Mark's Domestic Abuse Story

Mark's domestic abuse story is clear and touching insight into the life of a male victim of domestic abuse, caught in snapshots of his abusive relationship which documents the link between domestic violence and mental illness. Elequent and touching, a must read.

Part 1: An Introduction to the Story

In my mind what you are holding is a work of fiction. It has to be. Nothing so horrific, demeaning and fundamentally humiliating could ever happen in any real relationship, could it?

What if the events you are about to read about actually did happen? If that was the case then these words would probably be more at home as a case study within the genre of psychology on a bookshop's shelves. However, I am not seeking to find answers or reasoning to the terrifying occurrences within the following pages. This isn't a step by step guide of how to avoid the trauma that you may go on to read. So a self help text this most certainly is not. What you are about to read is an account of several situations that through no real fault of the participants, spiral utterly out of control and descend into the most hideous and degrading examples of physical and psychological trauma that any reader would probably never want to imagine.

Both protagonists in these accounts are victims. Both in their mid twenties, one with heavy emotional baggage resulting from events in her childhood and the other, the optimistic dreamer whose early years, by stark contrast were a hazy blue sky, picket fence existence. He had the sort of family environment that encouraged stability, love and security. The kind of childhood that fits nicely into the forty something's nostalgic rose tinted view of what their own childhood was. A glance backwards in time heavily diluted and embellished by American tea time family feel good TV shows and what they strive to represent.

Hers, on the other hand, was not. She had the constant threat of many forms of abuse hanging malignantly in the air of her family home. Abuse aimed at her and her mother from a father who was probably a victim himself somewhere along the line. Anyway, this is also not a psychological analysis of why what happened, happened.

You are about to be presented with a series of events that all took place in a relationship that lasted five long years. If you recognize any of these occurrences within your own life you will be aware of the level of control it is possible to have over another human being. You will be trapped in an awful place with absolutely no means of escape. You will be waiting and waiting for your partner to terminate the relationship because no matter how badly you need to be rid of this cancerous pairing, it is not yours to end. This work demonstrates what it can be like living with a person who is mentally ill. I try and acknowledge throughout this text that there is no one participant who is accountable for blame. It is written from the perspective of the person who is not mentally ill. Remember that she was his first serious girlfriend and that he had no frame of reference upon which to base these occurrences. He possessed the perspective to realise that all women did not behave in this way. Nevertheless, he had never previously encountered any behaviour such as this and therefore did not have the apparatus in place to help deal with these horrific situations.

These four accounts are snapshots of our time together. There were many other instances that were equally and more unpleasant. There is so much more to tell about the relationship and although it is quite liberating and purging to actually put pen to paper and write it all down, it is also somewhat traumatic and mentally draining. Our wedding, dreadful honeymoon and the face to face showdown she had with my Mother are other events that I could have chosen to document.

It has taken a long time for me to accept these events as fact. For over ten tears I did not really consider that these things happened to me, they were most certainly fiction. A bad story that existed in my head. I was in a relationship in which I was physically and mentally abused, yet we were both victims in our different ways. For many years I hated her. I do not hate her anymore.

Part 2: Conwy