PTSD Survivor’s Speak: Healing Nicole, Part 1

Today I’m psyched to introduce you to a member of Team Heal My PTSD — one of our very own volunteers is telling her story. I know you’ll groove on her vibe as Nicole Bissett, an active self-empowered voice, shows how important it is for every survivor to take healing matters into his or her own hands!

Healing Nicole

I had loved my abusive partner since 1986, when I was 17. He was 40 at that time. In 1999, after the failure of his fourth marriage and the failure of my first one, we were married for seven-and-a-half years. When I left him, I wasn’t just leaving the bad. I was leaving what was once a story-book marriage… at least, as I saw it.

I missed the man I believed I married — the man who willingly worked long hours so I could stay home with my son; the man who came home from a long day’s work and cooked dinner (he liked to cook); the man I could converse with for hours over coffee on a Saturday morning; the man who wrote poetry to me, walked on the beach with me, and would spontaneously pull me up to slow dance in the middle of the living room floor; the man who mended so many of our physical wounds and saved us doctor trips; the man who assisted me with homework when I went to school… you see, when he was kind, he was extraordinary! When I left, I lost all that and more, even though the reality was that he’d incrementally stopped all the kindnesses in the last year of our marriage.

I had to learn how to make it on the “outside” of my prison, self-imposed though it may have been. I understand now, through the research I’ve done on the subject of domestic violence, that I probably was working through the unraveling of a traumatic bond, a phenomenon that happens when a person is in a place of powerlessness in a relationship, and when there are acts of cruelty and acts of kindness interspersed. This type of bonding is also referred to as Stockholm syndrome, which was named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm.

The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery. In this case, bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. The victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. It is this type of bond that undoubtedly brought 900 members of the People’s Temple to their death on November 18, 1978. This phenomenon also occurs in situations where there is domestic violence, and other types of abuse.

In my situation, the balance of power was very lopsided. Aside from the fact that I’m almost totally blind, he was 23 years my senior, and he had an emotional hold on me from day one. He was also someone I perceived as smarter and more powerful, due to his manipulation, and, realistically, he had all the money. I hadn’t worked in 15 years, and was finishing up the last few semesters of my bachelors in journalism at San Diego state University when I left.

It is said that a woman takes at least five times to leave an abusive relationship. What is often untold is that it isn’t just the physical leaving. It is the process of taking your heart back.  That can get complicated; most especially when there is a traumatic bond. Very few people could quite grasp why I would miss him, or why, after two years, I just couldn’t “move on.” They especially couldn’t grasp why I would want him back. This made the journey lonelier as time went on, but fortunately, I still had one friend who stuck by me through it all. As a Christian, I also didn’t want the defeat of a second failed marriage, which added to the complication. But even most of my Christian friends advised me to move on.

For two-and-a-half years, I prayed for a miracle — that my husband would get the help he needed and come back to me. I believed God could and would perform a miracle. In the end, he did. It just wasn’t the miracle I had hoped for…

Part 2 will appear next week.

Nicole is the mother of a 15-year-old son, and currently works as a freelance writer. She has plans to become a certified life coach in July. Since she began to heal from her divorce, her latest passion is to write about, speak about, and assist in the healing process she went through in the hope of reaching out to others. Nicole’s dream is to work with trauma survivors, especially those who have suffered from the long-lasting affects and traumatic bonds of domestic violence. She volunteers her services to HealMyPTSD, as well as the Jonestown Institute. She can be reached via email at  nicole@healmyptsd.com, via Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ or on Twitter, http://twitter.com/

The ideas contained in this post solely represent the perspective of the author. To contribute to ‘Survivors Speak’ contact Michele.

Tags: abuse, anxiety, divorce, domestic violence, ptsd