Breaking Secrecy - Here's To Taking The High Road

Every time I share the truth about what a narcissistic family and relationship put me through and how I came out of it, people are privately messaging me, thanking me for speaking up.

Secrecy is what enables toxicity.

I also have some brave people coming up to me telling me, "How do I know you're not a bad person? I'm not sure I can trust you. Because you don't seem to get along with so many people. Because I heard so many nasty things about your from your ex, from your brother, etc."

I thank them for their honesty.

We have to change our perspective as a society that ABUSE is not only about beating the shit out of a person and calling her a whore.

We also have to become discerning that innocent people don't need to go out of their way to constantly convince others that they are innocent victims.

These misconceptions are what got me into the toxic relationship that I'm still managing as I raise my children... because my goal, from the moment of awareness, was to break the generational curse that started with my family, which led to exactly why I chose a man like this at 21-years-old.

Abuse also looks like this:

- My ex puts a RUSH on having kids when I was clearly not ready because he's older and he doesn't want to wait... he pressures me, and threatens to discard me if I didn't have kids right then. I was 24 years old, working a full-time job, and applying to do my MA at York University with the support of my previous professor from undergrad.

- Normally the right thing to do in a situation like this is to say no to such a douche that pressures you to produce babies, but right around the same time, my only family, my brother, discarded me when I revealed that I was sexually abused (first time I told anyone, I could barely speak from shame). I was such an inconvenience to his status and image-driven character. The loneliness and shock of being discarded made me hold onto any relationship at all, even a douche is better than being completely alone. The scarcity mindset and survival need completely controlled my decision-making.

- When I had my baby, he said, "Now I have you trapped" with a disgusting smile.

- My weakness made me cave into the abuse, and months after my first baby was born while I'm still nursing, my ex calls me a "gold digger" and asks me when I'm going to stop leeching off of him and start bringing in income.

- While I'm out of work with a baby, he doesn't allow any financial autonomy when I ask for maternity allowance, he laughs, consults the women at work, and when they agree with me, he calls them stupid (only at home, never at work, he's an angel at work). He was misogynistic and talked nasty about all the women at work regularly. They have no idea. They think he's great.

- He doesn't let me have any autonomy at home and throws a fit at me for hanging pictures that I like in the living room.

- He puts down all my friends and makes fun of them all, paired with the isolation, I find myself completely without any friends.

- When the abuse got worse and I wanted to separate, he threatened that I had no income, no stable career, so the court will take my child and have him and his mother raise him, which made me stay.

- While calling me a gold digger, I had to reproduce one more time, this time, with more ultimatums of discarding me. He knew how much the discard from my brother was a huge pain and weakness, and he used this regularly to control me.

- Previously I had friends from dance class, whom I could no longer see because he put them all down and told me that I was a gold digger who keeps spending his money on frivolous dancing. Prior to getting here, he love-bombed me telling me he admired my dancing, then it all changed after, and used it as a weapon to shame, attack, and isolate.

Photo: Me 2012 right after having my 2nd baby, trying to look like everything is fine. I thank my friends who bought me this stroller.

- When I left him, he wrote everyone in my circle telling them that I was crazy, was "suffering from postpartum" and that he was a victim.

- Based on that letter, my own brother, who had come back into my life for only a few months after 7 years of discard, took his side and shamed me: "What the fuck did you do?" - never asked me "What happened?" or "What did HE do?"

- After separation, he has been dating consistently. The one time I dated 3 years after our separation, he found the guy on social media, sent the guy a 7-page letter telling him why I was an unstable psycho, and that he needs to leave me to protect himself (the guy didn't fall into it, we separated for other reasons, but as a human, pretty hard to not allow something like this from having any influence).

- While I dated that 1 guy, my ex came to my house, crying, saying he was depressed because I won't come back to him, and that he dreamt that we were all doomed and died, so I called the police on him, who showed up at his house.

- His mother thinks I'm a crazy ruthless bitch because I protected myself and my kids from a death threat.

- When that tactic didn't work, he stopped having the kids overnight for a full year or two, which affected my work schedule where I could no longer work the hours I was supposed to, and my child got depressed because he didn't understand why his father didn't want him overnight anymore.

- I took my child to therapy and I got told that I'm training my kids to think that there's something wrong with them.

- As the kids got older, the abuse started to show up clearly in his interactions with the kids, which is why I've done everything I can to make sure I have the majority of parenting time from the beginning of the separation.

- To do that, I took a major financial sacrifice, where I was forced to pay for any shared expenses 50%-50%, even when I was nursing and my earnings were 1/3 of his.

- To this day, I'm the majority provider, and pretty much everything my kids have, own, and any services or lessons they get to come out of my pocket.

- He pays minimum child support and pays for their dental plan and complains that I'm ripping him off.

- When the kids are over, they're not even allowed to buy a $5 ice cream as he shames them saying, "ask your mom, she's rich."

- I'm still seen as crazy, and he's the star dad, and that's the facade his family actively paints when my kids are with them. This upsets the kids greatly.

- I now understand why he manipulated me so hard to keep me because no woman mature enough at his age would have reproduced with him. It had to be a traumatized young woman who doesn't yet understand that a person like this exists in this world.

This is only a small fraction of what abuse looks like when it's non-violent. Abuse takes a whole environment, including your own family who sees you as crazy, and of course, the fucking clueless mother that raised the abuser and lives in the illusion that she's very smart, and the rest of the family that sees him as a good guy and enables him.

I never shared any of this, and this is why so many people in my circle, except for the core few who aren't influenced by the bullshit, have seen me as the problem.

People don't consider why someone innocent has to constantly smear and say passive-aggressive sandwiching to shape my public image. Example template: "she's so wonderful, she's a good mother, but look at this crazy thing she did to me and I'm a sad victim."

Here is to taking the high road and actually speaking the truth.

Julia Cha ?is a Human Dynamics Mastery Coach for change-makers and change leaders of the world.

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