Hi Lou82, it's so normal to feel the way you do in your situation. What these other survivors have said above is great advice and support. Just having a place like this site to vent is often enough to find the stability your fear losing. I sense that you are enraged about what has happened to you or more specifically towards the person who did it. I have lived with this in varying degrees for a long time too.
I went through homicidal ideation towards my abuser for years. At the height of escaping the abuse I had to either kill him or get help and not do it. There was a time when I decided that nothing could be worse than the abuse, which continued after I escaped via contact with the children and the family court system. Long story. I would waver on this position of killing him and going to jail for another few years. Then when I really went over the edge and decided that going to jail and leaving the four kids to foster care or what ever happened was better than what we were going to endure for years, I decided that was what I was going to do. A rest in jail and fostercare was looking good indeed.
There was a dark battle for my soul going on between what I saw as the forces of darkness in him and the forces of light in me. I knew previous to all this that I was a person filled with light. It's one of the reasons he chose me. Then he had infected me with his stuff and I became homicidal? How bizarre. My other option was to be continually traumatized forever with no end in sight and goodness knows how the kids were going to turn out, if they even survived at all.
I had to risk them taking the kids off me when I decided to ask for help and therapy. I got some and knew that once it was documented I was in a position of power either way. It was very hard at the time but nowhere near as hard as the therapy I had to do years later, once I realized that I had sustained an injury to my brain's stress response after 20 years of sustained trauma from him.
So he lived and so did we. There have been many times in the ensuing years that he has done another of his numbers on us and I've regretted that I didn't do it in a moment of rage. I found I was capable of swinging back to that rage really quickly when he did terrible things to us again. I would curse myself that I didn't do it. Then there have been a much larger overwhelming amount of times when I look at my kids who are 28, 25, 24 and 18(the child that was his) and I think, 'Thank God I didn't do it" because I see all their success and realize that if their life narrative had gone along the jail/fostercare path, it wouldn't be as good as it is today and neither would mine.
He is a lonely getting old man now with no one. Dying of cancer and liver failure. We are successful survivors. I won the battle for my soul and my children are my living witnesses and love me all the more for it. I have two beautiful grandaughters being raised by the child that is 24 who is an electrician and a fantastic father and the most wonderful daughter in law who is such a good Mother. Grandchildren who are going to turn out emotionally and mentally stable. When I look at them, I feel like all that pressure, effort and pain was worth it. I made the right choices then did the work of following through on them. All this with the benefit of hindsight of course. It is a battle worth fighting, it really is. After all is said and done, in the future the fruit is on the tree. My tree is great, his is just about dead now, slowly withering in painful isolation.
