Chapter 9: [Gas]lighting the Match (8/2012 - 3/2015)

The disrespect & abuse I endured from my wife gradually increased in frequency & severity as I struggled to find the right solution, not realizing my mistake was believing there was one.

Jul 27, 2024

∙ Paid

When July of 2012 rolled around, I had been working six days a week, sixty to seventy hours on average, with no breaks longer than a couple of days, for over twenty months. I was desperate for a vacation, and my childhood best friend getting married in New York provided a perfect reason. After originally planning on elevating my second associate to the position of primary treating doctor in the clinic, a reversal of circumstances resulted in her deciding to leave the clinic (for very good personal reasons, and on good terms) and me preparing my first associate for the role. Entrusting the clinic to him, we planned a three-legged trip that began with us flying up to Minnesota with our sons to leave them with their grandparents while we then flew to New York. In addition to my friend's wedding, we celebrated my wife's birthday while we were there (I surprised her by enlisting an entire subway car full of people to help me sing "Happy Birthday" to her, an experience which delighted her to no end; she watched the recording over & over again), then returned home to spend a romantic weekend in Duluth together (the cover photo on my website's home page - my favorite photo of myself, and one of the last ones taken before my hopes & dreams were crushed - was taken on this trip). After taking our sons to a water park in Bloomington, we flew back home to Dallas.

The morning after the day I returned, I checked my email and noticed that I had received approval from the Institutional Review Board for my research project - the final step in a project for which I had worked tirelessly to achieve for so many years. Unable to contain myself, I literally jumped out of my seat and danced for joy.

At this point, I was feeling connected with my wife & sons again and optimistic about the future, recharged & ready after my vacation. I had a plan to transition to a part-time role in the clinic, complete the one remaining algebra credit which I needed for my bachelor's degree, and begin studying for a PhD on an extended five-year plan, so I could be more available to spend time with my family. After two long years of hard work & long weeks away from my family, I was back on track towards achieving my dream of conducting research on scoliosis at a chiropractic university, and life was good.

I then went into the clinic, my first day back. My associate greeted me warmly, then informed me that he had some bad news which he had been waiting to tell me, not wanting to spoil my vacation. He shared with me that the president of the university would be stepping down from his position. Unfazed, I optimistically replied that as long as I had him (my associate) on my team, we were unstoppable. He hugged me, a rueful look in his eyes, as he told me that he wasn't done giving me all the bad news yet, and that what I had just said made this even harder for him to say. He then informed me that he would be leaving, too, in eleven days. His wife also worked in the clinic as a massage therapist & chiropractic assistant; obviously, she would be leaving too.

I had originally hired a second associate doctor because he had not been planning on remaining in the Dallas area. Over time, his plans had changed, and as they did, he expressed increasing interest in assuming directorship of the clinic, while my second associate doctor (who was in a situation very similar to my own, with three young daughters and difficulties in her personal life caused by a non-supportive spouse) gradually realized that due to the lack of support at home, she would not be able to assume the role of being the primary treating doctor at the clinic and still care for her daughters. We had an honest, difficult, & incredibly rewarding conversation, and agreed upon a course of action that worked for both of us: she provided me with some assistance in research & managerial areas for a while, on her schedule, allowing her to continue generating income while being more available to her daughters, and gradually stepped away from the clinic by mutual agreement, in a planned, stress-free transition - neither quitting nor being fired, but departing with dignity, maintaining the highest regards for one another & showing respect for each other's position. In my opinion, it went exactly how personal & professional relationships should end, in the event that they must.

Therefore, I had been planning on him assuming primary doctor status at the end of the summer. The reversal of his decision (motivated by a sudden worsening in his father's health condition, certainly a valid reason for which I could not fault him nor hold the short notice against him) meant I was basically back to where I had started, nearly two years ago - just me and & one front desk staff. Nevertheless, I gave him a big hug, letting him know I would miss him both as one of the best friends I ever had & as one of the best doctors I ever worked with, and that I held no ill will towards him for his decision. I did not want our parting to be marred by any negative feelings, and so I did not allow myself to feel or express the anxiety & fear that sprang up inside me until I was alone, sitting down at my office desk.

Suddenly the future, which had seemed to be all falling into place, was full of uncertainty. With both associates gone, I was right back where I had been two years ago, and had no idea how I would move forward with pursuing my goals in research & higher education, or have the time to address the worsening situation in my own home life, with my wife's anger & alcoholism, and my children feeling anxious, neglected, & alone. It was then that I checked my email and read a brief message from the dean of the research department. In it, he informed me that the research department was being closed down, effective immediately, and that all ongoing research projects - including my own - were terminated.

In the space of a few hours, I went from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

At this point, however, I was not ready to give up just yet. I had recently begun investing in some marketing initiatives for the clinic, contracting with an advertising company to feature our clinic on digital displays placed around local malls, and those efforts - though costly - were proving to be highly effective. Over the next two weeks, I had eight consultations scheduled with potential new patients - usually, we averaged one or two a week. And IRB approval had always been the largest hurdle to conducting a prospective study - now that I had it, perhaps I could request the return of a portion of the funds to proceed with the research project independently, and simply hire a radiologist & a biostatistician to analyze the results rather than rely upon the college. Strangely enough, it was not the email from the research department, but an email from the maintenance department, which ultimately convinced me that persistence would be futile.

Since we had begun teaching the scoliosis seminars in 2003, even before becoming a student, I had always enjoyed being on a friendly, first-name-basis with the maintenance workers & security guards on the campus. I went out of my way to show my appreciation for their hard work & long hours: they were the first to arrive and the last to leave, the first voices you heard when you dialed for help, the first to arrive on the scene when you needed a hand, and the first ones you wanted by your side when disaster struck. With their friendship, problems that would have taken weeks to fix, going through the proper channels, filling out endless forms & waiting hours on hold, were instead solved within fifteen minutes after one call. I had done my best to befriend all the people I encountered who worked for the university, from the janitors to the deans, seeing them all as valuable members of the team that kept its parts moving smoothly, but always tried to go a little further out of my way to express my appreciation to those who are typically taken for granted. Which is why, when I received a request from the director of security & grounds-keeping to inspect the clinic, I thought nothing of it and welcomed them in.

A few days later, however, I received an unusually brusque & unfriendly email from the director - a man with whom I had seldom interacted, as he spent most of his time at a desk handling administrative & managerial tasks, rather than answering emergency calls or performing repairs. In it, he claimed that there was an issue with the ventilation in the x-ray darkroom (at the time, we had yet to upgrade to digital technology with our static images and were using a conventional x-ray processing system, with chemicals and developer) and told us that we would not be able to allowed to have patients inside our clinic until we fixed the issue - which would have taken weeks, if not months, and cost several thousand dollars to install the ductwork & ventilation.

I had never heard of an x-ray developer off-gassing dangerous vapors, and when I mentioned it to my dad, he snorted and told me the only gasses being emitted from the developer was hot air - the same thing this guy was full of. It was the responsibility of the Texas Department of Health to monitor x-ray services, and we were in full compliance - the college had no right to try to shut down our business when we were operating legally. He threatened legal action if they attempted to interfere with our normal business operations, and nothing further came of it. I heard no more about the issue, but the experience left me feeling troubled. Clearly, someone was searching for a reason to kick us out of the space, and with the loss of our support at the highest levels of the college, there was no one I could turn to for assurances that would not happen or to reverse the decision if it did. As I heard about more & more of the senior faculty members departing the college, I began feeling concerned about the clinic's future. Without the support of the contacts & connections we had spent the last thirteen years forming, how long would it be before they refused to renew our lease? What if I commenced the research project, only for it to be interrupted halfway through? The money invested on conducting independent initial examinations on each patient would be wasted, and the budget was tight as it was - there was no wiggle room for substantial unexpected expenses. Little did I know, my troubles were only beginning.

Over the next few months, I was hit with numerous traumatic events in rapid succession, beginning with a home invasion that resulted in the loss of the laptop containing the only copies of the photos from the first years of my youngest son’s life. Next was a car crash involving my wife and youngest son that totaled our family car, caused whiplash-related ligamentous, musculoskeletal, & neurophysiological injuries to my wife, and left both of them emotionally traumatized. I was then notified of the tragic & premature passing of a dear friend, the wife of one of my mentors who had been instrumental in forging the connections at Parker, a woman I greatly admired, and a long-time patient. I attended her funeral, and mourned her passing alongside my wife, who had also been blessed to befriend & be loved by this wonderful woman. Soon after, I was called into an emergency meeting with the principal & counselor at my son's new school, after my son made some negative comments about himself in a moment of frustration and the school - pretending to be motivated by protecting the safety of their students but in reality caring primarily about protecting themselves from any potential liability - chose to prevent him from returning to school until he had been evaluated by a mental health professional.

The coup de grace, however, came shortly after I attended a seminar in Idaho with my father. Another chiropractic technique school - one which I greatly admired - was expanding into the field of scoliosis rehabilitation, and had recently developed a scoliosis brace based around a solid chiropractic & biomechanical understanding of the spine. My parents had recently returned from a trip to Mexico, and my father had mentioned that my mother - an exceptionally intelligent, sharp, & capable woman - had been experiencing some strange episodes of forgetfulness, mental fog, & confusion. He had been a bit worried about leaving her alone to attend the seminar that weekend, and after receiving a strange phone call from her, he bumped up his flight to return home early.

That evening, after returning home myself, I was relaxing with my wife & a mutual friend, our three sons sleeping peacefully in their bedrooms upstairs, when I received a late phone call from my father. Suddenly apprehensive, I took the call in my office, so as not to interrupt my wife & our friend, certain the gravity of the call would be at odds with the levity of their conversation.

My father shared with me that he had taken my mother into the hospital. Her behavior had become increasingly bizarre after he returned home, particularly in regards to her energy levels & her mental state. She was confused, lethargic, & unable to recall basic facts, and it was obvious to him that something was wrong. By the time they arrived at the hospital, she was fading in & out of consciousness, and could not remember the names of her parents, the date, or the current president. She had been rushed to the ICU and was awaiting emergency medical imaging & evaluation by the neurologist, while my father returned home to get some sleep before going into his clinic to see patients the following morning. He told me that he would call me tomorrow after hearing back from the hospital, and to keep her in my prayers.

Returning to my wife & our guest, I found myself reluctant to bring up the foreboding news, and caught up in having fun, neither one asked me about the call. Furthermore, my wife had been drinking, and I had an uneasy feeling about how she would handle the news - I think intuitively I knew she would not react with sympathy, compassion, or supportiveness, and I subconsciously sought to avoid being confronted with evidence of her indifference to my emotions. As we wrapped up the evening and I said farewell to our friend, I shared the news with him privately and asked him to keep my mother in his prayers as well.

The next morning, I told my wife about my father's call & my mother's hospitalization. The reaction I received was - in a word - confusion. She seemed confused, and I was left confused by her response. The best way I could describe it would be to say that it seemed like she didn't know how to respond. If she expressed any emotion, it was irritation or annoyance. Needless to say, when I received the follow-up call from my father later that day, in which he shared with me the critically dire findings of the imaging studies, I felt a great sense of uneasiness as I told her the news.

An unknown & unidentified virus had infiltrated my mother's central nervous system and caused encephalitis & hydrocephalus - swelling in the brain stem leading to a build-up of cerebrospinal fluid in her third ventricle & increased intracranial pressure. The pressure & swelling was so severe that it was borderline lethal; had my father waited one more day to take her into the hospital, she would not have survived. An emergency surgery had been scheduled to drain the fluid immediately. If she survived the procedure, a second operation would follow that would place in her brain a shunt to drain the fluid. However, due to the very high pressure levels, we warned that it was highly likely that there would be some permanent damage resulting in irreversible changes to her neurological function. Assuming she survived both procedures, her neurological status and the degree to which her personality, memory, & cognition would recover were both unknown.

As an only child, I had learned to be resilient and manage my own needs. The majority of the emotional needs I had growing up, however, were typically met by my mother. She had the most formidable intelligence of anyone I had ever met - she, like me, had been a National Merit Scholar - and I modeled my sense of humor around her cleverness & wit. She & I had always been close, and the uncertain prognosis of her illness, as well as being unable to be present with her, was agonizing.

Other than the death of my grandfather when I was nine, I had never before been confronted with the terrifying prospect of losing a close family member, and there was no one closer to me than my mother. Combined with the grief & pain of losing the research project & the dream for which I had sacrificed so much, as well as the recent hardships & the sudden removal of the most trusted members of my social support network, my emotional fortitude was pushed to its limit... and when I turned to the woman I believed to be my closest friend and truest companion, for the first time in our marriage truly needing her love & support as I had loved & supported her for over a decade, that limit was broken.

As my confidence & optimism began to waver and the fear & the pain grew, my wife grew more bitter with me and more resentful of the personal & professional events affecting me that did not involve her - both positive & negative. At the time, I could not understand why merely bringing them up to her was enough to trigger her anger. Each time I reached out for support, I was met with only hostility & dismissiveness. The more I begged for love, warmth, & closeness, the more hatred, venom, & distance she forced me to endure.

My wife's indifference to my suffering was undeniable. That evening, after I had shared with her that my mother was in the ICU, comatose in the ICU, awaiting complex neurosurgery, I sat alone in my office watching "The Little Prince" - one of my favorite movies to watch with my mother as a child. Suddenly confronted by thoughts of a terrifying reality of a life without my mother's light, remembering all our wonderful times together and everything she had done to raise me to become the man I am today, I prayed to God for her recovery with tears in my eyes. I was completely sober; in fact, I swore to God that I would not drink until my mother was out of the hospital, and I kept that promise.

As I sat alone in my office, throughout the entire 90-minute movie, remembering childhood memories of all the times my mother had been there for me & praying to God with all heart for her recovery, my wife danced in the living room, drinking & flirting with other men online. A few nights later, she proudly bragged to me about another man giving her his number while she was at the video store, and reacted with confusion & indignation when I expressed my disgust over her insensitivity.

The anguish, grief, & helplessness I felt due to my mother's illness was compounded by the pain of the undeniable truth: the woman I had married did not care about me or truly love me.

Sometimes, when someone we love is sick or suffering, the pain is too much for us to bear, and we find ourselves unable to face them or be with them, even though we know we should be by their side. It can be an incredibly difficult reality to bear, and denying or seeking an escape from confronting the truth is a powerful psychological defense mechanism, one closely tied to our survival, which can overwhelm our decision-making, our emotional bonds, & our acquiescence to social norms. In a brutal & humbling irony, the very depth of our love & feelings towards someone can make it impossible for us to be with them when they need us the most.

This was not the case with my wife's attitude towards my suffering - though, limited in the amount of emotional pain I could bear at the time, I told myself it was. In truth, she was genuinely unaffected by my feelings.

Many men in such a situation, I believe, would have sublimated their pain into anger. How dare she be so callous & unsupportive? Some might consider such behavior justified by her indifference & lack of respect for her husband’s feelings, while others would claim that any form of aggression is unacceptable, seeing it as a lack of self-control or a sign of emotional immaturity, as him failing to express his true feelings & resorting to anger rather than being honest about the pain & vulnerability he feels, being rejected by his spouse. Few people, however, would validate his anger without judging it as acceptable or unacceptable, or consider the effects of its expression or its repression in a neutral, objective manner. And this is, in a nutshell, the root of our society’s collective emotional immaturity: we either repress our emotions, or allow them to rule us. Neither approach is healthy.

Anger, I have come to understand, is never bad or good, justified or unjustified - just like any other emotion. How we feel is how we feel, and feelings are not bad or good - they simply are. We can either accept how we feel & validate it, shame ourselves for feeling it, or deny it & repress it. We can change how we feel about things over time, by changing our beliefs in response to new information or new insight, but in the present moment, we have no control over what we feel at that moment. We only have control over what we think about it and what we do about it. It is ALWAYS okay to feel how we feel, and that includes being angry. When we are uncomfortable with our anger, it becomes unfamiliar to us, and so we become inexperienced in dealing with it & vulnerable to being controlled by it. We applaud ourselves for our self-control, believing we have triumphed, but the moment we come to see our emotions as something to be subjugated & controlled, we have doomed ourselves to failure by entering into a war where there should never be one, a war which we should never start - a war against ourselves, where even when we win, we lose. When we do not know how to express our emotions in a healthy way, they will inevitably manifest in other ways - unpredictable explosions, passive-aggressive behavior, self-loathing, or insidious & destructive habits. There are some who would say that many if not all physical ailments have their roots in emotional trauma or its denial, that emotional healing is the deepest & most profound level of healing that can occur, affecting every level above it, including our physical health, and the longer I live, the more convinced I become that there is a great deal of truth to this concept.

Had I allowed myself to feel my anger, I might have been driven to take action. And while the expression of anger might elicit feelings of discomfort in those who are uncomfortable with their own anger, there would have been nothing wrong with my feelings of anger or with me choosing to express them. There would certainly be limits to what might be considered a healthy expression of anger - regardless of how satisfying it might feel at the time, our anger is never a justification to commit criminal or sinful acts upon another human being - but simply telling her, "I feel angry, and this is why," might have led to important issues being raised, and through the ensuing interaction between us, there might have been an accounting. I might have been forced to acknowledge her indifference, and might have realized that I would never be able to spend the rest of my life with someone who was genuinely unaffected by my emotions, no matter how intense they were. At the very least, it might have clued me in to the fact that her lack of empathy would make it very easy for her to someday cause immense harm to me without a shred of guilt or remorse.

So accustomed was I to suppressing even the smallest flicker of anger, however, that I felt nothing but sadness, and when the sorrow ran its course & my tears no longer fell, I felt nothing at all, numb, blank, & empty. My repression of my anger robbed me of my ability to recognize the egregious violation of the marital contract between us, to love & care about one another, and to take action to protect my self-esteem. Somewhere down the line, I had accepted & internalized the belief that my feelings were unimportant. They did not matter, and so it did not matter to me that they did not matter to her.

But deep inside my soul, a little voice was screaming to be heard. No matter how much I might tell myself that my feelings did not matter, that little voice knew it was a lie. Every thing matters. Nothing is completely meaningless. Nothing is completely valueless. One person's feelings, in one moment of time, are often overlooked - but that does not mean they do not matter. It simply means that we failed to perceive their impact. Sometimes, the impact of one person's feelings, in one moment of time, is very obvious to us - there are countless examples of those feelings inspiring words or actions which changed the course of history. And all value is nothing more than perspective & potential - the value of a thousand gallons of water to a man dying of thirst is insurmountable, for it represents the potential to avoid death, while the value of a thousand gallons of water to a man trapped in a flood is less than nothing & changes nothing. Nothing about the water has changed - only the situation around it. So it is with our feelings - for every decision ever made, there was an emotion behind it. The value of emotion never changes, only the circumstances around us. How we choose to interpret & act upon an emotion might seem inconsequential at times, but in the right circumstances, it can make all the difference in the world. Our relationship to our emotions can very well be what separates an ordinary life from one that is truly extraordinary.

Knowing this, I could not bring myself to fully embrace emotional nihilism - not then, and not now. But denying reality does not exempt us from its consequences, and whenever love & consideration only flow one way, resentment is inevitable. And while I could acknowledge & understand the resentment I felt towards her, even as I did my best not to express or act upon it, I struggled to understand why her resentment towards me & our sons grew in proportion to the hardships we endured - especially when many of those hardships were caused or compounded by her own choices.

It was only years later, as I learned of the stunted emotional growth in pathological narcissism, that I began to understand. The resentment she felt was the same resentment I felt as a child for my father's work and my parents' drinking - anything that took their attention away from me. Due to the childhood trauma & abuse she had suffered, my wife was locked in the same emotional state that I had been in at age 8 - unable to put myself in my parents' shoes, I did not see how hard they worked or appreciate the privileges & comfort they provided to me. I did not recognize how, after a long week of dealing with bills & being away from one another, focusing on meeting the needs of others, that they deserved - and in some ways even needed - a chance to decompress & reconnect with each other. Limited by my self-centered & immature interpretation of their behavior, I only cared how it affected me.

And while fortunately I received the love & support which enabled me to move past that myopic & conceited perspective, my wife never did. To her, feelings were facts. She was only happy when she got what she wanted, and would never admit to being wrong or recognize how her own choices were the only thing preventing her from being happy. Trapped in an attitude of entitlement & perpetual victimhood, it should not be surprising that she soon began to feel as if everyone was against her. She isolated herself from anyone who attempted to hold her accountable for her behavior, vilified them in her mind, and only bestowed her kindness & affection upon those who enabled her - which only further alienated her from me & our sons, as we found it increasingly impossible to turn a blind eye to her irresponsibility.

Despite everything I did to encourage abstinence, moderation, & responsible decision-making, her drinking continued to get worse, for the only consequences that would have effected a change were outside of my willingness to inflict upon someone I loved. I wanted to believe that carrots alone were enough to inspire a person to make positive changes - but eventually the carrots run out, while the stick never does. She refused to accept that she had a problem with her drinking, and I became increasingly concerned about leaving her with our sons alone.

She did not care how others suffered due to her choices, and the more suffering my sons & I endured, the less inclined we were to cater to her, and thus the more resentment & dissatisfaction she felt towards us for not providing her with what she wanted. She didn't care about the reasons. All that mattered to her was that she wasn't getting what she wanted, what she felt she deserved, what she believed I was supposed to provide to her. She wanted it, and since I wasn't giving it to her, she would find other ways to get it... even if they ultimately tore our family apart.

Ultimately, I decided to close the clinic on the campus of Parker University - the clinic which I had seen as the opportunity of a lifetime and had invested nearly a decade of my life to establish. It was an incredibly difficult decision, but one which seemed inescapable. I simply did not have the strength to carry on, knowing the research would not happen, knowing my supporters were gone, knowing my family was falling apart, knowing my mother was barely clinging to life and would never be the same. Furthermore, I had seen the threat on the horizon to my father's companies, and was determined to convince him that drastic action needed to be taken.

I moved the equipment & furniture into storage, hoping Parker would re-open their research department or that I would be able to find another university willing to sponsor my research, but with the seminars moving online, the ongoing re-organization of the university, and the lack of a physical presence on campus, I found my opportunities slowly drying up. As the professors I had known for years departed one by one, I was no longer invited to present to the students in their classes. The staff in the Postgraduate Education department moved on or retired, and after speaking at the Parker Homecoming in 2012, despite receiving glowing feedback from the doctors who attended my presentation, I was not invited back the following year. I attempted to maintain relationships with the faculty that remained and build new connections with the new people coming in by attending various events & establishing a scholarship for students who attended the scoliosis seminar, but the new administration was unfamiliar with my father's work & less concerned with validating the chiropractic profession's role as spinal experts than ensuring the survival & profitability of the university. Higher education was undergoing a profound transformation, and simply focusing upon providing the best possible chiropractic education was seen as insufficient & over-specialized, exposing the university to unacceptable vulnerability should enrollment in the DC program drop. The new board members believed the university needed to expand its services, offering new degrees & programs in business administration, massage therapy, nursing, & more. While I retained an overwhelmingly positive view of the university, I could not help but feel that the efforts of the new board toward diversification & expansion substantially reduced their focus on the value they could offer to the chiropractic profession. Increasingly, I felt disconnected from the university which had once been my greatest ally, and the financial uncertainty affecting the chiropractic colleges at the time (caused by a dip in enrollment & a 33% reduction in seminar attendance) meant that the interest I received when I reached out attempting to find a new sponsor was much more lukewarm than I anticipated. I only found one opportunity, and sadly, though it began well, it was ultimately thwarted by what William Paley summarized as the principle of everlasting ignorance - condemnation before investigation - and nothing I did or said would have made any difference.

In March, at ACC-RAC 2013, I had connected with a researcher at Texas Chiropractic College near Houston, and had reached out to her after the conference to inquire about donating the $25k we had raised to the college to fund a research project on scoliosis. After receiving an enthusiastic & warm invitation from her & another one of their senior researchers, I headed south to what had come to be my family's favorite vacation destination over the years, reserving a room at the Kemah Boardwalk Inn and delivering a presentation to the faculty on my father's methods. Unbeknownst to me, the dean of research was the son of a chiropractor who had been trained by one of the doctors whom my father had studied with back in the eighties. This innovative & visionary doctor had founded a chiropractic technique which had achieved amazing results in many complex conditions, due in part to their early recognition of the value of video fluoroscopy (digital motion x-ray) for the advancement of chiropractic, and the dean’s father had been an enthusiastic proponent of this technique.

The dean had followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a chiropractor & attempting to duplicate the results achieved by his father with this technique. However, he gradually grew disillusioned as he failed to replicate the successes achieved by his father & others. Rather than questioning his own abilities or consider whether he might be misapplying or neglecting key aspects of the protocol, he blamed his lack of success on the technique itself, concluded that the founder was a charlatan & that his father had been deceived, and adopted a profoundly negative viewpoint of similar techniques. Undoubtedly this is what inspired him to research & the scientific method - pursuing the truth, and avoiding deception. Unfortunately, we are always blind to our own biases.

I knew none of this at the time, however, which is why I was unprepared for his lack of objectivity, which became evident during our follow-up meeting after my presentation as he questioned my father's protocols & expressed skepticism as to whether we had truly developed a comprehensive treatment protocol for scoliosis. We had a twelve-year track record of success, hundreds of positive testimonials & post-treatment x-rays demonstrating undeniable change in spinal alignment, and dozens of doctors consistently achieving similar results - to say his skepticism was unfounded is an understatement, and considering the chiropractic profession had yet to develop a comprehensive protocol for the management of low back pain, his dismissiveness was obviously irrational & patently spurious. We had the most comprehensive chiropractic protocol ever developed for the treatment of scoliosis, and only through rigorously-conducted clinical research would we be able to refine its application & gauge the comparative effectiveness of its component parts - yet here he was, standing in the way of the exact research that could have resolved his supposed concerns, and turning down the $25,000 we could have invested in making said research possible. He had no real stake in the process other than being the gatekeeper for it to begin - he would not have been burdened with extra work or expenses, nor would it result in any significant negative consequences to him or the college if he were proven correct and the end results did not support the effectiveness of our protocols, while its success, in contrast, could have led to significant professional benefits for the research faculty involved & the potential for additional funding & notoriety for the department. Yet, because my father had attended the seminar of someone towards whom he held a negative opinion, he was immune to logic & any attempt at persuasion and obstinately rejected our proposal.

At dinner that evening with one of the senior researchers and her husband, I expressed my frustration candidly and received an equally candid, not unkind response. Recently, the NIH had made a substantial, seven-million-dollar grant available to the research departments of the 30 or so chiropractic colleges in the United States - the largest in the history of chiropractic. In competing for the grant, the research departments of many chiropractic colleges had been instructed to abandon certain projects which had been deemed to be too "controversial" or politically inconvenient, out of the fear that it could jeopardize their potential of receiving the grant. This explained why universities with well-funded research departments held little interest in stepping on the toes of the orthopedic profession by supporting chiropractic's expansion into the field of scoliosis rehabilitation, while the university that was willing to support us ultimately closed down its research department due to lack of funding. Indeed, I realized this might have been the very reason that my father's alma mater - which ultimately won the grant - had declined to sponsor his seminars on scoliosis, after they had supported his previous seminars on x-ray analysis, corrective care chiropractic, & the Pettibon technique for over twenty years.

I could not help but voice my dissatisfaction - truly, the chiropractic ivory tower had grown distant & aloof from the actual reason the profession existed in the first place: to help patients with their health. I began to understand just how much grants & government funding dictated the focus of a researcher's career. Regardless of their areas of interest or the potential benefits to the profession, if a researcher could not obtain funding for the project, it simply would not happen. I recalled a similar conversation I had with another one of the profession's top researchers, who had presented some preliminary findings on a topic near & dear to my heart: alar ligament hypermobility. After making some initial forays into the topic & discovering just how much the failure to accurately screen for ligamentous instability could be negatively affecting the profession's management of neck pain & whiplash-associated disorders, he had been forced to abandon it when the administrators at the state university where he worked failed to grasp the significance of his findings for the chiropractic profession and refused to provide additional funding. I was extremely disheartened upon hearing this news, for it would have been the first time that anyone explored the topic of alar ligament instability with serious scientific rigor, by an institution which had the infrastructure, resources, & faculty to do it justice. The results might have revolutionized the management of motor vehicle collision injuries and saved millions of people from disability & chronic spinal pain - not to mention saved billions wasted in lost productivity & on ineffective pain management strategies. The opioid epidemic in America was just getting started at the time, and had yet to appear on the radar of the American political apparatus. How many patients might have avoided opiate addiction, had only the source of their post-crash neck pain been accurately diagnosed as a sub-failure of the alar ligaments, can never be known, but I do not doubt that it would have represented a significant percentage of the total lives destroyed by the pharmaceutical companies' ill-conceived, profit-centered mismanagement of physical maladies using toxic & addictive chemical painkillers.

Any innovation substantial enough to render the current paradigm obsolete will never come from within the established system - indeed, the nature of any complex system is to resist, not promote, fundamental shifts. The only progress & improvement that is allowed is that which enhances & aligns with accepted methodologies. As one of my former colleagues was fond of saying, "The revolution will not be televised."

If someone discovered the cure for cancer, but it required us to eliminate toxins from our diet & our environment, assume personal responsibility for our health, avoid drugs & chemicals, and be extremely conscientious regarding what we put into our bodies, then such a cure would not need to be suppressed or kept from the public. It would be ignored by all the top cancer researchers & centers, disregarded by all major media outlets, and there would be no businesses or organizations promoting it, because there would be virtually no one willing to implement it, and no money to be made in promoting it.

The irony, for those who might miss it, is that this cure already exists. Everything in the previous paragraph is demonstrably true.

After closing the clinic, I attempted to stay busy at home by focusing on the foundational managerial issues that needed to be addressed within CLEAR. I picked up a few books on non-profit management and signed up for a few online seminars, and what I learned filled me with alarm: the problems we were having were not uncommon for non-profit organizations, and not only did they expose the board members to serious liability and (in some cases) violate state laws, they had the potential to cost the organization its tax-exempt status, leave it vulnerable to the non-profit equivalent of a hostile takeover, subvert its stated mission & purpose, or destroy it altogether. After achieving Non-Profit status in 2008, there had been no serious effort towards incorporating any Best Practice strategies relevant to tax-exempt organizations. Board members were elected upon a whim, without any input from the members of the organization nor financial contribution or "buy-in" required (because the board technically "owns" the non-profit organization it directs, it is standard practice for board members to be required to donate to the organization upon accepting a position on the board and every year, several thousand dollars or more - none of our board members, other than my father, had done so).

The organizational by-laws were barely three pages long, and there were no descriptions of board member duties, no materials or training courses for board members, nor any attempt to educate them regarding non-profit management. As a result, there were substantial conflicts of interests that went unaddressed, inconsistencies in how crises & complaints were handled, and arbitrary standards of evaluating job performance, as well as constant interference, micromanagement, & unregulated influence of the employees. There were no metrics to gauge the success of the organization in fulfilling its goals, nor accountability & evaluation processes put in place for the board members. No efforts had been made to capitalize upon the non-profit status we had achieved, other than what I had personally been involved in creating, such as the fundraiser for my research project (which was primarily led by the university), a scoliosis scholarship established for Parker students, and a couple scoliosis banquets I had arranged at a local hotel during my first couple years as a student (before my studies & my schedule became too intense for me to take on additional responsibilities). There had been no fundraising campaigns, no follow-up with patients after they had been referred to a doctor to interview them about their experience or request financial support, no SMART goals or plans for the future, and no attempt to promote the organization versus the individual clinics in testimonials & marketing.

Worst of all, there was no attempt to manage the organization's funds & donations in a way that contributed to its longevity & success, or to ensure the board members were fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities. Instead, each board member acted in a way that promoted their own individual best interests, for their clinic and their finances, rather than what was in the best interests of the organization. This meant voting against increases in membership dues, investing time & money in marketing rather than research or education, and hindering the growth of the organization by restricting the certification of new doctors out of fear that the current clinics would see a decrease in their patient volume.

In short, the organizational structure of the organization was fundamentally flawed, and there was no substantial & sincere effort or attention being put forth by the board in fixing it. The board positions had been handed out by convenience rather than merit, given away for free despite the fact that the board members were the de facto owners of the organization, without requiring any significant investment in the success of the organization or penalties for failing it, and as a result, the board members were either ineffective, paying lip service to their obligations & responsibilities, or worse, actively malicious, taking advantage of the chaotic & disorganized structure, using it to their advantage, and actively hindering my efforts to address these flaws. I spent years trying to persuade my father of the need for action, at one point putting together an entire PowerPoint presentation and delivering it to him and another member of the board an hour each week over several months... no matter what I said, however, his response was always to consider the advice of the board, ignoring my urgings that the board itself was part of the problem, and held conflicts of interest that were in direct opposition to the goals of the organization.

My feelings of helplessness & frustration were magnified by my situation at home, as my wife steadfastly remained focused upon her own needs. Not once did she express any compassion or tenderness towards me, nor did she ever provide any words of kindness or encouragement. She refused to modify her behavior out of consideration for my emotions in even the most basic of ways: when I mentioned to her the vow I made to quit drinking until my mother was out of the hospital, she refused to join me for even one night of sobriety. No matter how much I pleaded with her or what rules we set together, she seldom lasted until 5 pm before reaching for the bottle - she saw drinking as her "right" after staying sober to breast-feed our three sons, and though I encouraged her to pursue a hobby or get involved in an activity outside the home, there was nothing important enough to her to motivate her to refrain from drinking. I loved her and did my best to please her, but taking on her emotions as well as my own was exhausting.

When her mercurial mood would turn dark, there was no ideal course of action for me. I would do my best to keep our conversations positive & light, and re-direct her whenever she began focusing upon old resentments & grievances that she refused to lay to rest, instead carrying them in the dark shadows of her heart & pulling them out whenever she felt the need to justify unleashing her rage and projecting her shame & her unresolved emotions upon me. Whenever her anger would emerge, I would acknowledge her feelings & the issues she raised, and address them if I could, but all of the issues she would raise were based in the past. They had no real solution, and she was not truly interested in resolving them. Nothing I could say or do or change would make any difference; what she truly wanted was not an ally, but a target. I would beg to discuss them later, sober, but her internal critic, unable to penetrate her narcissistic delusion, demanded a sacrificial offering to appease its rage, and I was the only available victim.

For hours, I would sit & endure the most horrible things anyone has ever said to me in my life. There was no escape from her verbal abuse; if I tried to leave, she would follow me from room to room. If I left the house, she would put on a revealing outfit and threaten me, saying she would get attention from other men. There was no one who might serve as an intermediary, no one I could turn to whom she might listen and whose opinion she respected enough to merit a change in her behavior - after all, if her husband & sons were not reason enough, who could possibly be? I would record her behavior, sharing the recordings with her later, hoping the loving, sober version of her that I had fallen in love with would be moved by the atrocious behavior and cruel words she exhibited when in a state of drunken rage. Initially, it seemed to work, prompting contrition & short periods of improvement... until she would feign concern that I was planning divorce and saving up the recordings to use against her, which would prompt me to delete them to prove my love & loyalty to her, at which point the cycle would begin again.

I lost count of how many times I poured out every bottle in the house. At one point, I purchased a large steamer trunk with a lock to enforce moderation; she broke into it, unscrewing the hinges from the back and taking every bottle inside to hide around the house. I stopped buying hard liquor, then all alcoholic beverages; but if the promises & the charm failed to sway me (and she could be incredibly charming indeed), she had her own key to our car & her own bankcard to our joint account, and as everything we owned was marital property, belonging equally to us both, I did not feel I had the right to deprive her of access to them. Counseling did not help. I refused to consider divorce or deliver any ultimatums, and I had no one to turn to - even if I had, I believed it was inappropriate for me to discuss deeply personal matters outside our relationship. I had built myself a prison and locked it from the inside, consigning myself to misery & near-daily torment as my mental health slowly deteriorated. The woman who had once pledged to be my rock & my shelter from the rain & the winds instead became the storm from which I desperately sought refuge.

She refused to accept responsibility for her actions or admit she was an alcoholic - even after a near-fatal accident that left her with a scar over her heart & incurred over $9,000 in medical bills that were not covered by insurance, The night it happened, she had picked a fight with me over something - I cannot remember what. Rather than engage, I had gone to bed alone while she stayed up listening to music on her headphones in our backyard by the pool. I always had difficulty sleeping by myself, though, so after an hour or so, I came downstairs to check on her, and found her passed out, face-down in a pool of blood. She had fallen on her wine glass, and the stem had opened a gash nearly an inch deep just above her heart.

I carried her inside and set her on a chair, cleaning away the blood so I could inspect the wound. It took me less than a minute to realize this was not an injury that could be managed at home: the gash was deep, fully penetrating the yellowish subcutaneous tissue and exposing the thin muscles above her ribs, and when I could see the tissue pulsing below with each heartbeat, I realized how closely she had come to puncturing her aorta & bleeding to death in a matter of seconds. I dialed 911 while she drunkenly protested that I let her sleep, and staunched the blood with bandages while keeping her upright in her chair. Thankfully, the ambulance arrived swiftly, and the paramedics wasted no time transferring her onto a gurney and driving her to the closest hospital. Our older two sons had awoken, and I explained what had happened and assured them that their mother would be alright, letting them lie down in bed with their younger brother & I. They drifted off to sleep shortly after we said a prayer together for her, but I stayed awake all night, staring at the ceiling and wondering what might have happened had I fallen asleep rather than getting up to check on her.

When I received the call from the hospital the next day to pick her up, the physician who had treated her was waiting there to meet me. He had noticed the "doctor" in front of my own name, and as a professional courtesy, he confided in me that he had not followed hospital policy when someone was brought in with a blood alcohol level as high as hers, which was to refer the patient for inpatient detox & rehab before releasing them. He looked me in the eyes and spoke to me, doctor to doctor, man to man, to be sure I knew how serious this was, and how close she had come to dying. He had needed two layers of sutures to close up the wound - one deep, one superficial - and they had needed to station a nurse nearby to prevent her from getting up, as she would not listen and had no clue what had just happened. They had placed a "Fall Risk" bracelet on her wrist, and a large bandage over the wound. After it came off a few days later, I thought for certain the scar would serve as a daily visual reminder of how close she came to dying that would be impossible for her to deny or ignore; surely, I believed, this had to be a wake-up call for her that the drinking needed to stop.

I think it was less than a week before I found her with a wine glass in her hand. She assured me that she had learned her lesson and would drink in moderation; that promise was broken less than a week after that. She never brought it up, nor thanked me for coming down to check on her or for calling the ambulance or for paying for all the bills, and if I dared to bring it up, she would fly into a rage, attacking every point of vulnerability & shameful secret I had confessed to her, give me the silent treatment for days, and withhold affection from me while flirting with other men. She basically did everything she could to not think about how she had gotten so drunk that she nearly died and to avoid acknowledging how I had saved her life. And if you act like something never happened, a funny thing happens: nothing.

Years later, in her interview with the police officer, she would insinuate that I was somehow to blame - that we had been fighting when it happened, and that the hospital had raised suspicions over the actual cause of the injury. To literally save someone's life, to take action based entirely upon their well-being, to selflessly cover the costs of their treatment without hesitation, only for them to never acknowledge it or show appreciation, but instead to twist the truth and use it against you to malign your character... it is a deep & indescribable kind of pain. Among the rapid-fire barrage of betrayals I endured in the years preceding & following our divorce, that particular bullet still remains lodged in my memories & in my heart.

It is a terrible thing to consider, but had she perished that night, the memories & emotions she would have left behind in the hearts of her husband & her sons would have been a thousand times warmer than what exists there today.

At the time, I made the same mistake that our society tends to make when we see a problem with someone's behavior: I saw an external factor - something outside of her, something that I could change - as the problem. This allowed me to maintain the positive beliefs I held about her - that she was a good person, and that she still loved me, even though she said & did horrible things to me at times - while also giving me hope & motivation, a reason to believe that there was something I could do to improve the situation. I focused upon the alcohol, and did everything I could think of to find the "right" amount to drink - whether that was zero drinks, or two drinks only on weekends, or whatever, I thought if we could just find the right balance between fun & responsibility, between satisfying whatever it was that drove her to drink while avoiding whatever caused her mood to turn black, that we could return to the happy, peaceful, productive life we had known. It would take years before I began to see the truth: there is no such thing as an "addiction" - at least, not in the sense our society understands it.

Every organism is biologically programmed to pursue that which it experiences as "good" and to avoid that which it experiences as "bad." We develop pleasure-seeking strategies and pain-avoidance strategies. The classical view of addiction sees it as, drugs & alcohol feel good, so people pursue those experiences because they have no self-control and they are weak & selfish. The reality is, however, that most people do not drink & do drugs to feel good, but to avoid feeling bad. They are not seeking pleasure, but rather relief from pain. This is an important distinction, because avoiding pain has nothing to do with self-control, and everything to do with survival. No matter how much self-control you might have, no organism can consistently operate in a manner that is inconsistent with its survival. And to the subconsciousness, there is only now - our brains & bodies will drive us to do what we have to do to survive right now, even if that is ultimately harmful to us later - because, as far as nature is concerned, there might not be a later.

My wife was in deep emotional pain, pain which she refused to acknowledge or accept. She had everything she had ever thought she wanted, yet she was miserable, and she did not want to think about why. She sought endless distractions from that pain, from the little voice in her head - just as I did, in refusing to question whether her behavior might mean she did not truly love me. We were responding as we were programmed to do, not sleeping but not quite awake, reacting to the forces inside us without ever really questioning them, because to do so was just too painful.

Nothing on Earth can push someone into changing a belief they do not want to change, or force someone into facing what they are not ready to face. If you try, you will provoke defense mechanisms that are so strongly & deeply entrenched that they could tear your world apart with their fury and outlast the patience of a saint with their implacability... and should you dare to overpower those defense mechanisms, you could quite easily shatter the very mind you are attempting to awaken.

The real problem was not her alcoholism - although it was definitely a problem, and certainly made things worse. Rather, the real problem was her own refusal to face the demons of her past and accept personal responsibility for her healing. The ultimate cause of the problems in our relationship was that she was choosing to avoid & deny her issues rather than face them, and her choice was something only she could change. Out of my love for her, I failed to set boundaries & enforce them, and so I became an unwitting enabler of her behavior. Paradoxically, the chance of her making better decisions diminished with each chance I gave her. Had I known then what I know now, I would have separated and kicked her out of the house until she addressed her mental health & her alcohol abuse, back when our marriage & our family still meant something to her. As I allowed her to disrespect both, they began to mean less & less.

And if it would not have been enough to inspire her to change, even back then, it would at least have prevented her from dragging us down with her.

We seldom look closely at our beliefs. We inherit them from the world around us as children - from our parents, from society, from religion, from our peers, and from the media - and grow into accepting them as adults without ever really questioning them; often, because to do so places us in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty, one that forces us to re-evaluate some of our core beliefs. If addiction is not due to a moral failing, then on what basis do we criminalize drug use & possession, remove people from their friends & families, their jobs, & society, force them into a dangerous & dehumanizing environment more likely to traumatize them than rehabilitate them, and brand them with a scarlet letter that will forever limit their opportunities for housing, education, employment, & socialization? Is it right for us to take people who are in pain, and to make their pain worse? How can we call this justice, when we are creating more problems & causing more suffering through our punishments than was ever caused by those we convicted & condemned? How does this create a net benefit for society, especially in cases where the person's use of drugs never harmed or placed anyone else at risk in any way? One might say that the sale of drugs funds criminal enterprises and promotes violence, theft, & other crimes more harmful to society. Of course, one might say the same thing about taxes.

If drugs & alcohol are not the real problem, then what is? The answer to that, I believe, lies in a saying you may have seen before:

"To understand a problem in America, do not look at who suffers from it, but who profits from it."

Slavery is illegal in America, right? It is, but with one important exception: as punishment for a crime. Prisoners in America are no longer citizens, but slaves. Entire corporations depend upon their forced labor for their business model to function. And once they are released, they are still denied the right to vote, the right to education, the right to fair housing, and the right to gainful employment. With the deck stacked so strongly against them, is it any wonder that many return to criminal behavior as the only way they know to live? Especially when their pain has not been addressed, but instead compounded by the social shame of being labeled a felon, seen as dangerous, unreliable, & untrustworthy? No matter what they do, that stain stays with them, punishing them daily in countless ways, even after they have served their time. In America, we don't want to see criminals turn their lives around: we want to see them back in prison, because we profit off their pain. And to justify this far-greater sin, we invoke morality and twist the core of what it means to be a Christian into a perversion that is the opposite of everything Christ lived & died for: rather than minister to the weak, the poor, the lost, and the broken, we condemn them, enslave them, deny them the basic privileges that should be afforded to all, and blame them for the choices they make in desperation to escape their suffering, rather than caring enough to understand their suffering & working to alleviate it. We see them as unworthy and ourselves as "above" them, better than them, telling ourselves if we were in their shoes, we would have made better choices, so they "deserve" the suffering we inflict upon them. And we maintain this moral high ground until we ourselves are brought low, humbled by a reversal in circumstances that allows us to experience their suffering, their shame, their pain. Then, once we ourselves have been victimized, we cry out about how unfair it is, demand special consideration for our victimhood, and feel entitled to receive from others the same leniency & compassion we once refused to extend.

I loved my wife, and could not bring myself to see her as weak, or sick, or diseased. I believed in the power of love to conquer all, and did my best to show her love & compassion, even as her misguided rage & pain caused her to lash out at the very vulnerabilities & insecurities my love & my desire for intimacy had led me to share with her. The only thing that could have broken the cycle would have been her choice to confront her pain, and that was not a choice she was prepared to make, for her pain was too great, her denial too deeply woven into the fabric of her being. Had there been any chance for love to have broken through her walls, it would have happened. I tried for years, and lived through abuse no one except those who have experienced it themselves could ever imagine. It began to change me, bringing out aspects of my personality which I never knew existed. Had I continued to hold on, it would have destroyed me completely.

Sometimes, the best way to show love is through distance. I will always love her, but I will never be close to her again. It is simply not safe.

All my efforts to pursue new opportunities with the new faculty or with a different chiropractic university were unsuccessful, and despite my best efforts & full-time presence at home, things continued to worsen. Around Thanksgiving & Christmas of 2014, we made the decision to move back home. My mother had experienced flare-ups in her condition each summer, with the summer of 2014 being particularly brutal - surgery after surgery was performed, with little to no improvement being shown from each one. Finally, a custom low-pressure shunt was designed & implanted in her brain which allowed excess cerebrospinal fluid to drain harmlessly into her stomach, and she was deemed stable enough to be released from the hospital.

However, after three summers of spending time in the ICU and undergoing MRI's, CT's, and surgeries, my father was worried that future summers would cause the same flare-ups and hospital visits, and although he was blessed to be a part of a wonderfully supportive church community, at the time he did not have an associate doctor to help him out in his office. I was reluctant to give up hope on my dream of getting involved with research - at one point, I was a potential candidate for the Dean of Clinical Research at the largest chiropractic college in the world, and had I received the position, I would have been the youngest dean of research at any chiropractic college - but my self-confidence had been eroded by the constant battles & abuse I had endured on a regular basis over the past three years, fighting an unwinnable war against the one person who should have been my greatest ally, and I no longer believed I was worthy of great things.

I had sacrificed so much and been so close, only for it all to fall apart seemingly overnight. I had worked so hard and given my wife everything she asked for and more. I had sacrificed my hobbies, my friends, and my pride. I had compromised my core values and forgiven the unforgivable. I had placed her above all others, and had always tried to be the best husband & partner to her that I could be. Yet nothing I did or said made any difference. She was constantly drunk & angry, while her jealousy & insecurity ensured that I received no comfort or encouragement from any source. I had experienced the indescribable pain of holding my dream in my hands for a few brief hours before having it ripped from my grasp. I loved being a father, and the only thing that had gotten me through the pain of being away from my sons during the early years of their lives had been the belief that my sacrifice would be repaid by being able to always take my family with me when I traveled, and to have the ability to provide for their educations & future careers... yet with the ongoing expenses resulting from her first DUI, her hospitalization, my student loans coming due, CLEAR's membership stagnating, the clinic being left with practically nothing & having to be restructured from the ground up, and sales from Vibe For Health dropping, our family's finances had gotten worse, not better, since my graduation.

I had resisted the move for as long as I could. I had wanted to leave central Minnesota since I was a teenager, and once I had left, I never wanted to come back... I hated the short-sightedness of small town people, their proclivity for gossiping & obsessing over other people's personal lives, their disinterest in funding education or becoming the best possible version of themselves, their two-faced behavior of being kind to your face while spreading lies about you behind your back. I despised the hypocrisy of cops beating their wives, smoking pot at home, & drinking or doing drugs while driving then arresting others for doing the same; the lack of anything resembling culture or classy entertainment; the pointless obsession with hunting & fishing; the stubborn stupidity & idiotic machismo of insecure Minnesotan men, preying upon underage women and boasting about it in their dirty frat houses & stinking locker rooms; the conservative & passionless attitudes of prudish Minnesotan women, punching down at any woman who had the nerve to be beautiful & confident or to embrace her own sexuality; the disdain for anything spiritual, new age, or different; the apathy, ignorance, & indifference the town exhibited about having one of the world's best chiropractors right in their backyard; the rampant racism & sexism; the way that the government & the economy in central Minnesota enabled & depended upon the revenues from DUI's, drug incarcerations, ineffective drug & alcohol treatment programs, broken homes, & failed marriages, rejecting affordable & effective solutions while maintaining a willful ignorance to the data that would clearly reveal the obvious lack of efficacy of the methods they promote; the lack of anything to do or look at in terms of scenery... I could go on and on.

I remember once attending a Bob Dylan concert with my father, held in Minnesota. Bob Dylan - a Minnesotan native, for those who didn't know - played the entire concert with his back to the audience. Reportedly, he does the same at every show he's ever played in Minnesota, and even though I know nothing about whatever experiences he may have growing up that led to his feelings about Minnesota, I must say that I completely relate to how he feels.

The positive experiences I have had in Minnesota have been few & far between, and whenever I have met an exceptional person in Minnesota, they were either from out of state or wanted to be. There's a fictional town in a Jack Reacher novel I once read... the town was called "Despair," where settlers traveling west had seen the mountains and realized they were very far away, so they just gave up and built their town in a barren plain around the only waterhole for miles. Saint Cloud, to me, seemed like it was founded by the settlers that gave up even sooner. Sartell positions itself as a "high-class" community with the best school in the area, while in reality its school does nothing but teach entitled rich white kids how to be entitled rich white assholes. The stench of the paper mill lingered for decades over the town like a perpetual fart, and the quality of its drinking water makes Flint, Michigan, seem like an artisanal spring. Waite Park was recently voted one of the worst cities to live in Minnesota, numbering 10th on the list with the crime rate per capita coming in at the 7th highest in the state, and Sauk Rapids... as much as I wanted to believe the best about my hometown, after what I experienced and what I heard from people I trust, my opinion is now that Sauk Rapids is the worst of them all. Its city council & police - the very people entrusted to keep the community safe - are infected with a deep & damning moral decay, the kind that allows them to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent & the crimes of the guilty alike, while its citizens are too apathetic, weak-willed, & self-centered to realize or care about the corruption.

Moving back home meant selling our house, and after spending nine years raising three small boys, it was in no condition to be placed on the market. It seemed like everything had been broken at one point or another: the doors, in particular, had taken quite a beating, having been splintered and battered by my wife pursuing me during the times I would try to escape her abuse. The amount of remodeling that needed to be done was extensive, and the cost of renting a truck container, moving everything but a few essentials into it, and hiring crews to perform the work quickly depleted our savings. Meanwhile, the furnishings & x-ray equipment from the clinic had been languishing in a storage facility for two years... hopeful that an opportunity would have arisen for me to continue working with scoliosis patients, I had been half-hearted in my attempts to sell it. Finally, one morning only a couple weeks before the final move, I arranged for the last few items to be donated to a Goodwill facility, and the manager of the storage facility (who had gotten to know me quite well over the years) agreed to take possession of the things that Goodwill would not accept. All I had to do was oversee the transfer of the donated items, sign for them, and then sign for the transfer of ownership at the storage facility. It was nonetheless a difficult & emotional experience for me...seeing the final pieces of my broken dream being washed out to sea.

When I returned home, at a little after noon, the moving crews were there, loading things up into the semi truck container. They looked at me sideways, one of the younger men trying to hide a smirk, as I walked into the house to find my wife drunkenly stumbling around, wearing a cheerleading uniform with a pair of blood-stained cotton panties on underneath. Aghast, I chased her upstairs to change, mortified by her behavior. The uniform had been a special purchase - not a cheap fantasy replica, but an authentic (& expensive) skirt & shell custom-designed to match the uniform she had worn on the varsity football cheerleading squad in high school. It had just arrived that morning, and finding her drunk and wearing it around strangers at the worst possible time of the month was humiliating in a way that stirred up painful memories of her dancing with another man on our wedding night, memories I had tried very hard to forget.

Society and I have always seemed to have a bit of a love-hate relationship: I find myself desiring more social connections, but I refuse to compromise the individual values I have which conflict with the majority view. I have never been one to blindly accept the viewpoints & beliefs handed down to me by society & the present cultural environment, preferring instead to evaluate the facts & form my own opinions, regardless of what others may think. It's why my opinion of a woman has never been affected by the number of sexual partners she's had - early on, I realized the hypocrisy & double standards involved in praising men while shaming women for the same metric - a metric which, not incidentally, has absolutely no correlation with a person's character, personality, or value as a human being. It's why I've never been racist, or sexist, or judged a person by the number of tattoos or piercings they have, the clothes they wear, or the way they talk. I judge people based upon how they treat others - do they show charity to the less fortunate when their chips are up, or do they snidely disparage those they consider "beneath" them to stoke their ego & soothe their own insecurities? Do they keep their word, even without being reminded? Do they pay their debts? Do their actions match their words? Do they remember those who supported them? Do they accept responsibility for their mistakes, or do they blame others & play the victim? Do they gossip or say bad things about others behind their backs? Do they have compassion & forgiveness for those who wrong them? Are they able to empathize & understand points of view different than their own? Can they admit when they are wrong? Do they tell the truth, even when it would be easier for them to lie? Do they stand up for what is right, or conform to what is popular? How do they treat servers, custodians, & all the often-invisible people who nevertheless keep our world running?

So many of the factors we use to evaluate a person's character & integrity are just plain wrong, and the right ones, we don't even consider.

For me, sexuality & spirituality have always been thoroughly intertwined, inseparable from one another. It is impossible for me to have a sexual experience that does not resonate with my spirit; when I have tried, my physical body refused to cooperate. Some of the acts which society deems "dirty" or "degrading," I find simply require a greater level of vulnerability & intimacy than some people are comfortable with, and rather than explore their fears & internal beliefs surrounding those activities & why they feel discomfort about them, they externalize their feelings onto others who are more comfortable with their sexuality and have no issues with engaging in those activities. The problem is not with the person engaging in that sexual activity - they are harming no one, emotionally or physically, by engaging in consensual acts in the privacy of their own bedroom. The problem is with the person judging or condemning that behavior in others: they are the only ones causing harm, and it's not merely emotional harm, either, but a spiritual invalidation, an existential assault against a person's identity. Being denied the freedom of self-expression results in the repression of one's personality, destructive behaviors, addiction, violence against others, disordered ways of thinking, self-harm, and suicide. Ask any LGBQT individual who has repressed their identity to conform to societal norms... at some point, they would rather die than continue the charade.

It's easy to look at my purchase of a cheerleading uniform for my wife as a sexual fetish and dismiss it as nothing more than the indulgence of lust, a hedonistic pursuit of carnal pleasures of the flesh. However, it would also be a disservice to the truth.

You see, symbolism plays a very large role in my life, and as a symbol, the varsity football cheerleader's uniform represented those of my female peers whom were generally regarded to be the most beautiful, the most coveted, & the most desirable young women in school - and, for me, the most unobtainable. As I was in high school, graduating before the turn of the millennium, in the last few years before everyone had a smartphone and Internet access, our access to information about other's lives was significantly limited compared to today. In my opinion, this encouraged the formation of cliques & the intellectual shortcuts of categorization & stereotyping to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, leading to skewed perceptions of the experiences of others & assumptions about their lives that bore little resemblance to reality. To my young mind, the football cheerleaders were the apex predators of the dating world, able to take their pick of any of the boys at school, followed closely by the cheerleaders for other sports (among males, potential desirability seemed to be much harder to predict: there were several young men who were generally regarded as highly desirable among a majority of the young women, but that majority was smaller, and the similarities between those young men less easily categorizable: confidence, charm, charisma, social visibility, & the opinions of other women seemed to me to be the primary determinants).

I rarely moved in the same social circles as the football cheerleaders - maintaining that level of popularity required a sacrifice of authenticity & a level of commitment to the opinions of others that I simply did not find worthwhile, and as some of my friends moved into those circles, I found the changes that often occurred in their values to be distasteful: arrogance, disdain for the experiences of others, grandiosity, and entitlement seemed to be common changes in personality in response to increased levels of popularity among the men, while women tended to become more focused upon their appearance (while paradoxically becoming more insecure about it), as well as more willing to compromise or change themselves to win the approval of others, and to feel more "trapped" in maintaining their perceived role rather than developing their own identity. I knew many of the most popular women in my grade, and truth be told, I often received the impression that their popularity was more of a burden than a blessing. They felt obligated to uphold certain standards of beauty & behavior, and were subtly punished if they did not. I found this to be a uniquely feminine prison - the popular young men never complained of chafing under any similar expectations. They seemed free to behave quite atrociously, in fact - the most disgusting & depraved behavior I had ever heard of were the hazing rituals & locker room shenanigans in varsity football, hockey, baseball, & basketball, and the parties thrown by the most popular of these men inevitably involved the most criminal activities & illegal conduct I had ever heard of, by far.

I had no desire to pursue or maintain friendships with any of the popular males - it was obvious to me that they invested more of their time in being perceived as a good person rather than actually being a good person. Behind the scenes, very few of them actually possessed the good moral character that others believed they had, and to maintain popularity as a male, one had to conform to the prevailing social attitudes, which in rural America, often included substantial elements of toxic masculinity, sexism, & racism. The friendships I had with the popular females, however, were quite unique, existing almost entirely separate from the entire social network of high school. I like to think they were more authentic around me, that they recognized me as someone they could be themselves around, without needing to maintain a charade.

That vulnerability is also scary, however, and potentially dangerous if the individual proves unworthy of their trust. As their experiences of betrayal & boundary violations multiplied, I found those young women (understandably) became less likely to show their true selves, even around someone who had always honored their trust. Two of the women who became varsity football cheerleaders in high school, I had been friends with in elementary school: both were beautiful, brilliant, & talented, but both endured some truly terrible experiences in their early years of high school that caused them substantial trauma, trauma that they never deserved nor anyone in their shoes could have somehow predicted, avoided, or remained unchanged by experiencing. Through no fault of their own, their willingness to shine was diminished, and no one else seemed to notice or care about providing them with the resources & support to regain their full potential. Some part of me, however, could sense that loss, and was deeply saddened by it.

After experiencing an intimate betrayal myself, and being further traumatized by the very mental health services which were supposedly in place to help students, I reacted by insulating myself against likely rejection by elevating the status of certain women in my mind, seeing them as "out of my league" - though I hesitate to imply that I "set my sights lower." Social stratification is as ridiculous as it is inevitable - people are incomparable to one another, and there was nothing "less" about any of the other women in the school. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I focused more upon women with whom I felt I had a chance to be with, and who were less concerned with popularity (some of them were still quite popular & had extensive social networks, but this popularity was different than the double-edged popularity required to exist at the highest levels).

Some of these women were wrestling cheerleaders, including the one woman with whom I had been infatuated since kindergarten, who had only grown more beautiful - and emotionally unavailable - over time. As my efforts to initiate a romantic relationship with every woman who caught my eye were repeatedly met with disappointment & rejection, I became discouraged & despondent, ruminating endlessly upon the idea of "what might have been," and the experiences I never had. After graduating high school, these experiences became forever out of reach for me - for I found the thought of being one of those creepy college guys, pursuing young women in high school, to be abhorrent beyond words.

The fact that my wife had been a high school varsity cheerleader was significant to me: it washed away every doubt & insecurity that I had about "not being good enough" to form a romantic relationship with the women I had known in high school. In my mind, she checked every box, having been a Catholic school girl, a gymnast, a varsity football cheerleader, a musician, a singer, and highly desired by her peers (as well as those creepy college guys), and the fact that she had chosen me to be her life partner was meaningful beyond words. It was almost a form of redemption for me... which made her decision to wear this outfit for the first time around strangers, while heavily intoxicated, particularly hurtful.

During our divorce, she became convinced I was allowing some other woman to wear it, despite having absolutely no evidence to support her belief, and despite my adamant insistence that I could never do such a thing and that I did not have any ongoing or potential romantic or sexual relationships nor any desire to have one with anyone other than her. I left to go to work one day, and came home to find that she had destroyed the outfit. When I realized what she had done, I literally broke down and cried like a baby in front of her... symbolically, to me, its destruction marked the death of my dream, the permanent loss of the love that I had once believed to be destined in the stars, and the devastating proof that I was not good enough, after all.

So yes. To dismiss it as nothing more than a sexual fetish would be a disservice to the truth, indeed.

I ask myself over and over again, why did I not leave? Was it really as straightforward as keeping the promise that I had made, to never give up?

Part of the reason was undoubtedly due to my child-like belief in the specialness of our love: I honestly believed she was the answer to my prayers, to the wish I had made upon a shooting star when I was fifteen years old. In many ways, she was everything I had ever wanted, and having only been with one woman before her, I had very little knowledge of anything different. I knew nothing about relationships where my partner responded with honest & straightforward answers to direct questions, where the goal of communication was mutual understanding instead of obtaining power & leverage, where my feelings were considered & respected. What I did know, quite keenly, was the difficulty I had in dating, and how much I loathed being alone.

Alone and isolated in Dallas, I could not even imagine what the first step towards separation would be. Could I kick her out? Where would she go? If she came back, could I legally keep her out of the house when she was listed on the deed? I loved her still, and could not stand the thought of her being separated from our family, taken advantage of, or assaulted. I did not want her to suffer at the hands of an indifferent & apathetic system that reduced the complexities of every situation down to a binary categorization of either perpetrator or victim, for I did not see her nor myself as either one. Forced into such absolutism, I had no doubt she would never willingly identify herself as an abuser or an alcoholic, and doubtlessly would have gone to a shelter for abused women, which most likely would have placed me at suspicion for abuse - and I have learned first-hand just how little evidence is needed for a man’s reputation & career to be ruined in such a manner.

Could I leave? I would rather die than abandon my sons, and where could we go? To a domestic violence shelter that refused to even acknowledge the existence of female abusers & male victims of domestic abuse, staffed by women who have seen firsthand the horrific physical signs of male violence against women & hold little sympathy for a man complaining of his wife "hurting his feelings"? At the time, there were no such shelters for abused men in Dallas - searching for "shelters for men" returned only results for homeless shelters, certainly no place for two young boys and a toddler.

I could not force my wife into treatment, nor did I believe it would be effective, after she had already gone through several months of state-mandated supervision & intervention with no noticeable change in her attitudes towards drinking. For women & children being abused by a drunken lout of a man, there were resources & support, but for a man in my shoes, it is not an exaggeration to say there was nothing - my situation was not even recognized as a possibility.

With the lack of societal consideration for male domestic abuse victims, I think it is easy to see another reason why I tolerated & endured the situation as best I could: I honestly did not recognize it as abuse. I had never considered the possibility that I could be a victim of her abuse, or that I might find myself in an abusive relationship. No one had ever suggested to me that men could be the victims of abuse, too, or that abuse did not always involve the use of physical violence or threats, but could take the form of coercive control through psychological violence, such as emotional terrorism (holding one's partner hostage with threats of infidelity, false accusations, slander, or self-harm, or otherwise causing them to suffer emotionally, financially, or professionally); repeated boundary violations & jealous or controlling behavior (refusing to let them have friends or getting upset or punishing them whenever they engage in activities that do not involve the abuser, constantly texting or checking up on them, or never allowing them to relax, get restful sleep, or have time to themselves); gaslighting (constantly invalidating their emotions or denying their experiences, basically causing them to question & doubt their perception of reality & their own memories, thoughts, & feelings); and stonewalling (which does not always involve silence - it can also happen when someone talks too much; by talking over everything the other person tries to say, constantly changing the subject, making rapid-fire accusations, or otherwise controlling the conversation in a manner that does not allow them to be heard or express themselves). Almost all of these were things that began happening constantly to me in my marriage.

I was inexperienced with relationships, having only had one serious relationship (which lasted a mere ten months) before meeting my wife. Before she moved out and I was finally able to have time to myself to reflect & research without her looking over my shoulder, I had never heard of concepts such as gaslighting, triangulation, boundaries, or narcissistic supply. I made excuses for her behavior, and attributed her cruel words to the alcohol, to the abuse she suffered in her childhood, or to her problems managing her anger. For the most part, she presented reasonable-sounding excuses for her behavior, and I wanted to believe them - what choice did I have, really? It was only me and her and our sons (whom I always did my best to shelter from our fights, even though she would often try to drag them into them & distort the truth to turn their feelings against me - which ultimately worked against her, as by the time she moved out, she had destroyed her credibility with them too much for them to fall for her manipulation). There was no one around to witness her distortions, to validate my experience, or to tell me that my memory was accurate and that I was actually being deceived, manipulated, & brainwashed into accepting a false reality.

When she made poor choices, she was able to evade accountability by acting like a victim or claiming she was reacting to my "abuse" (which was really just me attempting to defend myself against the psychological harm she was causing me with her verbal abuse, psychological torture, & boundary violations). She was never questioned or asked to provide evidence to verify her claims - the "Believe the Woman" mentality is firmly cemented in our society, as is the (false) claim that false allegations never happen, or happen so rarely that questioning the veracity of any claims of abuse is unnecessary & rude (the rudeness of denying the presumption of innocence to the accused, however, is apparently acceptable). The irony is, by adopting this belief, we create the perfect environment for false accusations to thrive, and encourage women to engage in malicious & deceitful conduct. When the principles of justice & equality are compromised, we allow liars, cheaters, & abusers to evade punishment & instead receive kindness, compassion, & support, while the real victims are punished for crimes they did not commit as innocent children suffer.

By deferring to victims & demonizing abusers, we inadvertently end up condemning victims & condoning abuse.

We recognize the loss of a potential future when a life is lost due to violence, yet we refuse to acknowledge the potential lost when a man loses the future he could have had after his children, his job, or his self-confidence are taken from him by lies, slander, & false accusations. The emotional trauma inflicted upon men by women is no less worthy of recognition, compassion, & justice than the physical trauma inflicted upon women by men - both are capable of destroying lives, ruining futures, and depriving children of a loving & kind parent.

Without hope of outside support or intervention, I devoted myself to forgiving and forgetting her bad behavior, believing it was a sign of my love & my loyalty, never considering how those qualities might be taken advantage of by someone with no sense of empathy or conscience. You might consider me naïve, but for over ten years I had carried the belief that our love was special, that she was my soulmate - and those first ten years together had been some of the happiest years of my life, with very few fights or red flags to be seen. At first, it was very easy to believe that our marriage was going through a phase that would eventually improve if I just hung on long enough & kept loving her, and later, after investing so much time & effort into it, I did not want to accept that all the effort I had invested had been in vain. I did not want to believe it was possible for anyone to be so deceitful, so malicious, & so cruel, least of all to someone who loved & adored her, who had written songs about her, given her everything she had asked for, treated her with kindness & respect, complimented her intelligence & talents, encouraged her endlessly, supported her through her affairs & addictions, brought her to beautiful places all around the world, cooked thousands of meals for her, cared for her when she was sick, taken her to beautiful resorts & luxurious restaurants, raised three sons alongside her, shown her endless compassion & forgiveness, and sacrificed his pride & values to grant her the privileges I had. Anyone who has never experienced the shameless selfishness of a covert narcissist would never believe anyone could seem so gentle & charming yet behave so callously & cruelly.

As with most abusers, she knew to make sure there were still just enough good times & reminders of the past to keep me believing it would be possible to be happy again - and, once, things had been more perfect than I could ever have dreamed possible. I had literally wished upon a star, praying to God for a love like this, and when it seemed like that wish had come true, I swore I would honor it by always being honest, faithful, & loyal to her. When things started to get better, that would validate my beliefs that we could be happy together again if we only made the right choices. When things got worse, rather than accept that those bad choices were just as consciously made as the good ones, I devoted myself to forgiving her and working with her to understand & change the issue. I never allowed myself to consider that there might be some issues which she would not acknowledge or address, or that her goals & priorities might be different than mine.

Furthermore, she never gave me clear signs that it was over - she always insisted that she loved me, that I was special to her, that I was the best lover she ever had, and that there was no one else like me, even after the divorce. It took the indescribable pain of witnessing her say the same things to other men before I was able to recognize that she would say anything to get what she wanted, and do whatever it took to convince me she meant it, only to forget all about everything she said when her mood shifted. As a being of pure ego, whatever her emotions told her was her reality & her truth, and - having learned to adopt a false persona from a very young age - she was an exceptionally skilled actress, capable of imitating any emotion convincingly at the drop of a hat. This also made it very difficult to believe my own perceptions - as she easily convinced others of her version of events, their skepticism only reinforced my own self-doubt. It did not help that I have always been quick to assume responsibility for my choices and look at my own actions before blaming the situation on others.

Many people assume, when there are problems in a relationship, that both people are to blame. This is not the case in an abusive relationship. In an abusive relationship, the problems are caused by one person feeling entitled to do & say things, fully aware that their partner will suffer because of them, and refusing to accept responsibility for doing & saying them under any conditions. To justify their behavior - primarily to themselves, but also to others, since external validation is the only way to maintain one’s beliefs when one cannot confirm one’s version of events internally, against the quiet voice of one’s conscience - they will adopt a disordered view of reality, lying or selectively disclosing only the facts which present them as the hero (or heroine) or the victim... never the villain. I've spent years trying to understand whether this happens consciously or not, and I've come to believe that, while it is intentional in some cases, in others it's not so much of an intentional choice as it is a survival instinct - when someone grows up being abused & neglected by their caregivers, being wrong literally feels like death, because for a defenseless child growing up in a toxic & violent environment, being wrong can indeed be a death sentence.

Many people who have been abused make the decision to never inflict similar pain & suffering upon others, but those who inflict pain & suffering upon others have almost invariably been abused themselves. I think at certain points in life, there are important decisions each of us makes... when we choose love, connection, trust, honesty, hope, and faith, we raise our frequency, and our inner light shines a little brighter. But each time we choose fear, anger, doubt, denial, helplessness, or despair, we lose something very important, and what's worse, we lose the ability to recognize what we lost. And each time we make a choice, that choice becomes easier to make next time. Over time, the choices we have made become engraved in us, and actual opportunities to make different choices happen less frequently, until finally, we live out the life we have chosen because we essentially cannot believe it is possible for us to live any other way. At that point, how we will react to any situation is already predictable, programmed into us through the repetition of our own volition. To act in any other way would seem so foreign to us, the cognitive dissonance created by our departure from our normal modes of thinking & feeling so uncomfortable, that we can only choose differently when our ego has been momentarily incapacitated, stunned into confusion & indecision by a traumatic & deeply painful event, or by the revelation of a truth that is so far outside of our experience & understanding that it shatters our perceptual filters and rips off the colored glass lenses that shade our carefully-constructed reality.

I can recall certain key moments when I believe she had a choice to depart from her programming. I believe each one of those moments, she was confronted with the option to choose differently, and each time, she did not take it. Though her words were enough to persuade me at the time, the truth was in her actions, and her actions never changed. Had I been less innocent & idealistic, I might have realized that she had been making the same choices for decades, and had never chosen differently. No matter what I did or what anyone else might have done, there was simply no way to overcome the inertia of her choices when she kept making them.

When the problems began, they started at the same time that I was forced to choose between either assuming directorship of the clinic on short notice or letting it fail, which was a very stressful & difficult time, and I attributed the problems at home to the large amounts of time I had spent away from it (in hindsight, I know the problems would have developed inevitably at some point, that they were not caused by external circumstances but by the incompatibility of the internal beliefs we each held, but my point is that the timing gave me reason to believe otherwise). When the clinic closed, I was able to spend more time at home, but I was extremely saddened by its loss and the loss of my research project, as well as the sudden illness of my mother, and struggled with constant feelings of grief, anger, despair, & shame. My wife was the only one around me who could have recognized the pain I was in. Had she been more empathetic, she could have encouraged me to see a therapist, or been more supportive of my struggle, but she was only ever focused upon her own emotions & experiences - I was only relevant to her as a source of admiration & attention.

If I did not sweep my feelings under the rug, I did not receive any kindness or attention from her, and at that time, my wife and my sons were the only people that were a regular physical presence in my life. I could not use my children for support, so she was my only option. I had come to rely upon her, and could not imagine doing my job or raising our sons without her, nor sacrificing any of my time with them, let alone 50% or more. My social network & connections had been diminished by my focus upon my studies, my work, my clinic, my research, & my family - not to mention her jealousy & her overt sexuality. My closest friends I had at the time had moved away or started new businesses & families of their own, and there were no opportunities for me to form new friendships; I could not even speak with someone privately without my wife present, as it would trigger her jealousy & rage. She insisted that any new friendships we formed with others should be with both of us, and when I honored that commitment, she would sabotage any new friendships I attempted to form. Meanwhile, she continued to establish relationships herself which did not involve me. I was loathe to be honest with anyone about just how badly I was being treated, as I did not want to be seen as weak, or unmanly, or pathetic, and I had no experience with being so emotionally vulnerable with another man, or with any woman other than her. I had grown accustomed to projecting an image of success, confidence, competence, & happiness over the years, and so I chose to endure the pain alone rather than confess that the love I had described as my dream come true had slowly & inexplicably metamorphized into a nightmare.

The disrespect & abuse happened infrequently at first and was minor, gradually & slowly increasing in frequency & severity as I struggled to find the right solution, not realizing my mistake was in believing there was one. So, in a sense, yes, it did boil down to keeping the promise I had made: no matter what, I had to believe we could work things out, because I had promised never to give up. There was only one way to escape, to numb the pain I was in: denial.

We think of denial as a bad thing, when it is actually part of our "emotional immune system," allowing us to continue to function in the midst of truly terrible circumstances, breaking the elephantine enormity of our situation into smaller pieces which we can slowly digest, bite by bite, without falling apart - giving us time to absorb the facts & process them while also maintaining the ability to survive. Trying to force a person to accept more than they are psychologically capable of is an exercise in futility; forcing someone to absorb truths which they are not ready to accept will only trigger stronger & stronger psychological defense mechanisms until they have either driven you away, silenced you, or firmly convinced themselves of your lack of credibility. So it is hopefully understandable in this context why, when anything arose that should have caused me to re-evaluate my faith in the integrity of my marriage, I reacted by either removing it from my life (for example, by quitting a men's coaching program I was in after my coach wisely & correctly told me that I needed to get a divorce in order to protect myself & to continue growing as a person), falling back upon blind faith & toxic optimism (as I did with her drinking & flirting with other men, telling myself that if I just hung in there, someday she would stop - despite her total lack of ever showing any interest in accepting responsibility for her choices, admitting they were a problem, or expressing any interest in changing), getting angry (when my father told me I should think about getting a divorce, I called him an asshole for the first time in my life), or (when it was the quiet, internal voice of my own soul that was the one telling me that this was not right) getting drunk.

When a man bears a burden that he feels he must bear alone, turning to drugs and/or alcohol is a common way to numb the pain. Men are often told they have no basis for any complaint, denied opportunities to be vulnerable, conditioned not to express their emotions, and mocked for showing any sign of weakness (similar to the issue of the "salary gap" that refers to women being paid less than men, this has been described as "the empathy gap," highlighting the reduced perceived value society assigns to a man's emotions compared to a woman's, and the diminished level of compassion society has for men who are suffering versus women - and when a society embraces capitalist & individualistic values as fully as the United States has, empathy & compassion for the suffering of anyone outside our immediate circle tends to be in short supply).

When a woman commits heinous or despicable acts, she is typically portrayed as an outlier: emotionally unstable, mentally unwell, and/or a victim of abuse & trauma. When a man commits a similar crime, his emotional state as well as any abuse or trauma he may have suffered is considered irrelevant, and he is held up as an example of why all men have the potential to be violent & dangerous, and why all women need to be afraid. The blame for crimes committed more frequently by women is not assigned to the entire gender, while blaming all men for the actions of a minority of them is commonplace. Young boys hear about "toxic masculinity" and are told that men are creepy, gross, & dangerous. Many feel as if they are supposed to be embarrassed & ashamed of their own gender (I know I did). They are conditioned not to cry, not to show pain or sadness or vulnerability, not to express their feelings, and not to show weakness. When they get older, they are told they need to open up - but they must be certain not to make any mistakes in who they choose to be vulnerable with, or they could find themselves exploited, penniless, heartbroken, ridiculed, jailed, unemployed, or all of the above. Society will extend support & compassion to women & children, but a man can lose everything because of one mistake, and no one will care. There are programs to help women who have been abused by men, but there are no programs to help men who have been manipulated, betrayed, or emotionally & financially abused by women. They are told they need to learn emotional maturity, but must do it on their own since no one will teach them. When they do share their emotions, they are often dismissed, marginalized, mocked, or ignored, leaving many to feel they have no choice but to silently endure the emotional scars of their past traumas, conceal their fears & insecurities, repress their pain, & present themselves as strong, confident, & in control, no matter what. Over time, this leads to powerful feelings of resentment, depression, or both.

Men are either heroes or villains - they are not allowed to be victims.

In my opinion, this is one of the main reasons why men exhibit signs of drug and/or alcohol dependency twice as often as women, why male violence is such as issue, and why the rate of suicide in men is universally higher than it is in women across all ages, cultures, & socioeconomic levels. They are told their voices do not matter, their suffering is insignificant, that any success they achieve is only due to their "privilege," and - worst of all - that they are “lucky” to be in this situation, to be a white man - so, if they stumble or fail, they are shown no compassion. They are blamed for many of the world's major problems - racism, violence, oppression, and injustice - and held responsible for the immoral actions of their entire gender, for all the pain women have experienced at the hands of men. Furthermore, it is exceedingly rare for a man to receive praise, compliments, or words of appreciation. They are expected to work, to provide for others, to be selfless and not complain. If they are not useful or productive, they have no value & are not considered "real men."

When they succeed, it is seen as a consequence of their "privilege," and not their own hard work & talent, and should they fail or dare to ask for help, it will be seen as a irrefutable sign of their weakness & incompetence. They are not allowed to be victims, and their experiences are often invalidated by people using illogical, dismissive, & overtly sexist responses. Misogyny is abhorrent, but misandry is trendy. Men need to be respectful of women's feelings & to help them to feel safe, but women are allowed to insult & assault a man in public without anyone batting an eye, and to ruin a man's life with false allegations with little chance of being held accountable. Because a small group of men are violent, we see all men as potentially violent, even if they have never actually been violent. All women have the potential to abuse & murder their own children, and statistically are more likely to do so than men, yet we do not warn against leaving a mother alone with her children.

Despite their supposed power in society, the truth is that men in pain are not allowed to have agency over their own narrative, and if they ever act in an un-heroic or less-than-perfect manner, they are immediately assumed to have the worst possible intentions. Men are more likely than women to receive jail time & to be jailed for longer periods of time for committing the same crime, and a man who has been abused, forced to have sex against his will, harassed, or stalked by a woman is more likely to be ignored, mocked, or accused of being the perpetrator than to receive help or support… as I would soon discover for myself.

When we stuff down our emotions, there are often surprising consequences, which we often will not even associate with their actual cause. In my case, it was insomnia. After sacrificing exclusivity to avoid further infidelity, lying down in bed for hours in the dark became unbearable, and the only thing that made it easier for me to sleep was alcohol. On the nights I did not drink, no matter how tired I was, I would inevitably lie in bed for at least an hour, sometimes two or three, reading, playing games on my phone, or just lying there, thinking of ways to avoid thinking, relentlessly denying that I was in denial. If I focused entirely on her needs, on doing whatever it took to keep her happy, for a while, I started to feel safe again, and it would get better… but inevitably my focus would shift away from her, and something would happen to remind me that I was living a lie. I would catch her sending flirtations messages or sexy photos to someone behind my back, sometimes with men she had never even mentioned to me before. Each time, I would tell her how much this hurt my feelings, and remind her of our agreement. In the beginning, she would make a show of contrition, but as time went on, it became more common for her to react by going on the offensive and finding some reason to get angry with me, which was a surefire way to trigger my anger: "I catch you doing something bad, I respond with patience & love, and then you react by yelling at me?!? Oh, hell no..."

I am ashamed to admit it, but there were a few times when my anger got the better of me, and upon catching her engaging in phone sex or sending nude photos with another man behind my back and experiencing this reaction from her, I broke her phone. I always ended up buying her a new one the next day and paying the deductible out of my own pocket, so I was only ever really punishing myself, but she would use these incidents as an excuse to deflect the conversation away from her cheating to my anger - focusing upon my reaction to her behavior rather than her behavior was a common technique she used in our discussions that always infuriated me. This happened twice in Dallas, once in Dallas with an Apple MacBook, and once in Minnesota on July 10th, 2018.

She claimed that breaking her property was abusive behavior, but I do not agree - certainly it can be, but whether or not it truly is depends upon the context. I never did these things to hurt, punish, or frighten her, or to prevent her from contacting other people. Rather, I did them out of an instinctive desire to protect myself, in response to the violation of a well-established boundary. We had an agreement, which she willfully violated, and an agreement that is not enforced by consequences for its violation is toothless. I had given her a gift, and she had used that gift to hurt me deeply. In my grief and my pain, my primitive lizard brain took over, and the instinct was to eliminate the source of the pain. Once I had calmed down, I acknowledged what I had done, admitted it was wrong, and took action to make amends by replacing her property, apologizing, and making a sincere effort to change my behavior. The problem was that her behavior that inspired that reaction in me did not change, and I continued trying to get her to change her behavior rather than end the relationship... I had sworn to her and to God that I would not give up on our marriage, no matter what, and I was determined to keep my promises, no matter the cost. In times of great emotional stress, we cling even more rigidly to our idealized beliefs, desperate for something upon which to rely. I never realized until it was too late how a person’s good qualities - such as kindness, loyalty, forgiveness, honesty, a willingness to accept one’s share of the responsibility for any given situation, & optimism - could become liabilities when exploited by a disordered & remorseless individual. Indeed, I later discovered that forgiving a narcissist is not interpreted by them as a kindness, but as a sign that what they did was not that bad.

Even if I accepted responsibility, acknowledged what I did was wrong, apologized, and did my best to make amends, when I attempted to return to discussing the actions of hers that I had a problem with, she still would not accept any accountability or show any compassion for how she had hurt me. And when someone does not accept responsibility for committing an offense nor even perceive it as wrong, it guarantees it will happen again. And again. And again.

If I tried to discuss things with her, she would either punish me by withdrawing her affections and giving me the silent treatment, or say whatever I wanted to hear just to get me to drop the subject and move on. Another favorite tactic of hers was to simply seduce me and use sex as a way of sweeping things under the rug; if I did not go along with this, she would fly into a rage & accuse me of loving pornography more than my wife. She often used shame as a weapon, bringing up pornography due to the social shame & judgment surrounding it and accusing me of being addicted to pornography regardless of the truth. Meanwhile, the pornography she most enjoyed was so extreme that it was actually illegal! She had no qualms about engaging in behaviors for which she would later condemn me. When anger was not effective, she would dissolve into crocodile tears, bringing up her past traumas & counting on my empathy & compassion to get me to excuse her behavior.

There was no way to have a productive, meaningful conversation. There was no possibility of resolving any issues, no hope of changing things for the better, and no progress or growth that could happen. I was constantly dealing with her drama, and changing my life around to accommodate her wants & her feelings, while my own were never acknowledged or validated. Nearly every moment of the day, I was working, studying, or helping around the house - doing something that would benefit us and our family - yet my efforts were minimalized and portrayed as things I did for me, while she spent most of her time drunk, dancing & listening to music, or lounging by the pool. The few household tasks she accomplished would be exaggerated & brought up constantly as evidence of how hard she worked & how much she deserved to have a drink (or several) whenever she wanted. If I tried to turn down her music at 2 a.m., or tried to stop her from having that fifth drink on a Tuesday night, then I was controlling, repressing her spirit, stifling her soul, and being selfish... and to maintain her beliefs, she was willing to sacrifice things that I was not, such as honesty, morality, our family's finances, & our sons' futures.

Her hypocrisy & projected guilt was limitless, and the repeated transgressions wore away at my patience, especially when I was lonely & dying for her affection. If I asked for time alone, I was never given it, and inevitably accused of texting other women, even though I had no desire to pursue anything with any other woman nor ever attempted to do so, and made no effort to hide anything from her. If she told me she needed space, I would give it to her, even when it hurt me - though it was more common for her to pull away but not tell me why, to keep me focused upon her but also allow her to portray me as clingy or unreasonable, when the truth was she could have resolved the tension by direct communication. Discovering she was giving the affection & kindness I longed for to another man behind my back, however, would send my emotions into a tailspin. I would be alternatively yelling, crying, & asking her why she chose to violate our agreement when I had shown her again & again that it was safe for her to be honest with me, and she never had a good answer.

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