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I was there too. I've talked about it here before. My first husband.. while we were dating, it was little "jokes" that I was "overly sensitive" about. After marriage it escalated quickly into verbal abuse, controlling my money, trying to isolate me from friends and family. I was not easily controlled and the harder I pushed back, the more intense it became.. blockading me into my bedroom so I couldn't leave (I wanted to go for a drive to calm myself down, let the situation settle), physically holding me to keep me from going for a walk to calm down. My own rage was really increasing too, but I never acted on it physically. Then he was slamming doors, tossing things around.. then he threw a jar of jelly at me. I had been going to counseling, alone (because he said he didn't have a problem, I did, he was fine with how things were). The day after the jelly jar thing, I made my exit plan and was out in two weeks. It was scary. I was afraid he would find me.
Fear for myself was part of the reason I left, but it was also fear of the rage that was building up inside of me. I was sure that if we'd stayed together, one of us would kill the other. I just wasn't sure who would do it first. I have never felt that kind of rage again. I was lucky that I could get out because we had no kids, no house.. we'd only been married for 14 months. I can't explain the terror I had that he would find me. The most dangerous time, according to all the experts, is when you leave. Those Lifetime movies aren't a bunch of hooey, they are more real than most think.
The other thing that people don't realize is that these intense relationships are usually just as intensely good as they are intensely bad. The good times are extreme.. ecstatic. The bad times are peppered in among them. It makes it easier to think that it is going to be ok because you can almost forget when things are amazingly good. They always go bad again though. Intensely passionate to intensely violent, over and over and over...
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