Starting anew

I have been mulling over the idea of leaving this blog behind me and starting up a new one. After all I am no longer, in theory, on the run. However, my story of the last few years is still a big part of who I am. Besides which I am still haunted.

I have not had a relationship since the whole ghastly mess, and it is something I would dearly love to have. If for no other reason than it might help to wash the nasty taste from my mouth of having slept with a 'Sex Offender'. It is not a nice thought is it? I thought so.

When I read about women who have lived with, sometimes been married to, this kind of offender for many years and they say they knew nothing about that side of his character, I now see it as perfectly possible. Often they are blamed, they can be hounded, spat upon, have abuse hurled at them, have their home defiled (if it wasn't already) yet they have done nothing, in fact they too are victims. They have been lied to, deceived, duped and had everything they believed to be good turned into something shameful and degrading.

To find out that someone you care about is a monster, a defiler of women, a calculated predator and who has all the time slept in your bed, can only make one feel dirty, ashamed, disgusted and also culpable.

Oh yes, afterwards all those little warning signs that you rationalised to yourself, make sense. But at the time there was always an explanation and because of that you blame yourself. You tell yourself that an intelligent woman should have known, should have recognised those signs for what they were. Well an intelligent woman is what I am and as such I must have known, somewhere deep inside of me I must have been lying to myself as much as he was lying to me.

So now I am still haunted, by my own culpability as much as at night in my dreams, of him touching me, of him kissing me and it makes me sick to my stomach. So maybe it is worth keeping this blog going. Maybe if you have had similar experiences you might be able to help me find a way through this. If you have come through it perhaps you can tell me how you did it.

I have been seeing a Cognitive Behaviour Counsellor who tells me there was no way I could have known. Of course it doesn't help that he looks like Crista Berg and so far it hasn't helped.

Which is why I would like a lovely man in my life to help me see that people can be what they appear to be. It will help me to regain my trust in men and give me something to look forward to, something to help me to see that I am not just a vulnerable woman to be taken advantage of.

I have come through living in a refuge, I have come through losing my home, I am strong and a woman worthy of loving a man.