I Was Freezing in Hawaiʻi

What I Know About Hiding in Plain Sight

Aloha, welcome (and welcome back) to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. I have been writing about the nervous system, about fight-flight-freeze responses, in the series of lessons I learned from my horses. I was ready to write about my sensitive, extraordinary gelding Kūkūilama. And then, this story came to me, reared up out of my subconscious and tapped its little hooves on my shoulder during yoga class when I was deep in parasympathetic relaxation. The story is wanting to be told. My intuition is that one or more of my readers needs to hear this. Itʻs not easy for me to write. But it is time.

Since I ended up feeling brave enough to publish this, I want to start with a kind of “trigger warning.” What follows is a personal story, a snapshot of the prolonged emotional abuse in my second marriage. If for whatever reasons you prefer not to read this story, I will be back next week with the more entertaining story, the one I meant to publish this week, the story of how my Arabian gelding Kūkūilama came into my life.

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Photo by Nicole Geri on Unsplash

The sequential part of They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir covered my adventures, misadventures, leavings, and learnings across multiple continents during the years 1992-1997. You can find those 43 episodes here, and each one is numbered in case you lose your place in the sequence.

The early memoir ends with my meeting The Swiss Guy, to whom I was married for seventeen years. The start of the story was something right out of a blockbuster romantic comedy. If you came late to this party, you really should read it. The end of the story resembles one of those dark fairy tales told by the Brothers Grimm - although ultimately it had a happy ending. Or an I-am-happy-ever-after ending at any rate. Meaning, eventually I found my happy, after a lot of work to understand how my codependence nurtured a man with narcissistic tendencies into full blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. After a lot of healing, healing that continues for me as I continue to grow. I choose my present to be a happily ever after, moment by moment.

But….here is what happened.

By the time I woke up to my reality and left my husband one early spring day I was - like the mare Hottie when she arrived in my pasture - capable and accomplished to the outside world, but living in a constant state of low level fear, hoping that quiet compliance and disappearing into myself would protect me from the painful, increasingly bordering on dangerous, dynamic in my marriage.

It developed gradually. I learned within our first year together that he could fall into a very dark place, full of an anger that seemed incongruent with the man I met at a meditation retreat, a gifted aromatherapist who presented himself to the world as a healer. He had the ability to be kind and loyal. He had a sense of humor that could leave him laughing uncontrollably at his own silly jokes, an adventurous spirit eager to explore new places and experiences, and a charisma that drew people to him. Until he no longer did. Until he became a person who could fly into a rage because the cucumber slices I cut for the salad were too thick. The abuse was emotional, not physical…I finally fled right when it appeared poised to become so.

I knew that my marriage was draining my energy and finally sought help for that. After a year of working with a therapist, I invited my husband to explore couples counseling. Predictably, he insisted the problems in our marriage were all my fault; I was the only one who needed to change to fix things. After a couple of years I unaccountably decided to stop going myself, telling my brilliant therapist that things were better and we were going to work it out - just as she was advising me to pack a GoBag and keep it where I could safely get out of the house and to my car. Luckily that was the year my husband thought the world was ending according to the Mayan Calendar and so he had already instructed me to prepare a backpack with essentials with which to flee to higher ground when a catastrophic tsunami hit. I kept mine in the closet of my home office. He never asked what was in it.

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So why did this particular story come back to me in yoga class as I became aware of and observed my state of deep relaxation, the just-published Rest and Digest essay fresh in my mind? What I remembered, without leaving the state of relaxation, was the years when hours of yoga did not take me to that state. I remembered, and watched as if it were a movie, how each morning I woke before dawn so I could have a couple of quiet hours to try to regulate my nervous system before the monster appeared. The dog would greet me with a happy dance, running to the kitchen for his breakfast. Then I went through my early morning routine - yoga, pranayama, meditation, run with the dog. Looking back through this lens of information about the nervous system I see that throughout an entire two-hour sequence of activities meant to create a state of parasympathetic calm and wholeness, my sympathetic nervous system never fully turned off. I was anticipating the storm of criticism and demands that would arrive as soon as my husband emerged from the bedroom.

I did not know at the time that substance abuse was contributing to his lack of boundaries. He hid that. I knew about the lunchtime beer and evening wine and hashish. I had no idea it started early; the morning espresso most likely harbored a shot of schnapps. And I later learned he was micro-dosing throughout the day on ayahuasca - a hallucinogenic substance he believed was allowing him to see a higher spiritual truth that included, apparently, the punishable inadequacies of my behavior.

The simmering of my sympathetic nervous system tells me my body knew I was in danger even as my mind minimized it. Remember The Other Three F-Words? Flight was not an option; my moral code instructed me to honor my marital commitment. Besides, we had an amazing origin story, seemingly an arranged marriage for some higher spiritual purpose and who was I to abandon that? Fighting to maintain my boundaries was becoming increasingly dangerous so I tried my best to avoid a fight. I resorted to recording our arguments on my phone as voice memos so that when he twisted the conversation and gaslighted me later I could replay it to preserve my sanity. And still I did not believe or leave. My paralysis was a version of the freeze response. Keep my voice down, keep his anger contained, keep myself safe. Abandoning a narcissist is the most dangerous thing you can do. They are not afraid to go for a scorched earth response.

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This story is not exactly a secret I am telling for the first time, in case you were wondering. Those in our friend circle saw it long before I did - and recognized, after a few kind attempts, that I was not ready to hear that I was in an abusive relationship. They expressed their relief and support once I made the choice to leave. Then, during the course of the separation and divorce, his extreme behavior became very public in a very small community. When your not yet ex-husband shows up at a hospital fundraiser and acts out in front of several hundred of your neighbors, that is definitely not a secret - it is a widely shared and long remembered story. It was a scary and humbling moment, but one that today is a heartwarming memory. So many people had my back that day and others. They continue to show their love and aloha for me almost a decade later. We can laugh about the antics of The Swiss Guy now.

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One of the most helpful things right after my separation was to hear the stories of two clients-turned-friends, their own stories of escape from a relationship with a narcissist. They each reached out to me, without me saying a word, because they had recognized the dynamic I was in and wanted to tell me their stories. Both super successful men, the first happily remarried and telling me the story over dinner with his wife also offering her support. The second was a gay man whose former partner I also had known. Much of the burning shame I felt disappeared as I realized I was not alone, not fatally flawed, not being judged harshly other than by my own migraine-strength inner critic.

If this telling was meant for you, and you want to reach out to me directly, please do not hesitate. Your situation might not be a marriage. It might be a toxic work environment holding you hostage. Or an in-law. Or a child. I donʻt know.

I also hope some of you will share this small essay with someone who might need to hear it.

Iʻll be back with Kūkūilama next week. Heʻs a shining light, I promise. And if you are reading my writing for the first time and would like to read more, you can enter your email address to subscribe and get what I write by email once a week. Donʻt worry. Itʻs free unless you want to pay!