Recovery. It's a loaded word. A lot of people are in one form of recovery or another. I studied and worked in psychology and understood it intellectually and as it applied to other people's lives far sooner than I realized how to apply it to my own life.
As a result, I chose the wrong partner over and over and over again. I chose abusive relationships repeatedly. I got myself into a marriage with man who was later diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and BiPolar 1. I discovered after marriage that my ex was a CI for Customs that had been arrested as a high level member of an international organized crime syndicate who had multiple violent felonies, including weapons, drugs, and money laundering. He was released from prison early to work for U.S. Customs.
When I reported the abuse to his Agent/handler I was told that if I reported the abuse locally and he was charged with another violent crime, he would be deported and the government could not use him as a key witness in millions of dollars of cases they had built with his information. They appealed to my military patriotism, sense of duty, and later self-preservation. In retrospect, I know they had their eyes on winning the cases for headlines and promotions and not much else because they were "driven" and "ambitious" and that is how that world works day-to-day.
I went to local police several times for help, and was told things like "There is no such thing as the Chinese Mafia" and "We aren't the morality police". It's been suggested that they didn't believe me, but since there were state police liasons involved who seemed to have no problem believeing the Chinese Mafia exists, I think it was probably gaslighting and a misguided extension of the Thin Blue Line courtesy. Lord knows what they were being told behind the scenes though, since "burning" or character assassination by phone calls to people in high places is a real thing.
We went to the US Marshalls office and were offered witness protection after the nationwide Chinese organized crime related cases closed. I was shocked. I would lose the rights to any college degrees, businesses I had built, and military standing I had earned and start off with just the minimum entry level job. I was supposed to be grateful for this-the safety. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I had committed a crime, or had been told upfront what I was getting into. Instead, I felt more betrayed by the country I had served. I declined.
He seemed so human upfront, but things got far, far worse. He cheated every chance he got, groomed kids from our business, and the freakier the better. He was a calculated, trained manipulator who consciously knew how to gain and keep control of people. By the end I had 0 personal connections outside the house. I was always on alert, always walking on eggshells, always keeping up appearances. A few years into it the Customs handling agent crashed his duty car into a parked car high while on opiates that he got, supposedly from another CI he was working for the Gardner Museum heist. I wouldn't put it past my ex to have gotten him hooked either, though. He did spend a lot of time talking about the agent's alleged priest abuse history.
This was right after the government witness lists were released to the Defense team, so they knew who "snitched". One of the other witness's families had members killed. The Boston Globe ran an article comparing the agent to the corrupt agents on the Whitey Bulger cases, the agencies involved decided they couldn't afford any more "embarassing publicity", so they set the disgraced agent up as a Private Investigator and fed him plum state and federal investigations to work on. I was trapped in that toxicity for almost ten years. I felt like I was held down by my own government while I was exploited and abused. The deep bond between the disgraced agent and my ex-husband made leaving and staying gone all the more treacherous since I had seen the influence they had on different institutions with my own eyes and didn't know who to trust, and I worried about dragging someone less able to navigate and defend themselves into a terrible situation. That's a story for another day, though....
