It's in your head

“I’m gonna do it!”

Gripping the handle of the gun cabinet door and staring at me, he stood there waiting to see what I was going to do next. It was at this moment I knew this was out of control. It took 2 days for me to realize it was merely a desperate attempt to manipulate the situation. I told him I had come to a realization about him, and I was not ready to share it. He was pressuring me to reveal it to him, but I wanted to talk to my therapist about it first.

“911 Emergency.” I called 911 and started telling the dispatcher what was going on. I hung up the phone and found my way to the couch. That's when I realized my husband stopped sobbing uncontrollably and followed me up the stairs to hear my conversation with 911.

This was the last event in a long chain of betrayal and the last night I ever spent with him. As I continued waiting for what felt like 3 hours for the police to arrive, he walked over to the couch and began hovering over me, half-empty beer in his hand, making sure I knew the amount of trouble I was in.

“This is the rest of your life.” I heard pity in his voice. I did not take my eyes off my clasped hands in my lap.

After this arrest, I was never in the same room with him, again. This is the day my healing journey took a significant turn.

-

The start of my self-worth journey began with a run. I would often run to clear my head, and one day, the run I went on changed my life. It changed something profound inside of me that I didn’t have control over. Our marriage was in a rough spot, and I was desperate to find a solution for both of us.

My ex and I were good running partners, and we made time to run. I was always athletic, but I was never much of a runner. When we started running together, it resonated with me and became a mental health thing, and I got good at it. We were running full marathons together as our marriage came to an end.

After he told me he had been suffering from sex addiction, I began needing to run more to handle the pain. Thankfully, there was a recovery group that was local, and I had attended my first support meeting for the spouses the night before, step 7, understanding our faults. I was hoping the run could offer clarity for our situation and help me process what I learned from the group.

After choking back tears from trying to figure out why I’m not good enough, it occurred to me that he is a jerk to me. He rarely takes an interest in what I’m doing and criticizes me a lot. Nothing I did was enough. That's the problem, I’m allowing him to treat me this way. My faults lie in the fact that I don’t demand the respect I deserve, you know, for being human. There is a lack of the basics: kindness, gratitude, generosity, happiness, and compassion. These are lacking because I’ve allowed the behavior. Not only that, but he is trying to bring me down by destroying my self-worth.

One of the ways he was doing this was by making me feel unattractive. He did this by telling me that he doesn’t approve of my clothing or by complimenting other women on the things that I am most insecure about right in front of me. At some point, I realized that my entire wardrobe had been flipped to clothing that hid most of my feminine characteristics. Before long, I realized I had mainly baggy sweatshirts and jeans in my closet.

Upon my return, my runner’s high was in full swing, and I blurted out my revelation. “Self-worth helps me perform at my job; my job doesn’t add to my self-worth.” My moment of clarity had arrived. I felt this intense satisfaction for the first time in my life, and he knew something was up. I told him how I was feeling, thinking it would improve our communication and finally put us on track.

That’s when things started changing. The love bombing returned because he knew he was going to lose me if he kept up with his old ways. He noticed I was acting differently; my tolerance and attitude changed. I started standing up for myself and saw how he was triangulating me with everyone because I called him out on his behavior. My self-worth began to grow, and I started looking at my life in an objective way.

When someone knows their worth, they demand it from others. If a relationship doesn’t offer what is on your personal list, then it's time to move on. It doesn’t matter if there are three items, or 300. Our list is our set of requirements. The problem comes in when we, as individuals, don’t have a comprehensive list or choose not to honor it.

Self-worth is made up of the things that we believe in ourselves. That’s all. No one can tell you that you are wrong or right. It’s what you think. One does not need to prove who they are; one just is. Just like beauty, worth is determined by everyone on an individual basis. If you judge someone based on what they are not good at, they are at risk of being seen as worthless. We are responsible for leaving a situation if it’s not offering what we need.

It can get muddy if it leans on our need to express it in an aesthetic way. If name-brand clothing and fancy cars make you feel worthy, then that is where our effort goes. Unfortunately, this only communicates the possibility of a bankroll, which has nothing to do with self-worth. Some may argue that if we do indeed have self-worth, then fancy cars and clothes are just a symbol of that. My experience taught me that expressing our self-worth using material goods can be slippery. It seems to me that those who flaunt their self-worth or claim that it is rock solid are often the ones with the lowest amount.

Growing up I was taught to dismiss my needs, resulting in a radically diminished sense of self-worth. This set me up beautifully for an abusive marriage, and my ex-husband picked up right where my mother left off seamlessly. Healing created a change in me, eliminating the part of me that resonated with the abuse. At some point in my healing journey, I began to understand my self-worth, and it helped me realize not everyone sees me the way he does, and his opinion is insignificant.

I began restructuring different parts of my life, including my wardrobe. I honored my desire to wear what I wanted in the color I wanted. I’m honoring my choices as authentic, no matter what I’m choosing. This resulted in a stack of pink and purple sweaters.

My realization was wrong anyway. He thought I found the child pornography on the computer, the porn he stashed in a hidden profile on our shared machine. In all the years I knew him, that never once landed on my radar, even though he told me he had been doing it since he was a tween.

Looking at this on a big-picture scale, it seems to me like my lesson of self-worth came from being told many ways, many times, how worthless I am. If we continually encounter the same obstacle, we need to find a different route. If it weren't for my run that day, I may never have found my moment of clarity.

Since this event, I have seen this pattern in several places in my life, and I have learned if something is not suitable for me, that the universe will trigger me to change it. I do my best every day to keep up with the challenge.