Most people targeted by verbal abuse try to explain to their abuser why what they’ve just heard is not true or not okay. That is me. If, I wasn’t trying to explain myself in hopes for the abuser to understand my intentions, I would become silent, stuffing all the hurt from the accusations the perpetrator was slinging. Then I began to journal my thoughts of disappointments and fears, and for fifty years I would live with this constant false hope that the perpetrator would be rational and could hear me and the relationship would be restored and get better. But most of the relationships where there was Verbal Abuse, never got better or restored. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to face the ‘reality’ that the ones I loved were Verbal Abusers, and that I could never have a healthy relationship with them, only an abusive one.
For me, that reality meant an end to the relationship. It meant loss. The loss of any hope of restored relationship. You would have to understand my upbringing, and the culture that I grew up in to understand how devastating that reality would affect me, my mom and my daughter and grandchildren.
Down the Via Dolorosa, called the way of suffering, walked a man called the Messiah, Christ the King. A path He chose to walk out of His love for others. This blog is a story of my seven year walk down my Via Dolorosa. A path wrought with suffering. Most of what you will read in this blog is about the abuses I encountered from my two older brothers, and how their greediness, their abusive nature, and their need to dominate and have power over others, would bring down the complete and utter destruction of my beautiful, fun loving, ‘Big Fat Greek/Filipino Family.’
May God give you the grace when faced with the reality that you may never reach an intimate relationship with an individual who does not consider you a person of value, one deserving respect.
Ginger