It has amazed me the extent to which 80% of the things which I thought my parents were horrible for doing to me as a child, seem far more reasonable & understandable as a middle aged adult.

Of the remaining 20% where I still feel they made the wrong decision, 3/4s of those I now view as being made with honest & true intentions to do what they thought was best, with the information that they had & the fears or worries they were fixated on.

While most of those, I feel could have been resolved if they had taken a more objective view or had done a better of listening & considering my version of events.

I also realize that of the times where I felt they unfairly failed to give my perspective an honest hearing & weigh it fairly - the percentage where I was actually right & being treated unfairly were the significant minority.

However, it is those events which I remember, not the times where I was wrong, or full of shit.

The list of areas where I feel that my parents completely failed & I would make a point not to repeat their behavior is not very long.

While there are several smaller items on that list, the most important one was the cycle or physical violence, emotional attacks & verbal abuse that my mother engaged (& my father ignored) in when she (somewhat regularly) lost her temper.

My oldest memory is that of my mother grabbing me by my hair & repeatedly slamming my head into the passenger window of our car. In particular, I remember not understanding why she was angry.

While the physical violence almost entirely ended when I was 12 & was large enough to threaten an effective retaliatory response, the verbal & emotional impacts of her anger & rage issues not only continued to traumatize me emotionally but they established a norm of behavior / expectation that has impacted every adult romantic relationship that I have had since.

I loved my mother deeply & I knew that she loved & cared for me as well. Growing up, everyone loved my mom, my friends would always tell me how lucky I was to have such a great mom & if it wasn’t for her rage & the abuse it spawned, they were right.

I decided as a young man that while I admired much about my mother, I made a point of reminding myself that I wanted a marriage that didn’t have that sort of dynamic.

Yet, every single one of my serious relationships involved at least one incident of my partner being physically violent towards me (I have never once been physically violent with an intimate partner).

I was generally twice the size of my girlfriends & for the most part, they couldn’t actually inflict physical damage.

So in order to hide & compartmentalize the emotional trauma caused by such violence & I would often try to take a soothing (if in retrospect, rather patronizing but at the time I didn’t intend it to be that way) approach of

“Its ok, baby, just get it out - I’m here for you”

Violence from the women who loved me was the norm, simply what I grew up to expect. My maternal grandmother & both of my sisters have also been physically violent towards me & the messaging I received from my family was that “A man never hits a woman” & “you’re twice her size, she can’t really hurt you so just walk it off.”

So I did (or tried to) - I would brush it off & pretend that it neither mattered nor hurt me.

Then in my 20s, a woman I was living with, hit me in the back of the head with a cast iron skillet. The impact cause a stream of blood to splatter on the wall next to me, nearly knocked me unconscious & required upwards of 30 stitches to repair.

The sight of the blood spattering on the wall & flowing down the back of my neck shocked my partner out of her anger & she immediate starting making profuse apologies & wanting to take care of me.

I honestly believe that she was entirely shocked at the damage she inflicted & had no desire to harm me seriously - not that it excuses her violence.

When I was admitted to the hospital, the nurses treated it as trivial & asked me jokingly “Oh boy, now what did you do?” (I had made a joke, & a bad one, but that doesn’t justify abuse)

The reactions of my friends (both male & female) similarly made light of the situation, it was again made clear that society perspective was to blame me & expect me to walk it off.

As few days later when I was feeling better, I sat down with my SO & told her that things had to change & that I simply was not willing to accept any future outbursts of violent abusive behavior from her.

It had stopped being funny, trivial, or something that I would overlook & to her credit, she was never violent with me again.

In the two decades of serial dating & relationships which followed, my rule was to have that same conversation & to set a hard boundary there any time physical violence was used against me.

It was one & done, a second incident meant the immediate & irreversible end of the relationship.

While in most cases, that boundary was respected & the violence did not reoccur, there were at least a dozen women whom I stopped dating when they refused to respect that boundary & I told myself that I would never again accept a relationship where I was subject to intimate partner violence.

Unfortunately, almost two decades later, while struggling with PTSD & other issues that resulted from a five year period of working in Iraq & Syria - I failed to keep that promise to myself.

I met & fell in love with & married a brilliant, gorgeous, funny & kind woman who I admired & respected.

She was 85% everything I ever wanted (& more) in a partner, 10% occasionally frustrating & annoying (but we all have our flaws & imperfections), the last 5% however was the problem.

The anger & rage (from events which preceded me) which fueled the physical, emotional & verbal abuse that she unleashed whenever she became angry & which steadily started to increase as our relationship progressed.

I don’t know why I accepted it the way that I did, honestly I even found myself making excuses for her & blaming myself for how my PTSD (& related issues) were making it very hard for me to function on a daily basis & how that negatively impacted her.

In reflection, despite my telling myself that I would never marry someone like my mother, I ended up doing exactly that.

Eventually, her violence escalated to the point that it couldn’t be ignored or dismissed & she agreed to get therapy.

While she managed to almost entirely reduce the physical violence from her rage, it didn’t take long before she just channeled it into verbal & emotional abuse instead.

It took me five years (& a lot of therapy of my own) to actually start insisting on healthy boundaries & behaviors in our relationship & shortly after I did so, she informed me that she was quitting therapy because she didn’t feel that her behaviors were unhealthy, & if they were, that they were justified & excused by my failures as a husband.

At which point, I had no choice but to file the paper which ended our marriage.