What eighteen years looked like from the inside

This is the long version. If you've come here from the About page you already know the shape of it. What follows is the detail, and some of it is hard to read.

I found the tablets in the pantry because the box was pink.

We'd talked about having another child and I'd said no. Not a vague no. I told her I'd need to see us get better at repairing conflict first. Some time later she went to a gynaecologist, had her IUD taken out and bought prenatal tablets. I found out because the packaging caught my eye while I was looking for something else.

When I asked her about it she cried and said she thought we had an agreement.

It took me years to work out what I'd found in that cupboard. My no didn't count. Both our children had arrived without any conversation about whether we wanted a family. She fell pregnant, I went along with it. The pantry was just the first time I caught it before it happened.

I didn't know how to ask

I'm the youngest of five, with a brother and three sisters. I came to Australia in 1989 to go to high school in Brisbane.

I married there in 2001. London later that year, the Netherlands in 2002, Singapore in 2007, back to Brisbane in 2008, Singapore again in 2012. Every one of those moves followed her career.

The 2008 return was hard. I'd spent almost the whole Singapore stint on the bench at a management consulting firm and it had done real damage to my confidence. I was going back to a city I'd left eight years earlier, where I'd either lost touch with my friends or outgrown them. She was going home.

When I told her how I was feeling, she said I should be grateful I was back in Brisbane.

I didn't say anything back. The story I made up was that saying more would lead nowhere. What I felt was sadness and frustration at not being met, and underneath that, shame.

So I moved out of our bedroom and slept in the pool house. It was a few weeks, maybe longer.

I came back inside once I'd made my peace with the parts of me that wanted empathy. I decided she wasn't wired that way and stopped expecting it from her. Around then I threw myself into a leadership course and a community project, and my own needs went quiet for a long time.

I want to be fair about the moves. I was happy to support her career. What I didn't understand back then was transition itself. Every move carries loss, and the loss brings fear, worry, anxiety and uncertainty with it. I'd been relocating since 1989 and I still had no language for any of it, so I had no way of asking for what I needed. It was a blind spot for both of us. What I couldn't get past was the absence of empathy, and that she couldn't see any of it from where I was standing.

Here's what I believed marriage was when I went into it. We were on the same page and we'd make decisions together. When we argued, we'd both repair it and come out stronger.

I had no idea that manipulation, blame shifting, name calling and emotional abuse were things that happened between two people who loved each other. When they turned up I had nowhere to put them. It came as a shock, and it kept coming as a shock for years, which is part of why I stayed.

What I couldn't name

Back in Singapore from 2012, I did the eighteen month Executive Master in Change at INSEAD, then a bank role for another eighteen months. In 2017 I moved into a different job. My boss there left, and the woman who replaced her started holding meetings with me almost daily to tell me I wasn't performing at the expected level. A year earlier the same work had been fine. She had no idea what was going on at home and I wasn't telling her. My spouse was being aggressive with me.

At a dinner in Singapore, two women I trusted said something like, isn't it good that you stood up for yourself at work? Now you can practise it at home.

The role ended. My new boss wanted me gone.

After that I wasn't employed in Singapore at all. I was on a dependant's pass tied to her job, working a short contract in Melbourne and flying back and forth.

Then I overheard her tell a friend I needed to grow the fuck up, get a job and be a fucking man.

When something ruptured between us it was always my fault. She had no concept that a breakdown has contribution on both sides, and that was one of the most painful parts of the marriage.

In 2018 she lost a very big role and took the aggression out on me and on the kids. I talked to one of her friends about how frustrated and worried I was. The friend recorded the conversation and passed the whole thing back to her. She told people I didn't have her back, and I think what I said to her friend caused her shame.

I moved into the spare bedroom and found us a couples therapist. She came for a few sessions, spent most of them concerned about when I'd be returning to our bedroom, then accused me of colluding with the therapist and wouldn't come back.

The Maldives

Late in 2018 she asked for a trial separation. A mentor of mine asked what the conditions of it would be, and how either of us would know it was working. I put those questions to her. She had nothing.

She'd arranged a family trip to the Maldives months in advance. At the airport she was acting strangely. My breathing went shallow and my stomach turned tight and sick. My heart was going before we'd even boarded. I overrode all of it, which is what I'd been doing for years.

It was my birthday weekend.

I asked her whether she was still committed to our marriage. She said no. I booked a flight and left with my son within forty-eight hours of arriving.

After

I moved out into a small one bedroom apartment, having come from a four bedroom house. Mostly what I felt was shame.

That's when the mask came off.

We both engaged lawyers, which I couldn't afford, so everything I had went to legal fees. I was still on a dependant's pass, and she made sure I knew she could have it cancelled. The kids moved between her place and mine under a parenting plan she wouldn't keep to.

At one point she told me nobody would believe me, because I'm male.

We were expats in Singapore living under Australian family law, and taking any of this to the Singaporean authorities was never a real option. I stopped speaking to her and moved everything to email.

We left Singapore in January 2021. She travelled and quarantined with the kids while I did my fourteen days alone. Within days of coming out I was served with papers for proceedings in the federal family court, where allegations were made about me that weren't true. The divorce was finalised that year.

How I got off the floor

The lowest point was probably May 2019. I was in Boston on a leadership program at the Harvard Kennedy School, not sleeping, very low.

Later, in temporary accommodation, my son came to stay. I gave him my bed and slept on a mattress on the floor.

From 2019 I went looking for an explanation. I studied Dr Ramani Durvasula's work and the narcissism experts on the Jung Platform, and having a label for what I'd lived through did help for a while. I had one consultation with Dr Tara Palmatier, who told me I was in a game and what I had to do to get out of it. I read the High Conflict Institute books as well.

All of it gave me tactics for handling her. None of it changed anything in me.

My psychotherapist moved me off that language. He pointed me back to the parts of me that were getting activated, which was harder work and did a great deal more.

What moved me was self-compassion, and I got there through parts work. I was introduced to it at Aletheia Coaching, then worked with an IFS therapist of my own. I went on to do the Aletheia training, finished IFS Level 1 in 2021 and started Somatic Experiencing in 2022.

Some of what I picked up was about my family of origin and being raised with no boundaries, no rupture and repair. The rest was about other people, safe ones and unsafe ones, and how you tell a healthy relationship from a toxic one.

Then a harder question turned up. Why hadn't I left sooner? I could see she wasn't the right partner for me, and I knew when I was being baited. I stayed anyway.

A behaviour would repeat. My body would tell me something was off. I'd say nothing, I wouldn't change what I was doing, and I'd let it go. Then I'd let it go again.

There's a line usually credited to Maya Angelou, that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. I was shown many times.

What I do with it now

Men aren't taught any of this. It doesn't happen at home or at school, and it doesn't come up in the men's groups I go to, and I go to several. What we learn is how to endure and how to provide. Nobody shows us how to hold a boundary, or how to work out early that a person isn't safe.

There's a lot of public conversation about men not being safe. It's warranted. What gets much less attention is that some women aren't safe either. My former spouse was discreet, and almost all of it happened behind closed doors.

I built Reclaim to teach men what I didn't have when I got married. How to pick a partner, and how to spot manipulation while it's happening instead of five years later. If a man is already inside something that's damaging him, the work is helping him see it clearly and act on it.

I've healed. I sleep, I'm healthy and I'm happy. I'm at peace with myself and I make better decisions than I used to. The relationships in my life now are meaningful and I can trust the people in them. Toxic people aren't coming anywhere near me. My relationship with my children is improving.

I'm grateful for my former spouse. I look at her as my teacher.

I see people for who they are. We all have a light side and a dark side, and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

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