Well, last night came to nothing. Mother came home - alone - and sat down and we sat together on the sofa and hugged and cried (I cried more than she did) and let all the fear and negativity drain away leaving a numb sort of calm.
We had both been terribly, terribly afraid. And all for nothing. Nothing had happened. MJ had gotten upset and simply needed someone to talk to, to listen to him and comfort him and help him calm down; that was all.
My reaction, as I wrote it, probably seemed disproportionate. And now it is over it feels that way to me, too, but it wasn't something I can help.
To explain; a while ago I had fortnightly sessions with a therapist (NHS funded), and one of the things she helped me to mentally plow my way through were the mass of jumbled feelings regarding MJ. What had past. What we had gone through. What he had done to us.
What he had done to us was to subject us over the course of a little over a decade to varying degrees of psychological abuse; from mild to violently extreme. It sounds ridiculously dramatic, but it isn't. He couldn't help it - or at least up to a point he couldn't - but it it doesn't make what happened any less unpleasant and damaging for us.
And the end result was that we have been what the therapist referred to as "conditioned". Trained, for want of a better term, by MJ - whether he intended to or not - over all those years to react to him in a certain way. To keep him calm, to keep him happy. To be fearful of him being angry, whether with us or with anything else (which always led to him being angry with us, anyway). We have been freed from the grip of his control, or at least the majority of it, for some time now. Years. But enough of that influence remains that any hint of anger causes our hearts to race and our breath to constrict within us and or minds to be clouded by the same fear that he has always made us feel.
Add that to the possibility - however remote - of our lives reverting completely to what they had been and you have a recipe for unadulterated panic. Which was exactly what I, both of us, were suffering from last night.
I wish I could say that it won't happen again, but it will. Sooner or later. No matter how hard I try I'm not able to react in any other way. The therapist was gentle but discouraging in response to my question of whether or not it would ever go away. Probably not, she said. Perhaps with the passing of time it would ease, but such emotional trauma was unlikely to ever fully fade enough to be considered "gone".
...So, yeah. That's it. That's how things are. And that's why I acted as I did, and why mother and I are so shattered today, and will be for a while yet (while he, as experience has proven, will now be perfectly content and happy). Because that is the way that he has the ability to make us feel. And because the aftermath of it is - and always has been - mental exhaustion.
It sucks.
It is what it is, I suppose. I can't change it, and there are people far worse off than we are, etc. etc.
...But it still sucks.
Alice x
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