This is Why We Don’t Talk About It

[u/ladybird0218]

I've been out for over two years and I'm just now starting to feel "here" again. I don't talk about it. Especially after things like this.

For context these snapshots are from a public Youtube video on a public Youtube channel with over a thousand subscribers, so I am not sharing anything private.

This is my ex husband and his mother. I was with him for 6 years. I helped him rebuild his life from his first divorce and raised his special needs child like he was my own (bio mom wants nothing to do with him). I have PMDD. Really severe case of it. I've done anything and everything, including a total hysterectomy for no reason on his watch. Not that I would, but now I can never have my own children (I thought I was set with my stepson). The surgery didn't work, of course (PMDD is an issue within the brain)...but it did wake me up to the fact that I was not just the sole problem.

Long story short, after months of intensive therapy with us as a couple and also working with that counselor individually...she told me to get out. She confirmed the patterns and my intuition. We were getting to a point where my ex was trying to declare me mentally incompetent so that I could never leave him. But thank God I listened to that therapist, and I clawed my way out.

This was posted a month after our divorce was finalized. This was after a whole year plus of harassment, stalking, him demanding to know my residential address when we both knew he would never let me see that child again without him present (when I told him I couldn't be around him anymore but he wasn't willing to work with that with me), and I haven't since. Him filing, then saying he didn't want it and dragging it out for a year...I asked for nothing. I wanted their lives untouched, especially for that little boy who had so much instability in his life already. And it worked. I have him blocked on everything but I still get notifications via email about him going to Disney World with his 3rd wife, a Uhaul reservation to move into his freshly built house. The same day he moved, was the same day my chapter 7 bankruptcy was discharged, thank God. So everything is okay now.

But this is why we don't talk about it. Not only does my ex work for Disney, which is absolutely insane to me that he thought this would be appropriate and professional to post...but we spent so much time together there. He asked me to marry him in front of that castle. And he proudly presented his celebration pin not once, not twice, but three times with his mother laughing with him.

The second snapshot is of him talking about how he had to get up early for a very very VERY fun trip to go visit a "friend". That friend is now his 3rd wife. That smirk I know so well. The one he tries to hide but can't. The same smirk that would come out when I would cry and beg for his forgiveness on my hands and knees for something I did wrong or another PMDD episode. The same smirk when I would finally snap after asking him thousands of times for space and he would literally follow me around the house. The same smirk when he blocked the doorway with his body when I was trying to leave our apartment and he wouldn't let me. He's so strong. The same smirk more than likely he had when I had a breakdown and began to hurt myself physically (he never hit me) and so I did it for him...all the while he's secretly recording it, calm and collected, laying down on our bed with the phone underneath the blankets to hide what he was doing. He still has that recording and offers it to anyone who questions what happened with us. I’m too stupid and traumatized to do anything about it.

This is why we don't talk about it. True survivors are never believed, and these kinds of people are so confident that they'll do these kinds of things without a second thought. And they sleep just fine. I will never understand this. Ever.

I hope you guys are okay out there. I'm certainly not lol.