Choice

Back in our first year of marriage, my in-laws were treating us and me so terribly, and I literally began to lose myself.  I spiraled into a deep depression that started then and lasted years (it lasted long after we got them out of our lives because the effects were so long-lasting).  In our first year of marriage, they were still in our lives, and no matter how much they may do now, I always have to remember how much worse it could be if we had them as a part of our lives.

Well, things were so bad for me, personally, that I was so depressed, and I would go to sleep at night hoping that I wouldn't wake up.  I never thought about killing myself - I just had no desire to live if my life was going to be full of so much pain.  Does that make sense?  I was very very depressed.  I doubted the very core of who I was - not just in that moment, but every point in my life too.  I looked at the simplest things I would do or that I did (ex: frustrated my husband wouldn't pick up his clothes), and I would fit those small little things into the picture my in-laws were painting of me (a horrible, awful monster) that I started to wonder whether they were right.  I mean, that's at the core of psychological abuse - when they can control your thinking.  I was experiencing all of this abuse (mental, emotional, verbal, psychological for me) for the first time ever in my life, and I let it affect me in a bad way - I had very severe depression and anxiety.

Not that that's uncommon when someone goes through what I did and what I still am, but when it first began to happen, it was hard on everyone involved (except for my in-laws of course, who said my depression and anxiety were fake because I just acted that way to manipulate my husband - sickos, right?).  It seriously took me 3-4 years to finally feel like I was getting back to normal.  It took a long time.  In the counseling field, we work with depression and anxiety inventories.  I do what I am now, and then I also do what I was then.  I'm proud that I am where I am at now - that I might have 1 or 2 things on those, but it's scary to realize where I was at - having around 28 on a scale of 30 (just one example).  Very severe anxiety and depression.  And I can see it more clearly now that I am out of it.  Thank goodness for such a helpful, loving, and supportive husband!

Anyway, when I first stared to spiral and things were getting really bad with my in-laws, my dad was talking to my husband, and he just briefly expressed a fear of his, saying, "I have a feeling that if it continues this way, there will come a time when you'll have to choose between your family and your wife.  I hope it doesn't come to that, but I feel like it will if it keeps going like this.  If it does, I hope you're able to make the right choice."

He didn't tell him he had to choose.  He was simply making an observation, and I think he was thinking that at that time, my husband might have chosen his family, and he was afraid of that.  My dad would never tell someone what to do or give them an ultimatum, etc.  My husband even agreed with him that he felt it would come to that (he has since told me his family had already mentioned him having to choose between them and me by the time my dad even said this).

Flashforward about 6 months after that conversation and it was when my husband was sick (when he almost died) and recovering and we were at my in-laws' house (you know, after they kidnapped him).  His mom pulls him aside and chews him out and cusses him out about probably the same old crap.  But she flat out said to him, "You need to choose - her or us because we can't be in your life if she is."  My husband says he kind of laughed at her when she said this because he couldn't believe she would think it would be a hard choice, and then he said, "Well, that's easy - her."  His mom was ticked - I was in their kitchen cooking, and they were just around the corner in the next room.  She walked into the kitchen and bumped into me like some high schooler!  She kept walking, and then my husband walked in, and I knew something had happened - then he told me.

The interesting thing is they now say that my family and I made him choose, along with saying I control him and don't allow him to have anything to do with them.  And that I'm abusive and manipulative and I've brainwashed him, blah, blah, blah.  They project everything they do onto me and then flat out make stuff up.  I know they are holding out thinking my husband is going to leave me and go running back to them.  Uh, not going to happen.

My husband made the decision to cut them out on his own - for his safety, for my safety, for our safety.  His family did this to themselves with not only what they did to us and me and my family in our marriage, but what they did to him his entire life!  Not to mention, they gave him an ultimatum and told him he had to choose (a statement they continually say came from my family and me - laaaaame!).