What eighteen years looked like from the inside

This page describes coercive control inside a marriage, and parts of it are hard to read. If things are difficult right now, support numbers are at the bottom of this page, and Lifeline is 13 11 14, any time.

This is the shorter telling. If you've come here from the About page you already know the shape of it.

I found the tablets in the pantry because the box was pink.

We'd talked about having another child and I'd said no. Not a vague no. I told her I'd need to see us get better at repairing conflict first. Some time later she went to a gynaecologist, had her IUD taken out and bought prenatal tablets. I found out because the packaging caught my eye while I was looking for something else.

When I asked her about it she cried and said she thought we had an agreement.

It took me years to work out what I'd found in that cupboard. My no didn't count. Both our children had arrived without any conversation about whether we wanted a family. She fell pregnant, I went along with it. The pantry was just the first time I caught it before it happened.

Before I go further, I want to say why I'm telling this at all. It isn't to diagnose my former spouse, and it isn't to establish that I was blameless, because I wasn't. I'm telling it because I spent years unable to name what was happening to me, and because naming it eventually meant looking at the parts of me that kept accommodating it. Both halves of that belong in the story.

One distinction holds through all of it. I had patterns that kept me from protecting myself, and they shaped how we related. They don't make controlling behaviour a joint production. My part in the relationship was real, and her control was hers.

In conflict, neither of us could hold empathy for the other or take the other's perspective. Whenever I raised an issue, I became the problem. She was skilled at winning at work, and winning is what our arguments became. Through all of it my body kept signalling that something was wrong, and it didn't occur to me that I had a choice. Years later I learned the reversal has a name, DARVO, the psychologist Jennifer Freyd's term: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Each repetition made the next one harder to interrupt.

I didn't know how to ask

I'm the youngest of five, with a brother and three sisters. I was raised in a culture where obedience and respect for authority were required. You didn't dare ask for things. You were told, or given, and you received with gratitude. My father would remind me that his own father died when he was three years old, and that I should be grateful. I came to Australia in 1989 to go to high school in Brisbane.

I married there in 2001. Over the next eleven years we moved five times across three continents, and every move followed her career. The 2008 return to Brisbane was the hard one. I'd spent almost the whole Singapore stint benched at a consulting firm, and it had done real damage to my confidence. She was going home. I wasn't sure what I was going back to.

When I told her how I was feeling, she said I should be grateful I was back in Brisbane.

What would actually have made me grateful was work. I didn't say anything back. The story I made up was that saying more would lead nowhere. What I felt was sadness and frustration at not being met, and underneath that, shame.

So I moved out of our bedroom and slept in the pool house. It was a few weeks, maybe longer, and it wasn't the only time. I couldn't have told you why back then. With the language I have now, the reason is plain: in conflict I wasn't safe with her, and distance was the only protection I knew how to take.

I can see now that withdrawing was part of the pattern too, my part, and it came from further back. In my family, when shame hit, I withdrew, and for the boy who learned it that was a valid strategy, the best one available. Inside the marriage it cost me twice over. I didn't know how to hold a boundary, or how to stay in a conversation without abandoning myself, so I left the room instead. And the leaving itself became an offence, what she called the silent treatment, so the move that protected me from shame brought more of it back. That loop would repeat for years in different forms.

Here's what I believed marriage was when I went into it. We were on the same page and we'd make decisions together. When we argued, we'd both repair it and come out stronger. We'd practise power with each other, never power over or power under.

I had no idea that manipulation, gaslighting, blame shifting, name calling and emotional abuse happened between two people who loved each other. The words themselves weren't in my vocabulary until 2020, years after the things they name had entered the marriage. So when they turned up I had nowhere to put them and nothing to call them, which is part of why I stayed.

The other part is that walking away never crossed my mind. Not once. I was raised in a family and a culture where family stood above everything, and I intended to keep my vows. It's honourable until it isn't. A vow assumes the person you made it with is safe, and I had no way of judging that about anyone.

What I couldn't name

Back in Singapore from 2012, I retrained and moved into leadership development. In 2017 a new boss began meeting with me almost daily to tell me I wasn't performing at the expected level. A year earlier the same work had been fine. She had no idea what was going on at home, and I wasn't telling anyone. The role ended within the year.

At a dinner in Singapore, two female friends I trust, respect and value said something like, isn't it good that you stood up for yourself at work? Now you can practise it at home.

After that I wasn't employed in Singapore at all. I was on a Dependant's Pass tied to her job. I'd never once asked myself what would happen if the marriage didn't work out and we needed to go home. We'd gone for her career, her employer had covered the relocation, and my right to be in the country ran through her. The whole way in had run through her, and I'd never thought about the way out.

Then I overheard how she described me to a friend. That I needed to grow up, get a job and be a man. The actual words were harsher.

When something ruptured between us it was always my fault. I could never get us to a shared conversation about what each of us had contributed, and that was one of the most painful parts of the marriage.

In 2018 things at home got markedly worse. I talked to one of her friends about how frustrated and worried I was. The conversation was recorded and passed back to her in full, and afterwards the account that travelled was that I didn't have her back. I moved into the spare bedroom and found us a couples therapist. She came for a few sessions, spent most of them concerned with when I'd be returning to our bedroom, and then wouldn't come back.

The Maldives

Late in 2018 she asked for a trial separation. A mentor of mine asked what the conditions of it would be, how either of us would know it was working, and what each of us would be working on while it ran. I put those questions to her. She had nothing. I treated the trial separation as an attempt to repair the marriage. In hindsight, that was also the week to have sat down with my therapist and a lawyer, and I did neither.

She'd arranged a family trip to the Maldives months in advance. At the airport she was acting strangely. My breathing went shallow and my stomach turned tight and sick. My heart was going before we'd even boarded. I overrode all of it, which is what I'd been doing for years.

It was my birthday weekend.

I asked her whether she was still committed to our marriage. She said no. I brought my flight forward, apologised to our children that the marriage was coming to an end, and flew back to Singapore with my son within forty-eight hours of arriving.

After

I moved out into a small one-bedroom apartment, having come from a four-bedroom house. Mostly what I felt was shame. And whatever restraint the marriage had held in place fell away.

We both engaged lawyers, which I couldn't afford, so everything I had went to legal fees. My right to remain in Singapore, and to remain an integral part of my children's upbringing, depended on her employment, and I wasn't allowed to forget it. I heard her say to a friend, "I hate it when men say that they need to be around for the children. Where have you been all the time, mate?" The kids moved between her place and mine under a parenting plan that kept shifting.

The legal process undid me in a way the word fees doesn't cover. Every conversation was one I'd never imagined being in, and my system answered the way it knew how, by freezing. Somewhere in that stretch I dropped out of a doctoral program I'd started in September 2018. There wasn't room in me for both.

My mentor, Dr Paul Dunion, gave me the frame for those years later. Divorce is a phase of life a man is almost never initiated into, and where there's no initiation, life takes over. You get pushed and pulled in every direction, and the lawyers win. I can't fault it as a description of what happened.

I was also the first of my friends to go through separation and divorce. None of them had supported a man through one. They didn't know how to hold me, and I didn't know how to be held, so what I mostly got was advice to calm down, offered to a man whose system was in fight or flight most of the time. You can't calm down on request. Nobody in the circle knew that yet, including me.

At one point she told me nobody would believe me, because I'm male.

We left Singapore in January 2021. She travelled and quarantined with the kids while I did my fourteen days alone. Within days of coming out, a legal process began in which claims were made about me that weren't true. The divorce was finalised that year.

How I got off the floor

Understanding her gave me tactics. Understanding myself changed my life.

The lowest point was probably May 2019. I was in Boston on a leadership program, not sleeping, very low. Later, in temporary accommodation, my son came to stay. I gave him my bed and slept on a mattress on the floor.

From 2019 I went looking for an explanation in the narcissism literature, and for a while the labels helped. They gave me tactics for handling her, and they changed nothing in me. My psychotherapist moved me off that language and pointed me back to the parts of me that were getting activated, which was harder work and did a great deal more. He brought a playfulness to it that mattered more at that time than I can easily explain.

What moved me was self-compassion, and I got there through parts work, first as a client, then as training, IFS and later Somatic Experiencing. Some of what I picked up was about my family of origin, being raised with no boundaries and no rupture and repair. The rest was about other people, safe ones and unsafe ones. Henry Cloud and John Townsend's book Safe People gave me the measures I'd been missing: a safe person respects a no, takes responsibility for their side, changes after an apology rather than repeating, and is the same person over time. I read that as a list of everything I hadn't known to look for at twenty-six.

Somewhere in those years, a leader I respect asked me a question I've never forgotten: do you attract abusers? He asked it as an invitation, not an accusation, and it sent me back through my major relationships looking for the common thread. The thread wasn't that I invited any of it. It was what I'd been trained to tolerate, and how early the training had started.

Then a harder question turned up. Why hadn't I left sooner? A behaviour would repeat. My body would tell me something was off. I'd say nothing, I wouldn't change what I was doing, and I'd let it go. Then I'd let it go again.

I was shown many times.

What I do with it now

Men aren't taught any of this. It doesn't happen at home or at school, and it doesn't come up in the men's groups I go to, and I go to several. What we learn is how to endure and how to provide. Nobody shows us how to hold a boundary, or how to work out early that a person isn't safe.

I built Reclaim to teach men what I didn't have when I got married. How to pick a partner, how to spot manipulation while it's happening instead of five years later, and what healthy relating actually asks of two people. Some of that is early childhood work, the kind a man has to do to become his own person rather than his family's pattern. If a man is already inside something that's damaging him, the work is helping him see it clearly and act on it.

A lot of it comes down to agreements. She thought we had one, and I knew we didn't. Most of the resentment I've watched build in relationships, mine included, grew in exactly that gap, where an agreement was assumed rather than made.

I've healed. I sleep, I'm healthy and I'm happy. I'm at peace with myself and I make better decisions than I used to. The relationships in my life now are meaningful, I notice unsafe dynamics early, and I act on what I notice. My relationship with my children is improving.

I can't change what happened, and I've stopped needing to. The healing was in understanding what kept me there, and in learning to act on what my body tells me instead of overriding it for years at a time. That's the work I do with other men now.

If tonight is bad. Lifeline 13 11 14, any time. MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78, any time. In an emergency, call 000.

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