You'll regret not keeping proof of your abuse, protect your future self with receipts.
I feel like abuse victims often end up “leaping” from one abuse event to another, and their brain eventually starts to ‘swiss-cheese’.
In the mid-90s, there was a TV show called Quantum Leap. The main character was a savant genius doctor that invented time travel, allowing him to hop between other people’s lives and change something that happened to them. Great concept, only the side effects he would have from it was a “swiss-cheese” memory, not being able to remember every experience he had from one life to the next, or even who his own wife was.
Using this analogy, I feel like abuse victims often end up “leaping” from one abuse event to another, and their brain eventually starts to ‘swiss-cheese’. I found it harder and harder to keep up with how many goal post changes and redirects I got from my ex, which really set into my ability to recall each problem easily. My overall feelings were of course bad, but when I’d try to recall the specifics, sometimes it was hard.
Abuse normally starts the same for many of us. It starts with the love-bombing, the hoovering, the promises made. Your abuser puts the best bait on the hook and let’s just face it, we all fell for it. But once they are in, the next phase of control is almost always the same in every story, the emotional abuse begins. This is the most sneaky of them in my opinion, because you almost need another level of abuse to happen to highlight how far you have fallen emotionally.
When I think about this, it makes me angry and sad at the same time. Because I have to wonder how in the world could I have gotten to the point of feeling so dead inside without seeing how each piece was taken? Think about how many times you were forgiving despite being called out your name? Do you walk on eggshells, afraid to say things that will cause a fight? Hard to admit this but, I had developed a small library of lies that I would rotate, just to keep the peace, I know I’m not alone in this. If you find yourself having to manufacture the environment to keep the peace….you may be in the midst of emotional abuse.
So here is the thing, how do we show receipts for THIS specific type of very private, very hard to prove abuse in a divorce when your memory isn’t dependable? I’m not going to say that I have the answers to this. But rather, I encourage you to do everything in your power to TRY and get a record of what is happening to you. And even if it doesn’t have a specific place in the legal system, sometimes it is not exactly about the judge seeing things your way, it is more about proving to the rest of the world (AND YOURSELF) that it wasn’t just a nightmare, it actually happened. Because here is the other bite, our world has systematically oppressed whistleblowers, so getting people to believe and empathize with you, especially when the abuser is a man, is an uphill battle.
I started keeping track of things that were happening to me a few years before things really fell apart. Was it for the purpose of using it in court? Not really, it was more for the proof of sanity that I needed. Was I really forgetting that much? Was I as bad as he was saying I was? Didn’t I remember him saying that thing?
Learning how to discreetly turn my microphone recorder on my phone set me up to have more than enough receipts to validate what I had been through with my ex. When I had my collapse at the end of the marriage, I was able to play these recordings for my friends and family to prove that the stories I was telling were not just me being dramatic. I was actually hurting from real damage.
Privacy laws are sketchy depending on what state you live in. Some states don’t allow recordings in legal cases unless all parties know about it. Some states, like mine, allow one party consent. Basically, this means that at least one of the people in the recording needed to be aware it was happening. However, in most cases you cannot USE the recording in court for divorce proceedings. This really stung, like a lot. Because I had so many admissions by him recorded.
