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Author's Chapter Notes:

Justin's almost to his breaking point but it's still hard to escape your abuser . . . TAG


Chapter 21 - Eye Opening.



Did you know people can be trained to respond to their handlers just like lab rats?


It’s true. There’s this experiment that scientists do where they condition lab rats to continue working to get rewards long after the researchers have stopped giving them any. If it’s done correctly, the rats will literally continue trying to get rewards until they die. And the scary thing is that it works on people just as easily.


See, if you give the rats a reward every time they do whatever it is you want them to do - say, pressing a lever in their cage - the rats quickly learn to press the bar and get their treat. If you stop the rewards, they stop pressing the bar. If you only give them a treat for every 10th press, they learn to do only 10 presses and, if you then stop rewarding them after the 10th press, they’ll only try it one more time - one more set of 10 - but if there’s no reward, they stop pressing. However, rats who are tricked by the researchers such that they are given rewards on a random, intermittent schedule, so that they can never predict WHEN they’ll get that reward, will just keep on pressing that damned bar till their little rat paws fall off.


Same with humans.


In the beginning, someone in an abusive relationship with a narcissist is getting constantly rewarded. The abuser is lavishing you with praise and romance and you’re eating it up. You keep going back because you want that love reward. Once the narcissist feels they have secured you, they stop the continuous rewards and only reward you for positive behavior. When you do what they want, you are rewarded again, and you crave that reward that you used to get so frequently, enough that you’ll go along with their demands just so you can feel the love again. After the Devaluation Phase starts, though, you are only getting intermittent rewards and there’s no way to predict when you’ll be rewarded or when you’ll be punished. So, like the lab rats, you keep pressing that bar, over and over, hoping that this time you’ll get their love again. Once you give in like that, the narcissist knows they have total control over you and you’re trapped. 


The official, psychobabble name for this is Narcissistic Trauma Bonding. 


See, we humans are wired to emotionally bond with the people around us. We need to be loved. And it’s a natural instinct, when threatened or in a dangerous situation, to reach out to those we’ve bonded with. But when we’ve emotionally bonded to the person who is the source of the danger, that bond works against us. 


And we end up like those lab rats, unable to stop going back for our hit of love, even after the love is no longer being supplied.



It was almost three AM before I made it home to the apartment in Pittsburgh and I was a total mess. On top of being sick, only getting three hours of sleep the night before, and a long busy day with lots of driving, I had just received what appeared to be incontrovertible proof that my boyfriend was cheating on me. It’s a miracle I hadn’t had an accident on the drive home since I’d been crying so hard at times I could barely see the road. 


I spent the first hour after I got home pacing around in the apartment and arguing with Ethan in my head. I was so angry I literally couldn’t think straight. I felt so betrayed. So used. So horrified that, even after we’d made the commitment to start fucking raw, he would cheat on me. But somehow, in the middle of my ranting, my denunciations of Ethan morphed into self recrimination. 


How could I have let this happen? I should have known better. I DID know better. I should have been smarter than that. I shouldn’t have been so trusting. So naïve. Why did I always set myself up to be hurt like this? Did I somehow invite this? Did I do something to drive him away? Why did it seem impossible for me to find someone who truly loved me? What was wrong with ME? 


In the depths of my misery and depression, it seemed like *I* was somehow at fault.


Sometime around dawn, I determined that I would leave. I wasn’t sure where I would go, but I knew I could no longer stay there with Ethan. I wouldn’t stay with someone who didn’t love me anymore. Someone who didn’t respect me enough, and didn’t respect our commitment enough, to be true. It didn’t matter who was at fault I just couldn’t stay. I was done.


I started pulling my shit out of drawers and cupboards and packing up to leave. Luckily, a lot of my stuff was still in the boxes piled up in the back of the closet, so I pulled those out and began adding to them. When those boxes were full, I moved on to gathering all my books, artwork and paperwork. In the process, I came across that pile of unopened mail and commenced sorting through that to find any that were addressed to me. 


I’m not sure what prompted me to start opening the envelopes addressed to Ethan as well. Curiosity, suspicion, sheer vindictiveness? Ethan had always been adamant that I not touch any of his mail, going so far as to scream at me the one time I accidentally opened something of his. But since I was leaving anyway, who cared. I defiantly tore into one right after another. 


What I found was eye opening. I found bills. Utility bills, student loan bills, and even credit card bills. Only, the bills I was looking at didn’t match what Ethan had told me we were paying. For the most part, the utility bills were substantially lower than what I’d been estimating for our budget. The other ones were completely unknown to me. I hadn’t even known that Ethan HAD any credit cards, but according to these statements, he had over $15,000 of available credit on hand. 


Then I opened one of Ethan’s bank statements. That literally floored me. With the crumpled papers still in my hands I dropped to my knees in astonishment. Money. Lots of money. That’s what I was looking at. Just tons of fucking money. All of which he’d been hiding from me. There were at least two checking accounts, a savings account with just shy of $10,000 in it and a CD account with over $50,000 in it. In just that one bank. Oh, and one of those two checking accounts was a business account in the name of the apartment building, indicating that E. Gold Enterprises, LLC owned the building. What the fuck?


All that time I’d been slaving away at a back-breaking, minimum wage job to support us - the money from which was going into HIS bank account, as evidenced by the statement I was holding in my hand - thinking that we were too broke for me to afford lunch, he was sitting on all this money? 


It was too much. My brain just couldn’t grasp that amount of mendacity. By that point I’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours and I was a physical and emotional mess. I think my brain just sorta short-circuited. I burst into tears, collapsed into a heap on the carpet, and within minutes I was sound asleep. 


Which was where Ethan found me when he returned home a few hours later. 


“What the fuck is going on in here? It looks like a tornado struck,” were the words that woke me from my exhausted slumber.


I struggled to get up from where I’d fallen asleep on the floor. My muscles were stiff and I was cold. One of my eyes was crusted shut with gunk from my cold and allergies. I could hardly breathe, I was so stopped up. Add to that the tear-stained face, rumpled clothes I had been wearing since the morning before, and my hair standing up on end from where the cat had licked at it, and I probably looked like death warmed over. But I was instantly awake, my heart hammering in my chest and adrenaline coursing through my veins.


“Justin? Are you okay, Babe?” Ethan asked, sounding a little leery.


“No, Ethan. No. I’m not okay,” I answered, standing directly in front of him so I could look at him, eye to eye, while I confronted the liar. “What the hell is all this?”


I held up the bank statement which I’d fallen asleep still clutching. I watched as his eyes got wider and the color in his cheeks drained. I held my breath. I waited. 


And then he erupted.


“What the fuck are you doing going through MY personal mail!” he snarled, grabbing the bank statement out of my hand and starting to tear it up into millions of tiny pieces right in front of my eyes. “You have NO right going through my shit, Justin. I’ve told you before that you needed to stay out of my stuff. Are you deaf or just too stupid to listen?” 


He continued to tear up that statement, over and over again, shredding each piece until it was smaller than the average spec of confetti. And all the while, he was yelling at ME. Accusing me of spying on him. Violating his privacy. 


His reaction was so completely over the top that, when he was done making mince meal out of that bank statement, and went to throw it in my face, I thought for half a second he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Not with his fists, at least. Instead he flayed me with his angry words.


By the time I had gathered my wits enough to say something, all my evidence was gone.


Still, I spoke up. “Why have you been hiding all that money from me, Ethan?” I pointed to the paper shreds on the carpet. “All this time, you made me think we were broke. You wouldn’t give me money for lunch some days because you said there wasn’t enough. You didn’t pay the bills. You said we couldn’t afford to pick up my prescriptions. But all that time you had more than enough money in those accounts. Why, Ethan? Why?”


“What are you talking about, Justin?”


“The money.” I pointed to the floor again. “All that money!”


“What money?” Ethan sneered at me. “You’re fucking delusional, Justin. There’s no money.”


“But . . . I saw the statements. The ones you just tore up. You have all these bank accounts. I saw it . . .”


“You’re wrong,” Ethan maintained, standing there in front of me with his arms crossed, unyielding, steadfast in his denial.


“No. No, I’m not wrong. I saw it,” I insisted, but his expression never changed. “But . . .” I turned to look at the table where all the rest of the bills I’d opened were lying spread out in a jumble. “I saw it. And I saw this too.” I snatched up the credit card statement and shoved that in his face.


He took that bill and manually shredded it as well, staring me in the eye the whole time, as if daring me to stop him. 


“You didn’t see anything. You’re imagining things, Justin,” Ethan declared as he threw the remains of that paper on the floor as well. 


“But I . . . I SAW it!” 


“Justin, Babe, you’re losing it.” 


He came up to me, putting his arm around my shoulder and leading me over to the couch. I let myself be led and sat where I’d been put. I was so confused. 


“But I saw it,” I said again, this time a little less certainly.


“I don’t know what you thought you saw, Babe, but you’re wrong. You must have misread the statements or something. Do you think, if I had that much money, I’d have been playing on the streets in all sorts of weather just to make a little cash?” 


I shook my head. That really didn’t make sense now that he’d pointed it out. But I’d seen it . . . I looked back to the little piles of torn up papers on the carpet as if they’d somehow miraculously reconstitute themselves and come to my rescue. 


“Come on, Babe, be realistic. You think we’d be struggling the way we have been for the past few months if we were rolling in dough? That’s bullshit. I’ve been working my ass off, trying to make this recording contract happen, because I want to take you away from all this, Babe.” He gestured at the messy, cramped little apartment around us. “Everything I do is for us, Justin. I do it all because I love you and I want to take care of you. I want to buy you nice things and take you to exotic places. That’s why I’m working as hard as I can. Don’t you see that, Babe? That’s why I just spent the last week in fucking Harrisburg, the armpit of Pennsylvania, for fuck’s sake.”


Which brought up a whole ‘nother set of grievances, of course. “You didn’t LOOK like you minded being there. In fact, you and your newest fan looked like you were enjoying yourselves,” I accused.


“What are you babbling about now?” Ethan grumbled, trying to sound confused, although I could still hear the edge of anger in his voice. 


“I was there. I saw you.”


“You were where?”


“I was there. At your concert in Hershey. Jeff loaned me his car so I could drive out there and see your big debut,” I explained, my anger momentarily ramping up again and overtaking the depression. “I’d been trying to call you all week to tell you about the fucking phone bill and ask you to transfer some money to me but you didn’t return any of my calls.” I looked at the torn up bank statement one more time but, since it was no help, I carried on. “So I borrowed Jeff’s car. I was gonna come see your concert and tell you about the money, and then, maybe, spend the night celebrating with you in Harrisburg.”


“Well, why didn’t you?” Ethan asked, arms crossed again and his expression truculent. 


“I figured three’s a crowd,” I charged stubbornly. 


Ethan huffed am aggravated sigh and shook his head. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on with you, Justin. Are you having some kind of psychotic break or something?”


“I know what I saw, Ethan. I saw you and that kid, Mark - the same one who came up to you after the Heifetz Competition - together after the concert in Hershey. You were flirting with him and laughing and touching him . . . And then . . .” It hurt to even say the words. “When you went to leave, I saw you give him the keycard for your hotel room.”


“You’re fucking delusional, Justin,” he repeated.


“No, I’m not, Ethan. I KNOW what I saw!”


“Listen, Justin . . .”


“I KNOW WHAT I SAW,” I screamed it this time, unwilling to let him talk me out of my belief. “I saw you and Mark. You were talking together. There were dozens of other people around who saw it too. I’m not imagining things.”


With another huge sigh, Ethan sat down next to me on the couch. “I seriously don't know what’s up with you today, Babe,” he was trying to sound reasonable again. “Yes, I talked to a guy after the concert but it wasn’t the same kid from Philadelphia. It was some music student who wanted to ask my opinion on grad schools. I talked to him for, like, thirty seconds. It was completely innocent.”


I just couldn’t let it go, though. “If you were just talking about grad schools, why did you give him your room key, Ethan?”


“You know what? I see what this is,” Ethan turned on me, getting up from the couch so he could once more tower accusingly over me. “You’re being paranoid and jealous because you expect me to be just like Brian. That’s it, isn’t it? You just assume that, because Brian used to sleep with everything that had a dick, I will too. Well, I don't appreciate your lack of trust or your baseless accusations, Justin. Stop projecting all Brian’s sins on me!”


Then Ethan turned around, grabbed his bag, gathered up all the remaining mail off the table and stuffed it inside, and marched out the door, slamming it behind him. 


I was left sitting there on the couch, totally confused. Had I really just imagined all that? Was Ethan right? Was I delusional? Seeing things? Did I simply imagine everything I thought I’d seen with my own eyes? 


What the fuck was happening to me?



I sat there for a long time, just numb. I wasn’t able to think at all. Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing computed. 


Eventually, though, I got up for no other reason than my ass was starting to ache from sitting in one spot for too long. I ambled around the apartment for a few minutes, unsure what it was I was after. Whatever it was, I didn’t find it in the ten square feet of that tiny studio. With no other idea other than that I had to get out of there, I grabbed my keys and walked out.


With no destination in mind and no timeframe, I mostly just wandered. I was too wrapped up in my own head to pay attention to where my feet were taking me. I suppose it wasn’t all that surprising that they led me down a familiar path. When I finally did look up, I was standing outside Woody’s. I figured, what the hell, that was as good a place as any to kill some time, so I went in. 


I still had a few bucks in my pocket - all that was left from the remains of my meager savings account - so I bought myself a whiskey and took a seat at the far end of the bar. It was still early, and a Sunday, so the place wasn’t very crowded. It was a good place to sit and hide from the world. With nothing else to distract me, though, I was forced to contemplate what the fuck I was gonna do next. 


My argument with Ethan had left me totally confused. He had me all tied up in mental knots. I remembered seeing that bank statement. I remembered seeing him with that skanky Mark. I could see both things in my head. I didn’t think I was crazy or delusional. I didn’t think I was imagining things OR overreacting. But Ethan had denied it all and done so forcefully enough that he had me doubting my own memories. And, without the statement he’d torn up, I had no proof of anything. What would be the point of disputing something I had no way to substantiate? Besides, I was so tired and so run down, I didn’t think I had the energy to argue the point with him again.


So, what? Did I just go back to him and forget it all? Could I go back to my life and let it all sink into some memory hole where I could ignore it? The same way I’d ignored all the other arguments we’d had? Did I WANT to go back to him? 


Without Ethan I had no money and nowhere to live. Did I have any alternatives? Where would I go, what would I do, if I didn’t go back to him?


The main problem was that I didn’t have many options. 


In the short time I’d been together with Ethan, I’d pretty much lost contact with all my old friends and even, to some extent, my family. My whole life had changed. I wasn’t the same person I had been just six months before. I didn’t have the same self-confidence or even the same mental image of myself. I used to think of myself as a strong person who knew what I wanted and had a plan to get there, but now I felt completely lost. Directionless. 


Plus, I no longer had anyone to talk things over with; someone who’d check me if I was going off the deep end. Daphne was so pissed off at me she hadn’t even returned my last few phone calls. I felt too embarrassed to call my mother and ask for her help. My whole world had come to revolve around Ethan. So now, when I needed someone to talk to that wasn’t Ethan, I didn’t have anyone. 


In my depressed state, I felt like I was down to only two options; go back to Ethan or give up entirely. 



So I sat there with that conclusion pounding in my head as I stared morosely into my glass of whiskey. When I went to pick up the glass and my ring tapped against the rim, I cringed. I tapped with it a few more times, listening to the melodic clink of metal against glass. That was all I had left now, wasn’t it? I had made this commitment to Ethan. I had given up everything I had for him. I had given him my loyalty, my love, even my body. I didn’t have anything else left that was mine. I’d given it all away. And the only thing I had left, the only thing that was still mine in any way, was that symbol of his commitment to me. If I had nothing else, I still had that. 


But was it enough? 


“Buy you another?” my introspection was interrupted by the arrival of a familiar presence as Brian took a seat on the barstool next to me, holding out his pack of cigarettes in an unspoken offer to share. 


I pulled a cigarette out of the pack and let him light it for me. “Sure. Why the hell not,” I accepted his offer of a drink because I wasn’t nearly drunk enough and didn’t have the money to get there on my own. 


Brian signalled to the bartender, holding up two fingers to indicate that he should bring two more whiskeys.


“When did you start to accessorize?” Brian asked, turning his attention back to me and reaching across the bar to tap at my ring finger where that damn ring was so prominently visible. 


I shrugged. I didn’t want to share that particular memory with him. I didn’t really want to think about that night at all. I felt too guilty and disappointed in myself. The night I’d accepted Ethan’s ring was the night I’d given away that last piece of myself and now I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten anything worthwhile in return. Shit. What the fuck was I gong to do? I made a mental note to stop in at the free clinic in the morning to get tested just in case I wasn’t delusional and had really seen what I’d thought I’d seen the night before in Hershey.


“Where’s your fiance?” Brian pressed the issue.


“Somewhere else,” I answered.


“Well, luckily you have this.” He grabbed and held my hand, his thumb playing over the cool metal, and I let him. 


The touch was familiar and comforting. In the depths of my gloom it felt nice to have someone touch me, even if it was only offered in friendship. Even if Brian’s acknowledgement of that ring caused me to feel even greater guilt. 


I suppose my reaction to his teasing about the ring was a little over the top. I clearly wasn’t in control of my emotions. I’d always worn my heart on my sleeve and been easy to read. It wasn’t any surprise that Brian, who’d known me so long and so well, could tell I was just barely holding off another spate of tears.


“Hey? You okay?” he asked.


I started to get up, intending to leave. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t sit there and pretend that everything was alright. Nothing was right. Nothing was okay. But there was fuck all I could do about it.


“Thanks for the drink,” I said and slammed back the shot the second the bartender had set it down in front of me. “I’d offer to pay you back but I’m a little short right now.”


“No biggie. I offered to pay,” Brian replied, grabbing hold of my wrist and holding me back from leaving. “You don’t have to go yet. I’m good for another round.”


I smiled sadly at him and shook my head. I tried to pull my arm free, but he wasn’t letting go. I could feel his eyes on me, trying to bore into my heart. I couldn’t meet his gaze. I didn’t want to cry in front of him. But he still wasn’t going to let me leave.


“You know, if you need a little extra income, I might have a proposition for you,” he offered with a sexy waggle of his eyebrows. The suggestion, coming out of the blue like that, surprised me enough that I paused in my attempt to flee. He laughed and explained further. “A business proposition that is.” He laughed and I stopped frowning at him so hard. “Lindsey roped me into doing the promotion work for the GLC’s Annual fundraising dinner and I could use an artist to help me create a poster. The theme is Carnival. I need something hot and brilliant. The gig is yours if you want it. It would be an easy $500 for someone of your talents . . .”  


That caused my frown to return. I pulled my arm out of his grip and flexed my gimpy hand, feeling how stiff and unreactive the muscles were. I hadn’t actually even attempted to draw anything since I pulled out of the seminar class a couple weeks back. So much for my ‘talents’ . . .


“Thanks, but I think you should probably ask a real artist,” I replied.


Then I turned my back on both Brian and the remains of my old life, and surrendered myself to the only fate that was left to me.


 

Chapter End Notes:

2/24/20 - If you’ve ever asked why someone in an abusive relationship goes back to their abuser, just read this chapter to them. The victim has basically been brainwashed. It has nothing to do with how strong or smart they are. It all comes down to brain chemistry and psychological manipulation. So please don’t be too harsh on our Justin here. He isn’t thinking clearly. However, even this poor, demoralized, unhappy Justin has his limits, and I think Ethan is getting close to pushing them. (I see about 5-6 chapters left is all, if that helps those of you who are close to reaching your reading limits...) TAG

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