I didn't want to tell him. Ever. But it came up. One night in bed, he slipped a hand over my shoulder and felt where the bones had healed unevenly. I froze, then shifted positions, and tried to distract him with my feminine wiles. But I wasn't as wily as I'd thought. A few days later he came home as I was washing dishes in the sink. He kissed the back of my neck and massaged my shoulders—both of them.
"Did you break this?" he asked, as his hand rested on the ugly shard that was part of me.
The sink dissolved into iridescent flashes as my stomach dipped into my intestines. I took a deep breath, still looking forward. "It was broken, but I didn't break it," I told him. "Someone else broke my shoulder."
To hell and back
Nearly a year before, I had been at the bitter end of an eight-year abusive relationship. The first few years had been fine, but as my ex had gone through a personal crisis, he had returned to some former bad habits — drinking, drugs — and developed some new ones, like beating the holy hell out of me. I'd tried to stick it out by going to Al-Anon, couples counseling, and partners-of-depressed-spouses web sites. But when his rage sent me to the emergency room, I'd packed my bags and headed across the country, too afraid to press charges, too hurried to take any of my belongings.
Since resettling, I'd hooked up with a great therapist and gotten oodles of support from an online bulletin board populated by survivors like me. But when I started dating R, I wondered what to do. Should I tell him what I'd been through? The advice from the board was mixed. Some said never to tell—they'd had the information used against them, or it "scared him off." But others had moved on to healthy, happy relationships. I wanted to be in the latter group.
"You should tell, as a general rule, as soon as you start developing feelings for that person," says Steven Stosny, Ph.D., author of You Don't Have to Take It Anymore: How to Turn a Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One (Free Press, '05). "It's an important thing about you that anyone deeply involved with you needs to know."
Filling him in, says Stosny, was my chance to gather more information about him before I got in too deep. If the revelation scared him off, good riddance. If it evoked an angry, vengeful, knight-in-shining-armor response, that would be a red flag, too. "Anyone who responds with anger and aggression will eventually turn that anger and aggression on you," says Stosny. I needed to look for a compassionate response, the sign of a partner more concerned with my recovery than anything else.
