I promised Charles I wouldn’t write about him or our time together. He asked me not to, because, he said, he does not want to be hated by a bunch of crazy women who don’t actually know him.
I promised I wouldn’t write about the things that he did, both before and during our relationship, because I loved him and I knew people wouldn’t understand. I didn’t want to hurt him.
It wasn’t a lie; I meant it in the moment.
That’s what he would say to me when he would talk me into having sex with him by promising me we were going to be together forever, only to turn around the next day and call me a crazy bitch for thinking we were in a relationship.
He never lied. He always meant it in the moment. He would just realize the next day that he could never be with me.
His promises only lasted until his orgasm was over.
I kept mine for over a year. But I’ve finally understood that my therapist was right, and that I will never free myself from him, that I will never really start to heal, until I allow myself to stop censoring my words to protect him.
The first time I wrote about what he is really like, I had a three-day panic attack and unpublished the post. Then I wrote him a letter begging for forgiveness.
I never sent it.
For about fifteen years I hated Charles. I thought he was a fuck up and a loser. I couldn’t stand talking to him, and avoided it whenever possible.
I left Norman the first time in May of 2023 because I woke up one morning and could no longer stand to be under the same roof as him. For the first time ever, it dawned on me that when he evacuated without me for hurricane Katrina I could have died.
At the time, I didn’t even have enough money to eat every day. I didn’t have a car. I was living in a shitty little efficiency apartment that was infested with roaches, mice and rats. It had holes in the walls. The appliances didn’t work. I was poor.
I had no way to leave the city. And he knew that. But he left me behind. I could have died. When that finally sank in, I couldn’t stand to be around him.
Norman encouraged me to go, to take a break, to get my head straight. He knew I wasn’t leaving forever, because I had a ticket to a concert that I definitely wasn’t going to miss.
I returned to Norman the first time not because I loved him, but because I love Matchbox 20.
The morning I flew back from New Orleans to Seattle Charles’ wife took me to the airport. Before we left she gave me a dramatic speech about what a wonderful man he was and demanded that I sit down and have a civil conversation with Charles when I returned to New Orleans in June.
Yeah, I already had plans to leave again before I went back the first time. Like I said, the marriage was over.
Norman picked me up in Seattle, and on the way home he gave me a speech about what a wonderful man Charles was and how they were like brothers. Norman also told me I had to learn to get along with Charles.
Twice in 24 hours I was told I had to talk to the guy. By people who knew about his addictions and his penchant for violence. By people who knew that my mental health was tenuous. That I was suffering and uncertain and vulnerable.
They told me he was wonderful, demanded that I talk to him, and as soon as I did they both called me a whore who plotted to destroy both of our marriages.
It’s hard not to feel like I was set up.
After I wrote that letter to Charles begging for his forgiveness and love, but before I could buy a stamp to mail it, I was doomscrolling through Instagram when I saw something that said “a trauma bond isn’t what you think it is.”
I like knowing things, so I googled “trauma bond” to make sure my understanding of the phrase was correct.
Turns out a trauma bond isn’t what I thought.
Like many other people, I thought a trauma bond was a bond formed between two people who had each experienced trauma and came together by sharing their experiences. It isn’t.
A trauma bond is actually an intense emotional attachment that develops in an unhealthy relationship. It involves alternating abuse with positive reinforcement. The victim often develops feeling of sympathy for the abuser, causing them to blame themselves for the abuse and making it hard for them to leave the relationship.
The formation of a trauma bond begins with something known as “love bombing.”
It sounds so nice. Love bombing. Who wouldn’t want to be bombarded by love?
It hurt to read that article. Every single word is a perfect description of the time I spent with Charles.
From the moment I started talking to him, Charles showered me with praise and attention. We were in constant contact. He told me Norman didn’t appreciate me for who I was (true) and that I should “break out of my box” and follow my dreams instead of just doing what Norman wanted me to.
He told me he had owned his own business for twelve years, and that he had done FX work for Disney and other major networks, but that he needed a partner who could take his company to the next level.
That was sort of true. It was like that scene in Making Money where Heretofore told Cosmo Lavish that he had been a minor secretary and had been employed at the palace. Cosmo assumed that meant he was a minor secretary in the palace when the truth was that Heretofore had been a minor secretary at the Armorer’s Guild and had been employed at the palace as a gardener. “Heretofore preferred to think of it as an unfortunate conjunction of two truths.”
Charles did indeed have an FX company that had been registered with the state for 12 years. And he had worked on some major productions. He just left out the fact that the major productions had all been contracted by a different FX company and he just worked on their crews. Charles’ company had only done a few minor, independent productions. Most of the work he landed himself was unpaid. But I didn’t find all that out until later.
He told me his marriage had been over for years (yeah, I know), that he had already kicked his wife out once, that he wasn’t sure why he took her back the first time. He told me I was the woman he had been searching for his entire life and that we were going to be a power couple.
He told me I was destined to be one of the greatest voices of my generation and that he was going to give me a platform for my writing. He said he was going to support me financially so I could go back to school to learn screenwriting.
He said he was going to protect me and take care of me. He said he was going to show me the world.
And I believed him. I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him.
He said everything I had always wanted to hear. Which wasn’t hard, because I told him all the things I wished Norman would say and do.
Charles paid more attention to me than anyone had in my entire life.
I met Norman when I was 20, and from day one he trained me to do what he wanted by criticizing me and ignoring me. Even after we moved in together he would stop speaking to me or even looking at me for long periods of time if I did or said anything that displeased him.
Norman told me repeatedly that the best thing about our relationship was that we lived entirely separate lives.
Yeah, I know.
I grew up in an environment of torment and neglect. I spent my childhood hearing how worthless and stupid I was. When Norman told me that no other man would tolerate me, I believed him.
Later, when Charles dropped his act and started telling me constantly that everyone hated me and no one could stand to be around me, I believed that, too.
Charles tells anyone who will listen that I ruined his life. He claims I plotted to destroy his marriage (because obviously just keeping his dick in his pants was never an option) and stole his business from him.
For a long time I believed this because I have an innate tendency to blame myself for everything.
But the truth is, his life sucked long before I came on the scene.
He has been an alcoholic and cocaine addict for his entire adult life, and he got his wife addicted, too. Even I, who once complained to the dean of the law school about the amount of alcohol served at school events, started drinking like a fish when I was around him.
His friends told me stories about times Charles got into armed standoffs with drug dealers and gang members. Apparently if you got into trouble, you could count on Charles to show up armed to the teeth and ready to shoot.
They found these stories funny. To be fair, most of his friends are addicts and drug dealers as well.
Yeah, I know.
Charles’ wife was the one who told me about the time he beat a man so badly the guy nearly died.
At this point I’m absolutely certain he was abusing her from the moment they met.
Charles actually told me on multiple occasions that the reason he preferred me to her was because when he screamed at her she would get scared and cry, but when he screamed at me I would fight back.
She was afraid he would hit her. I didn’t care if he hit me. That’s a pretty significant difference.
Charles was unable to find work long before the strike started because he tried to poach a job from the FX company that had been putting him on their crews. When he told the story, the owners of the company had set him up because they felt threatened by him and wanted to “put him on the shelf.”
Charles is so narcissistic I think he genuinely believed that a well-established, multi-million dollar company was threatened by his one-man operation that couldn’t do anything more than provide fog and squibs.
Charles refused to even look for work during the strike. He said he wasn’t capable of holding down an ordinary job and that he had worked too hard his entire life to let someone else tell him what to do.
While I was filling out application after application and crying because I couldn’t find any non-legal work, he was lying in bed drinking jugs of cheap wine and cashing checks for thousands of dollars from his mother while screaming at me for taking advantage of him.
Yeah, I know.
This is a man who told me that men and women will never be equal because society doesn’t allow him to beat the shit out of me for being disrespectful the way he would a man.
This is a man who broke plans with me because he said if he left the house he would hurt someone. Not any person in particular. He just wanted to find a stranger and cause him physical harm.
This is a man who reached for a gun at a stoplight because he didn’t like the look on the face of the pedestrian that crossed in front of the truck. When he realized he had taken the gun out of the glovebox to clean it, he spent the rest of the ride home talking about how he was going to get it and go back and hunt the man down and teach him a lesson.
I convinced him to stay with me instead. Victory, I guess?
When Charles was a teenager, he planted a pipe bomb under a school. Not even the school he attended, just a random school. I didn’t even hear this story from him; I heard it from some guys he grew up with. When I asked Charles if it was true, he told me a priest found the bomb and would have died if the detonator hadn’t malfunctioned. Rather than being regretful, he assured me that he knows now what he did wrong, and the next time he builds a bomb it’ll definitely work.
This man has a federal explosives license and a safe full of C4.
Before we got involved, Charles was so unsuccessful that even with two incomes and no kids he had to get his millionaire mother to buy his wife a car because they couldn’t afford to get her one themselves.
Before we got involved, I was a person who worked my way up from living in squalor and not having enough to eat to being a highly respected attorney.
I used to be incredible.
Charles is violent. Egotistic. Narcissistic. Possibly a psychopath.
Yet he’s constantly surrounded by a crowd of people who think he hung the moon. His phone never stops going off.
How is someone like that worshipped, while I am forgotten?
In spite of being clever and sarcastic, she’s also fragile and weird and she has trouble fitting in.
Learning about love bombing and trauma bonds finally broke the hold he had over me.
I can see now what happened, what he did. I can see how I was susceptible, given all the trauma of my past an my lack of a sufficient support system.
I can see how I’m still susceptible, and that I’ll have to be careful in the future.
I can see now what happened, and how, and my heart is broken in a whole new way.
The most love I’ve ever felt in my entire life was nothing more than a lie. A trick. A delusion.
That’s a hard thing to live with.
But I’m working on it.
Safely, in my fortress of solitude.
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