Chapter 1: Coercion Bypass

I’m going to drop these details like they make sense and if something seems like it should be elaborated on, and isn’t, it probably will be another time.

When I developed the harmful ideations, I took seven months off full-time work and limited myself to maybe 20–30 hours a month. I worked hard on my mental health. I started building healthier boundaries, enforcing them, and finally noticing the abuse I’d been dissociated from, induced by Sean’s cognitive and physical resets. About six months in, I started feeling like I could work again. I landed a great job, and the reframe it provided quickly showed me Sean was draining my life force with his petulant, demonic shenanigans.

The reason I was in those dysregulated states? Sean was threatening to blackmail me if I didn’t retract my statement to the police, about the time he hit me, restrained me, followed me, blocked me in with his car, got out, and screamed at me in the street while I was on the phone with 911… with his own six-year-old child watching from the truck.

When Sean got upset that I set a boundary after finding the penis drawing his son made, along with the child abuse Sean had witnessed in person and what his son told us that day, he refused to intervene. He said, “I’m letting his mom dig her grave.” That was it for me. I broke up with him. There had already been an entire year of watching that child’s hell while his parents’ co-parenting mimicked a knocked over port-o-potty on the last day of Burning Man and I couldn’t deal with it again.

Sean started threatening me while I was at work and I filed for an order of protection. Before it could be served, he went to my home and stole thousands of dollars worth of my belongings. Here he is, unplugging the camera before doing it.

My employers have been tremendously supportive, even after he messaged them trying to get me fired (he got their number by demanding my phone to see that “i hadn’t been cheating.) He kept insisting I was cheating on him, even after he repeatedly broke up with me, and I never did. After about three months of that, I finally made a dating profile during one of the “breakups” For context: he also pushed me to make profiles during this time, and told me which pictures I should put. Even when I did that, I chose to speak to people across the country, because I didn’t want to meet anyway. It was SO confusing. Sean would say things like he’d never tell me how he betrayed me unless I showed him something first. He even said he couldn’t believe I’d “done nothing” because he’d “done so much.”

Looking back, I’m pretty sure he was trying to program me, to get me to make profiles, dissociate me into a subservient state, make me feel guilty for “betraying” him, and then use that guilt to access my phone and contacts, so he could blackmail me. Which he did.

So, in the video below, when you hear me say, “why do you say I have to show you something,” I’m referring to that, to being told I had to prove I’d done something wrong before he’d confess to what he’d done. It was never about the confession, he wanted access to my contacts.

Curiosity killed the cat… but don’t worry, satisfaction brought it back.

Below, you can see the absolute anguish I experienced a couple weeks later when I found out how much he’d been cheating. You can see in my face and hear in my voice that I was absolutely not the same mindset as the one who questioned why he said I had to show him things, or later called him out on blackmailing me. You can see the despair and heartbreak of this age-regressed (through trance, by Sean) part of me that had been programmed to “be a good girl” and make him happy. That is the part of me that gave him the phone, trying to prove I don’t cheat.

During this time, despite not consciously knowing most of the abuse, people from the neighborhoods around mine, all connected through a church, essentially extracted me from the relationship, psychologically and spiritually. One young man seemed to spiritually sense what was happening and told a woman, who would later become a mother figure to me, that I was being treated terribly. I wasn’t fully aware of the abuse at the time and I remember wondering how he knew especially because I didn’t think it was terrible. I was still heavily dissociated, with amnesia around most of what was happening on a day-to-day basis.

Later, as I began to gain safety, the flashbacks started. I began to remember pieces. I started finding the videos and notes I had left for myself, and it’s started to make sense.

Anyway, my friends: One woman introduced me to people who somehow turned out to be the exact right people for me. Another (the Mom) kept insisting I needed to be away from Sean. She said he might deserve God’s forgiveness, but it couldn’t come from me. Their church had a well-structured intake system that gave me what I needed to exit Sean’s cultish abuse.

They were accepting of the mystical experiences I’ve had and continue to have, which mattered, because in the past, other churches had demonized me for sharing experiences I didn’t ask for and couldn’t control. That acceptance made me trust them more. My friends told me not every church in their denomination is like this— that their particular “ward” is unusually supportive. A couple of them made it clear: many are not.

Here you can see two of my friends riding their bikes to drop off my laundry after Sean stole my washer and dryer. There had been some sort of rocket launch that evening.

None of them were ever hateful toward Sean, which I appreciated. I still saw him as a wounded veteran, not necessarily as a man embodiment of a gas station bathroom on the side of a highway that’s gone 6 months without cleaning. Still, I had been programmed by his abuse to respond to certain names and phrases he used. So to counteract that, I wrote his transgressions all over my bathroom mirror—so even when I dissociated just to get through the day, I couldn’t look at myself without my unconscious remembering: I need to stay away from him to be safe. That mirror stayed like that for months.

Since he had shown up in the middle of the night before being served the Order of Protection, I bought cameras. He knew that if he came at night, I’d be exhausted and more likely to fight his intrusion, afraid, dissociated, and too tired to hold a boundary. He did that every time I broke up with him, or he broke up with me. Eventually, I got into the habit of waking up and fighting with him until he left.

Below, you can see him entering before he realized I had cameras, then turning them off. I didn’t have the money to hire someone to mount them to the ceiling, and I was in freeze state most of the time, barely able to function. After the OOP was served, he stopped coming inside. But I still found evidence he was hanging around outside— before I had exterior cameras up.

He changed tactics, started calling and texting me while I was asleep, using new numbers. Even though my phone was on silent, I’d often wake up when the screen lit up. He’d call from blocked numbers since I had an OOP. The problem was, the police also called from blocked numbers, so some of the “No Caller ID” calls were the detective I was reporting Sean’s violations to, but I believe this particular one in the middle of the night was him.

I also believe he used trance-state abuse to condition me to dream of him if we ever broke up. I had dreams of him every single night. And even in the dreams, I’d go lucid and start yelling at him, telling him he wasn’t supposed to be in my life. More on the trance abuse I noticed later..

Also pictured: one of the many disposable numbers he texted me from while the OOP was in place. He had been stalking my social media and saw I was studying Psalms in Latin, so he started trying to win me over through that.

To stop myself from automatically slipping into that child-like obedience when he called, I kept YouTube videos playing all night: talks by psychologists and domestic violence experts on the TV in my room. That way, if I woke up and saw he was trying to contact me, I’d have something grounding to hold on to.

One night I woke up to a video about different kinds of sexual abuse. It was a lot. Sobering. The way it lines up with what Sean did was almost unbearable to look at. But it gives structure to something that had felt impossibly chaotic and dissociating.

The fact that I found comfort in those charts says a lot about how long it took me to fully remember what was happening. Eventually, I’ll post more about the SA. For now, it’s enough to say: there’s almost nothing in those diagrams I didn’t experience or see mirrored in Sean’s behavior.

For obvious reasons, I was afraid of him showing up or following me all the time. So much so that I made T-shirts with Sean’s face on them, just to see if he’d mention them in his messages. I figured that would let me know if he really was following me. I made fun of him on the shirts so I’d know if he was close enough to read them. I genuinely thought he was going to destroy my life.

I’d crash around 7 or 8 p.m. from pure hypervigilant exhaustion, then be wide awake at 3 a.m., looping over everything he’d done. So I started doing aerial again, knowing that if I was in the air, I’d have to focus completely on my safety. It worked. It cut through the trauma loops like nothing else.

I pushed myself to do skills just barely within reach, things that took all my focus to avoid falling or getting hurt. And when I did, the thoughts of Sean would disappear.

The clips of aerial in the video above were chosen chronologically so you can see how I gained weight and got stronger the more time passed without Sean in my life. He had conditioned me to use no social media and I archived this and made my profile private out of fear..but at least I showed myself I was doing something. These are the lengths I went to to get away from him.