no one liked me because I was such a bitch all the time. When I asked him to give examples, he would change the subject.

         He would weaponize silence if I had done something to anger him or sometimes nothing at all. He would also be particularly chatty with friends and family, making sure I knew the silence was just for me. I was always trying to improve myself, so it bothered me immensely. It made me question what I had done and caused me to constantly reevaluate my role in our relationship. This was a way to put me in a defensive position by getting me to doubt my own reality. I would later understand it was a form of gaslighting. Why would someone be mad at me if I'd done nothing wrong? It was insidious.

         Our modern-day culture encourages women to leave in situations like this. Why people stay for so long or what happens when you leave isn't talked about as often. I didn't want my children to grow up in two homes. I stayed for the belief of my duty to my marriage and "battle buddy". Lots of people wanted our relationship to fail, and I was dead set on proving them wrong. Also, what kind of person leaves a wounded warrior? When a victim has that moment of clarity and realizes the reality of their situation, a proverbial switch is flipped.

         When the switch flipped for me, I was training at an out-of-state Army base. The class I was in consisted of mostly senior enlisted people. Every day I was surrounded by people who communicated well, listened to what I had to say, and gave me positive feedback. Over the last week, I started to panic internally. I knew that I would be going home to a place where I didn't have open communication, was blown off constantly, and was not respected. I also knew that our children were learning from us how to manage their future relationships. They could become future abusers or victims themselves. I imagined my children mistreating their future spouses or allowing themselves to be treated poorly. It was very clear to me, finally, what I had to do.

         The letter explaining why I was leaving was one of the easiest and yet hardest words I'd ever written. They flowed easily from my pen because I had been dealing with these grievances for so long. It wasn't always like that. Is it ever? No couple says their relationship is awful from day one, or they wouldn't be in it. Ours had barely gotten off the ground before the bright red flags started appearing. The very short idealization (love-bombing, it's called) he displayed toward me should have tipped me off before anything took place. I simply did not have the insight at that time to recognize the signs.

I made the following list to look back on. Not bitterly, but with the knowledge that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. It is now part of my testimony.

2009

- Kicked in our front door while extremely inebriated. He then attempted to smash through the second-story window from the inside. This appeared to be a suicide attempt. Earlier, a bunch of us had gone out in costume for Halloween, and we couldn't find him at the end of the night after driving around and looking. We went home, hoping he would call. He was livid that we hadn't found him. Luckily it was a strong window. I was four months pregnant with our son at the time.

2010

-The first affair. I found out when the woman involved bragged about the affair when he had upset her.
-Threw an unopened can of food at me, narrowly missing our infant son.
-The second affair. It lasted six months. She ended it with him just before her husband returned from Afghanistan. The first discard happened during this time. Discards happen when an abuser finds a new supply of attention or admiration or is no longer getting what they want from the current one.

2011

- Drove away while I was on top of his Jeep, causing me to be thrown to the pavement, injuring my wrist when I landed. He said I shouldn't have gotten into the car. We were arguing, and I got on top of the car to prevent him from driving away, something out of character for me. I would later find out that victims act out of character when emotionally abused and sometimes display what is called reactive abuse.
- The third affair. It's possible that this woman's second child resulted from the affair, but she doesn't know for sure if the child is his. This he confessed to me when it was apparent that I would have found out otherwise.

2012

- He punched a wall during a heated argument with his father. He fractured his hand. We moved to the next town while we finished building the house. Arguments with his father happened often and sometimes came to blows.

2013

- Punched me in the face after I admitted to having an affair. After that, It became his new excuse to take his vengeance out on me. I left after he hit me, but I came back a week later. Victims are often so devalued, starved for attention, and tired of being devalued that they are primed to have an affair themselves.
- A few months later, he attempted to choke me. We had recently moved into the house we built and were sitting on the couch watching TV. I'm not sure what triggered it. I just remember realizing he was choking me and being unable to stop him. I watched the room appear to go dark and then he let go before I lost consciousness. My throat took days to heal. He claimed he had no memory of that. Later, I would read that it is common for abusers to deny events like this. I filed no report, but I did make a diary entry.

2014

- The Craigslist ads looking for random hookups started sometime during this year. The one I found was one of the most lude and sickening personal ads I'd ever read.


2015

- He fired a gun in the house twice, going through the cabinet in the kitchen and the floor. No argument preceded it and my best assumption is this episode was what he needed to claim full disability for PTSD. I had to call the sheriff's office, which sent a 'team' to remove him. He was put in a VA inpatient mental health facility for two weeks upstate and released, mostly because I didn't press charges. (You may be seeing a pattern of me not pressing charges. A paper trail I would later regret not having).

2016

- He got into a fistfight with his father in front of our son. I took still shots from a security camera in our home. These would end up being the evidence I'd use later to justify getting emergency custody of the kids during the beginning of our separation.

2018

- He intentionally flipped his truck while driving on the freeway in what I believe was a suicide attempt. Moments earlier, I told him on the phone that I was planning on ending the marriage. A good samaritan pulled him from the burning truck. He told the police it was a suspension malfunction. He maintains that narrative to this day.

In June of 2019, I arrived with the police to take emergency custody of the children. I had shown enough evidence to the court that he could be an immediate danger to his family if he thought he was losing his family. Being served with a petition for divorce could easily produce that kind of rage. I originally intended to go to PA to stay with my parents but decided to go to Texas first. I needed to consult with close friends there and help clear my head. My husband called constantly, begging me to reconsider. He agreed to seek better care for his mental health. I decided not to leave Louisiana and found a house in the same town so the children could see their father. I knew that I would not, if ever, feel safe again but I promised my children they would be able to see him. I wanted to do everything I could to keep my promise. Subsequently, the following still happened.

2019

- He broke a window in my guest house, resulting in cuts so deep that he almost lost his life. I'd let him in to talk about his recovery and the kids, but it wasn't long before an argument started. We don't make the best decisions under long-term duress. He left on foot. He returned a little later, very intoxicated. I wouldn't open the door, and I was afraid. I told him to sleep in the guest house till he sobered up. Shortly after, he returned to the main house bleeding so badly that he asked me to call 911. He'd severed everything in his forearm down to the bone. He no longer has full use of that hand. I have some of this on video. It's still not clear if it was an intentional injury or simply got hurt by punching the window.

2020

- I saw him on my camera early in the morning, walking around my house with a ladder. I came over the camera's speaker, asking him what he thought he was doing. He said he just wanted to talk.

- He went to my home after I didn't answer the phone one night and punched my ring doorbell until it was destroyed. The video is archived. I was not home at the time. I ended up pressing charges for the first time. I would decide to file for a restraining order the next month to prevent further problems, but COVID-19 would delay that practically till the divorce was finalized.

         The above represents the largest and most significant events. The much more frequent issues that would arise almost daily were, of course, also important contributions to my decision to finalize the split. Silent treatments, gas lighting, guilt-tripping, victim blaming...etc. The discovery of my pregnancy in 2015 overshadowed that year's earlier events. In 2017 his mother took her own life, and we became much closer for a period of months. It seemed like every time I decided I needed to leave, something would happen to make it improbable. In retrospect, I'm glad I was there for him when his mother passed. No one should go through that alone.

         It took me a long time to realize that, in actuality, he was nothing like the person I met originally because he was posturing in the beginning. I fell in love with someone who didn't exist. An idea, the person that he pictured I'd want. It took a long time for that façade to come down. There are great qualities that make up who he is. Friends and family can tell you this readily. He's the kind of guy who stops to move a turtle out of the road. He will help you if your car is broken down. He might even give you the shirt off his back. I left a man who hates himself and takes it out on the people he thinks he loves. But love was never modeled for him. Not in any consistent way. He was not born a monster. He was made one by years of systematic trauma, abuse, and neglect. I decided I didn't want to die at his hand or possibly my own.

         Once I had some distance, I tried many times to cease any contact that didn't involve the kid's needs. It took a long time. In fact, his finding a new supply was the reason it stopped. It's common for victims of this kind of abuse to be hypervigilant for months or years after leaving. I live close to the main road, and my anxiety would spike if a car went by with a loud sound system. I checked my door locks often and put cameras around my home. It wasn't for nothing, as some of the earlier lists were documented by those cameras.

         Getting my thoughts together and seeing things for what they were was a process. I needed to be able to step back, and the dust settle. The children were able to move on to two households with much less trauma than I imagined possible. I speak with my ex-husband weekly about the needs of the children, and his issues seem to have subsided for now. It could only seem that way because I am on the outside now. I worry about him - the kids worry too. A friend told me recently, "You can't save the world, Deborah. We have to fight our own battles" That's true, but we can be kind while we do it. God has helped me every step of the way. Everyone's situation is different, however. What worked for me may not be the right move for someone else. Whatever we choose to do, let us always say that we did it in service of what is best for our children and ourselves.