Beware of the Dog: Breaking Free of Abusive Relationships

By Jean Houghton

Nothing I had believed was as it seemed. This was the bottom of the pit for me. Id endured abuse for twenty years with my first husband only to now have spent another five and a half years of my life being chewed up and spit out by another man who I believed in. The first one exited my life spewing hateful, vulgar, blaming curses as he was sinking into self-loathing and suicidal episodes only to then point the gun at me. Then, again, in my simple quest for love and partnership, my devotion was rewarded with hatred, deceitfulness and destruction.

After twenty years of teaching Family Life Education and experiencing the devastation of abusive relationships, I offer real life tools to enable the reader to recognize real love, avoid the counterfeits and understand God's desire to heal us when we make poor choices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449706500

Jean Houghton

After teaching Family Life Education to high school students for the first ten years, I realized that my own family life presented a stark contrast to the elements of healthy families. I have experienced the painful and lonely circumstances common to too many others within the confines of domestic violence.The power and control needs of the abuser penetrate the minute details of daily living. Fear becomes the status quo in which the victim dwells and carries on. I was captured within that fear and manipulation for over twenty years. I was painfully aware of the disappointment I felt as a wife and mother, unable to gain the cooperation of my husband to embrace the importance of our positive and wholesome role modeling. His angry outbursts turned to rage over time and I was left dazed, trying to love him better somehow, hoping it would make all the difference. My desperate search for answers and solutions has revealed some truth about these issues which has enabled me to share these tools with hundreds of students in the classroom. I also appreciate the confusion that abuse creates while trying to be faithful to ones marriage vows and live in obedience to God's will. I live in a small town in Maine with a warm and loving, good natured husband. My adult children, including a wonderful daughter-in-law, are near by, thriving in their career pursuits as teachers. My stepsons pursue their own dreams in California. I have never laughed so much, had so much fun or had so many travel adventures as I have had in the new found freedom that I now enjoy as my true identity emerged in Christ. To God be all the glory!

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SKU-000190454_TEXT-13.pdf Contents

January 25, 2010

July 21, 2005

My Emotional and Social Foundation

Meanness

Innocence

Damage

Learning to be Nice

Love and Faith

The Pain of Adolescence

Hostage Taking Begins

Background Information

Choices

Off to College

No Turning Back

Lovely Tradition

My Nagging Values

Violence Escalates

The Abuse Continues

Exercising My Faith

There’s Some Good In Everyone

Control Becomes More Evident

The Advantages of Owning A Home

Where Is Love?

New Understanding

The Lack of Empathy

Painful Truths

Some Red Flags of Abusive Relationships:

My Other Full Time Job

What to Love?

Functioning in the Grip of Deep Fear

New Hope and Despair

Deliverance Begins

Turning the Corner

Feeling Free is a Slow Process

Getting a Grip on My Fear

Divorce Can Be Expensive and Agonizing

Our No Fault Divorce

Recovery Begins

Breaking Out Into a New Adulthood

Hidden Damage

Looking Back On Barry

The Hardened Heart

My Grateful Heart

Who Am I, Really?

Rebounding

Sharing My Baggage

Always Thankful For the Blessings

Complications of Another Unhealthy Relationship

Floundering For Compatibility

Our Last Shot

Transition

Trying to Get It Right

Fast Forward

Fast Fast Forward

Another New Life

His Family

A Godly Man

Sleep and Health Alerts

Wedding Joy

Inconsistencies and Deceit

Bigger and Bigger

Musical Chairs and Churches Too

Natashia

Career Changes

Nipping It In the Bud

For Better, For Worse, In Sickness and in Health

Odd Circumstances

Some Answers?

The Truck

Job Changes

On the Positive Side

How’s That Counseling Going?

Troubled Finances

More Lies

Random Weirdness and Other Smoke Screens?

Animal Issues

Family Time

Stress Causes Illness, Again

His Arrest

Lawsuit Storms

Shocking Revelations

Forgiveness

Reality Check

The Beginning of the End With Excerpts From My Police Reports

Deliverance Day, Monday, August 8-What A Difference A Day Can Make

Turning This Corner

Legal Action Begins

Help From the Ex-Wives

Shattered

Some of the Damages

The Short List of Lies

More Complications

The Scare

A God-Send

Na’ Na, Na Na’ Na (Connor’s Childish Revenge)

The Legal Wrap Up

Take Your Time

What About Abuse in A Christian Marriage?

What is love?

God Continues the Clean Up

Aug 1, 2009 How Far have I Come?

God Makes All the Difference

Guilty But Healing

FOREWARD

I’m not writing about dogs, but of warnings and how some of the greatest perils in life don’t have any warnings. My personal childhood experiences and education in no way prepared me to watch for the warning signs that might have saved me from the tragic hardships and bizarre circumstances I became entrenched in. I have learned the warnings from my own experience and by my fervent drive to connect the dots to make some sense of what I was going through. I now include warnings in my high school life development curriculum but certainly that reaches only a minute number of young people and those are the ones who are awake in class!

I’m just kidding. My students are wonderful and thirsty for any guidelines they can get to negotiate the partnering mine field. They long to find partners who will endure the stresses of life and prevent a divorce experience for their children. So many of them have been through divorce and in some cases, no one has ever listened to some of their deepest hurts. Many of them have only known one of their parents, usually the mother, but not always. Come on, did we ever expect satisfying, successful, partnering to be so difficult to accomplish and maintain? How have expectations and results become so pathetic and so desperate!

Though I have great love and respect for both men and women, I especially have a heart full of compassion for women because I can best relate to them. Besides my own strange and painful experiences in relationships, I’ve heard countless sad stories from high school students during 30 years of teaching, which have revealed the pain of abuse, neglect, poor parenting and the inability to trust others. Then there are the wonderful girlfriends I am blessed with many of whom are recovering from their own wrecked relationships or quietly suffering through disappointments in marriages that lack the joy and luster of true intimacy. My dear daughter and son have in turn been affected by my own poor choices. My good intentions weren’t enough. I needed to be warned, and I wasn’t.

Love and partnering aren’t just a nice idea. They are basic human needs, the success of which seems to be more and more difficult to achieve. Why? There are many reasons in our society but some of the major misconceptions about love and romance are perpetuated in the media when time after time partnering depends on superficial qualities like looks and money alone instead of exploring the deeper qualities that supply the real binding power of love. Real love is worth finding.

SKU-000190454_TEXT-13.pdf  January 25, 2010

How does that happen? I hear a short refrain of a song I haven’t heard for 35 years and my heart is plunged into a painful tailspin, flooding my mind with a total awareness of how full my youthful heart had been of simple dreams and hopes for our future together. Our lives would become more and more wonderful as we pursued our career goals; eventually adding children to share our bounty of love and prosperity. Jonathan Edwards, on our local 207 T.V. show, continues to sing that long forgotten song:

Sometimes in the morning, I catch a falling dream, disappearing scene, And I think about someone, that I will never see again. And now it’s only me again.

The melody alone continues to wrench my heart, finding grief, buried in some dark corner, flooding me with the realization of how sad I feel for that young man I loved so deeply, who I staked my whole future on. He got stuck somewhere along the way, mired down by the terrible silent legacy of his ancestors; severely disabled by this long term disease tragically passed down through generations of parents to their children.

Suddenly I felt the weight of the tragedy I witnessed and lived through; of the incredibly pervasive pain caused to so many that began with such powerful hope and expectation. Imagine what wonderful blessings God had planned for our love to grow, embracing and nurturing our children together. Can we begin to grasp how far reaching those long tentacles of destruction can reach into a life and eventually choke out all of the good, all of the talents and special abilities that were meant to flourish? All those years I was in love with the man I got only fleeting glimpses of; the man who he was meant to be.

Alcohol is poison when it is allowed to overcome the goodness that God intended. My eyes well up now realizing I deeply grieve the life not lived by Barry. The blessings he missed because he chose differently; how can that ever be measured? The blessings intended for the children and me could have easily been choked out as well. They have longed all these years to have their natural needs and expectations for a Dad to be fulfilled, as did the generations before them no doubt. But the Dad role to love and nurture in a safe environment got broken way before they were born. I didn’t see that coming. Somehow, by God’s mercy and grace, the children and I turned to Him in the midst of our crumbling family life and received all He provided with open arms and open hearts. It made all the difference.

SKU-000190454_TEXT-13.pdf  July 21, 2005

I awoke with an urgent drive to write my story. The impression on me was so strong it made me instantly issue tears of relief. I had no idea there was so much pent up pressure inside me to use my experiences to help others. Before I could even finish thinking the question, What should I call it?, the answer interrupted my thought with, Beware of the Dog. Strange name for a story that has little to do with dogs! My husband lay beside me, still asleep; unaware of the emotional and spiritual reverie I was experiencing.

We were in a hotel just outside of San Francisco near the airport, on an unexpected and undreamed of vacation to visit his adult sons who live there. Only two years ago, I didn’t have a husband and my father was still alive. My mother’s money gift from Dad’s estate, designated for travel, had allowed this amazing trip. I’d never been so far from Maine in the U.S. and hadn’t flown in a large commercial airplane since high school. Why now? Why here of all places?

Yesterday the boys gave us our introductory whirlwind tour of San Francisco. From a cozy coffee shop on the edge of the Mission district, to a Giant’s game in their picturesque stadium, through Golden Gate Park and dozens of other highlights in between, my senses were already overloaded when we landed in a lively Spanish restaurant just past 10:00 P.M. It’s Haight-Ashbury location reminded me of flower power and the Hippie movement that had begun there in the 1960s which had so influenced my high school and college life far away on the East coast. The brightly colorful decor with it’s shrine high up on the wall and uproariously loud atmosphere recharged my sagging energy level that would have left me bed bound back in Maine.

Like sardines, we were packed into the adjacent bar area while we waited for a table. A tall pitcher of sangria had just been served as I began to talk with the young woman in our party. We had to literally shout in each other’s ear to carry on a conversation. As we shared tidbits from our lives we began baring some old wounds from past relationships and agreed how difficult it is to know just how much one should share with the present partner.

I suddenly felt a detached awareness of feeling an ageless connection with this young woman, half my age, a mere acquaintance really. I only told her a few details about my last husband when she reacted with such shock and outrage that I realized how terribly deadened my own feelings had become over time. My sense of injustice woke up with a start as though it had been asleep. In that instant of witnessing her brief reaction, I felt like a protective shroud that I’d unknowingly drawn over my painful past, ripped open and fell away.

In this most unlikely setting, bombarded with the sights and sounds of this wonderfully vibrant restaurant, three thousand miles from home, I became powerfully aware of how heavy my heart had become to help other women. To experience such a rush of emotional focus internally while intensely trying to absorb the social benefit of personal interactions with my fairly new but long-distant stepsons, chatting through dinner and enjoying a delicious variety of appetizers and entries might sound like sensory overload but I actually felt incredibly alive.

Although I had shared bits and pieces of my story for legal reasons, or occasional illustrations when teaching family life or partnering issues, I never felt ready to share the whole story. I have believed all along that one of the purposes of my experiences is to help others but I never knew how or when that would happen.

By explaining what I have endured, I hope to help prevent others who will take my warnings to heart, from falling prey to the kind of monsters who masquerade as men among us. The most tragic and devastating events in my life came in such disguises that I did not recognize them. I remember musing one night right slap dab in the middle of a violent rampage that this disgusting man really should have come with a warning on his forehead! To think we are warned to Beware of the Dog and yet we are less familiar with and unprepared to recognize the signs in a relationship that can cause so much more damage than a dog-bite. I learned the hard way that a man, or women for that matter, can enter your life and disrupt it in ways that are beyond your imagination.

This book is my warning for others who like me, have ordinary dreams for living happily ever after. Hopefully you’ll become equipped with some tools that will increase your chances for partnering successfully or at least without being harmed. Partnering well is a huge issue that often becomes trivialized in our society by romantic fantasies supported by the media hype of celebrities and romantic stories from books and plays. Long-term commitment involves not only your love, but your time, finances, and possibly children, as well as your extended family and personal friends. Letting another person into your life to live under the same roof and share your intimate family and friend relationships is very serious business.

Maybe I needed to be this far from home to begin to put the events of my past into a new perspective that can help others. I survived! Not everyone does. I suddenly appreciated how far I’d come emotionally from the day only five years earlier when I hit bottom. But how did I ever happen to wander into a world of abuse and dysfunction so unaware and unprepared? I’ve thought long and hard about why I became entrenched in a life full of anger, destruction and deception. Many of the causes began in my childhood.

SKU-000190454_TEXT-13.pdf  My Emotional and Social Foundation

The late fifties and sixties were such a different cultural experience for middle class children from that of today. Mine was safe, sheltered and carefree. I got to be a child. My parents, married for 53 years, modeled a lifelong commitment to each other and their five children. I fully expected I would someday have what they did. There were no other options in my mind. In my South Portland, Maine neighborhood, on several streets in every direction, I knew of no divorces until I was in high school. Every friend and acquaintance that I can recall went to a church on Saturday night or Sunday with his or her family.

The cultural structure, individuals, and even the media seemed to reinforce family values. In contrast, today the family is being bombarded with messages that seem hell-bent on confusing and even destroying the concepts of traditional, long-term relationships that are based on mutual love and respect. Responsible parents must work much harder to shelter children from the worst possible influences that are as close as a television and computer inside our very doors and worse, inside some children’s bedrooms!

When children came home from school at lunch time, every mother that I was aware of, was at home serving up lunch and there at the end of the day to hear all about your school day, reminding you to change into your play clothes. The family sat down to eat supper together every night and in my home, there was no T.V. after supper on school nights because you did your homework. My three brothers out voted my sister and me to choose the one show we regularly saw before supper, Gilligan’s Island. That reminds me that the Gilligan and Lucy types (I Love Lucy) made me more nervous than amused with how much trouble they got into. Sounds like I took life quite seriously.

When we weren’t studying, we were playing outside. There were always plenty of kids my age around to play with. In the yard, we played jump rope, giant step, red light-green light, and even cigarette tag (This was years before we were informed that cigarettes cause cancer.) On the street we played baseball in the rotary(cul-de-sac), roller-skated and went sliding in the winter.

Safety was not an issue. We had so much freedom to explore our world that by 2nd grade, my friends and I were racing around to other neighborhoods within a mile of our homes to visit school friends, play on various playgrounds, attend my brothers’ Little League games and to go ice skating in Mill Creek park. We walked to Willard Beach by ourselves, captured pollywogs in secluded places like Sawyer Brook and played hide and seek in the huge lilac bushes there. As children we had a kissing rock within those bushes and later as teens, the unlighted, Marsh Road, beside the brook was a favorite parking spot (kissing only, in my experience). We spent hours rolling down grassy hills and climbing gravel piles in the nearby sand pit. We stayed out late playing flashlight tag and on one amazing night laid on our backs watching the northern lights. It was magical!

One summer morning, my sister, Doreen, and I set out exploring across the marshes to find out where we’d come out on the other side of the distant woods. Once there, a friendly farmer invited us to jump from his hay loft into piles of hay and tried, unsuccessfully, to teach us how to milk his cow. We then found our way back from Cape Elizabeth along Mitchell Rd. to our street. No harm done; it was called an adventure!

Even Portland was safe during my childhood. As fifth and sixth graders, my girlfriends and I would hop the bus to town and wander around the streets, in and out of stores for hours. Grants department store was particularly fun for its escalator and Porteous for its elevator. We’d usually end up in the Puritan Restaurant where hamburgers were .30 and hotdogs, .20. (I babysat for .50/hour so had a little spending money.) I remember feeling a bit wild one day when I missed my girlfriend and beamed a man in the back of the head with my straw paper. He chose to ignore it but bursting with guilt and relief, I giggled myself silly.

Whether at my own childhood dinner table or those of several friends, parents carried on the conversation and children rarely spoke. The saying went, Children should be seen and not heard. The expectation for quiet was more than we could bear at times when we passed too many looks around the table and giggled so hard internally, that we nearly burst open, stifling any sound, trying not to be noticed. This was especially a problem when squeaking chairs sounded like someone breaking wind. We did not use slang words.

At my own family table, I remember secret macaroni swallowing contests right under my parents’ noses. We would challenge each other to see who could stuff the most pieces of macaroni in our mouths and then swallow it. My oldest of three younger brothers, Kent, got into big trouble one night for dumping a few too many condiments into my older sister’s glass of milk. He had to drink it to our delight! (the natural consequences method of discipline). I can still remember where we each sat at the table and that we each had a different colored melamine plate.

Mealtime and family vacations provided us with the consistent quality time with my parents that I believe children crave. Research repeatedly supports the benefits of family mealtime for children, but certainly the preferred method of conversation would be to include the children. We had some wonderful, though financially frugal family trips to visit relatives and family friends in Newport, R.I., New York City, Hartford, Conn., Lake Champlain and most frequently, Waldoboro, Maine on a winding dirt road called Duck Puddle where a car might not pass by for hours. Relatives had us children stay over for weekends and longer which further deepened our family bonds and expanded our life experiences.

SKU-000190454_TEXT-13.pdf  Meanness

One day in 7th grade I experienced the only humiliating event that I recall in my childhood. My seventh grade geography teacher could be sugary sweet one day and as mean as a witch the next. (Imagine the Wicked Witch of the West without the green face). She was rumored to be an alcoholic and we students somehow figured that might explain her unpredictable behavior or perhaps she and her twin sister were taking turns in the same classroom.

She had just finished rattling off an explanation of the U.S. treasury system, which sounded like Greek to me. Then she dramatically opened her grade book, lifted her red pen and piercingly looked around the room to select a victim while she menacingly yelled out the warning that whomever she called on had better repeat her words perfectly or they would receive an E! (That would be the equivalent of an F today, except that in South Portland that was a 74 or below and I had an A+ average in that class). Miss Houghton!

The next moments run in slow motion in my memory. Slowly rising from my seat, my whole body gripped in a wave of panic, my mind scrambled to make sense of her words. I heard myself haltingly repeat as much as I could remember. (I’d love to hear what that sounded like now!) That’s enough! Sit down! That’s an E, an E! Miss Houghton!!! My body was in some kind of petrified shock waiting to burst. The bell rang and I managed to hold it in as I made my way through the crowded corridor, into the coatroom adjacent to my homeroom. That’s where I lost it. My friends surrounded me trying to console me as I sobbed. My Child Development students would recognize this as my loss of dignity (the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect) having been treated so disrespectfully.

Unbelievably and unknown to me, my homeroom teacher went to get the terrifying teacher who came in and with an unprecedented display of compassion, put her arm around my shoulder and escorted me back to her room! I was hyperventilating and couldn’t stop so she threw open a window and had me lean out to take deep breaths. She gave me a candy lifesaver and soothingly talked to me about what a good student I was, assuring me that she would remove the E.

When I finally was released, I walked the long way home (an extra mile, outside of the Meeting House Hill neighborhood) so I could completely calm down before I got home. My efforts to leave it all behind me instantly failed when my mother greeted me at the back door. She took one look at my face and in her very soft manner asked, Honey, what happened? I lost it all over again and I recounted the event.

My attachment was strong with her. I have never been so grateful that my mother was there for me. An old diary entry reveals that the same geography teacher, Miss B. sent me an engagement card six years later. Motivated by remorse, maybe? At that time, I decided that everyone has some good in them.

In contrast to my mother’s reassuring presence, years later, my own harried parenting presented my children with quite a different style of being there. After teaching all day, when I got home, I was so controlled by my first husband that he barely allowed me out of his sight. From the moment I went upstairs to tuck in the kids, he began impatiently hounding me to Hurry up! or yelling, What’s taking you so long? One night when I stole an extra moment to lay down beside my 1st grade daughter; she released a painful story of humiliation that had happened at school days before! I felt so guilty and sad that she had carried this by herself for so long.

Halfway through 2nd grade, after her father’s arrest, we discovered in Em’s counseling sessions that she felt so deprived of my attention that I needed to schedule specific time to be with her to begin to satisfy a kind of attachment (the normal bond that grows out of a mother and child relationship) issue that she was experiencing. This is just one example of the problems of partnering with a control freak (he constantly tried to dictate how everything around him was done). Stay tuned for the whole list a bit later.

The geography teacher and my back door neighbor were the only mean people that I recall up to the age of 17. The neighbor wouldn’t allow me to cut through his yard to get to my girlfriend’s house. She lived in the house beside his. Given my timidity of authority figures and conformity to rules, he probably only yelled at me once to get out of his yard and that did it for the next ten years. I had to walk all the way up my street, a block down Sawyer Rd., and then down most of her street,