Mental Abuse Can Happen to Anyone

Many women from my generation are strong women. Most of those women make it known they would not stand for abuse of any kind from a spouse or partner. But, what if you didn't even realize you were being abused? It can happen to anyone. It happened to me.

I married a man I met the summer after I graduated from high school. We didn't have much in common, but I thought it was a case of opposites attracting. For the first few years, we got along great, I thought. There were times when he didn't like my friends, so I would choose to not be around them anymore. I thought I was just making compromises to strengthen our relationship. He liked to fish, hunt, and ride motorcycles. I liked to read and watch movies. We spent the first 10 years of our marriage doing our own thing. We rarely spent any time together.

Then, I decided I wanted to finish college. I had finished one year right out of high school. But, because he wanted me to, I quit and got a secretarial job. When I started back, the mental abuse began almost immediately. If I didn't come home directly after I got out of class, he was suspicious I had done something I didn't want him to know about. If I had to talk to a fellow student on the telephone, he had to know who it was and why I needed to talk to them.

Then, the final blow fell. I got a computer. The internet opened an entire new world of intellectual and social possibilities. According to my husband, the only thing I could possibly want to do was meet other men on the internet. He would become angry if I even tried to talk about my computer. It didn't matter that I was talking about a new game, it was the enemy.

My life changed drastically after that. He started driving me to and from work. This was to save gas, he told me. He told me I didn't need to have a cell phone. This was to save money, he told me. I was not allowed to use my computer unless he was home. This was to keep me save from the sexual predators, he told me. I believed everything he said.