Nothing But Trouble

0:10Speaker 1:You're listening to a mother Mer podcast.

0:14Speaker 2:Muma Me acknowledges the traditional owners of the land and waters. This podcast is recorded on This episode discusses domestic violence, drunks, and other explicit content and is strictly for over eighteen's. If you will anyone you know needs help, there is a list of support services in our show notes. We all have types, tall, dark, blonde, tradees, the nice guy. The list goes on. Well, Tessa definitely had a type, but it wasn't any of the above.

0:47Speaker 1:Jail birds as no, like, I've had a very colorful life, and I find it a lot easier to see males that have at least knowledge about a colorful life. But yeah, he was very much the jail bird as soon as you looked at him.

1:08Speaker 2:In you the issue with time, They can often come with well certain baggage.

1:13Speaker 1:I did find out through the grapevine that he apparently used to have a really bad gambling, pokey addiction. I started to think, well, maybe what he's doing is he's creating a fight with me to create a reason to be able to leave and storm out, and I guess a reason to be away from home for the next twenty four hours so he could go and gamble and get on Pokey's.

1:49Speaker 2:I'm Georgia Love and this is everyone has an ex Come with me as we dive into a collection of unconventional stories about relationships past through the eyes and the hearts of the very people who lived them. When this story begins, our girl Tessa here was twenty nine. She'd worked much of her life as an adult entertainer and now owned her own business in that industry. It could be a tricky world to find and date a nice guy, but work was work, and she loved it.

2:16Speaker 1:I would do topless wat dressing at Bucks parties, boat parties, that kind of thing. I'd been doing that for a while. I'd always had really really bad luck in relationships. And a friend of mine said, Oh, I've got a business partner that needs to book strippers for their Christmas party. And he gave his friend my number and I went and worked that night. And he was the friend of a friend.

2:45Speaker 2:His name was Daniel, and immediately Tessa heard a certain Taylor Swift song playing in her mind.

2:51Speaker 1:It was almost instant, like we just looked at each other and it was like, oh no, this is going to be trouble. This is like like bad bad. Instantly I was like, oh god, I'm going to date him. I knew instantly it was very much my type. Tall, very very bright blue eyes, the coolest clothes on ever, and just held himself in such a way that was just he was so witty and funny and on the ball and just so good with banter. But also very much the look he gave me too, very charming character.

3:31Speaker 1:But yeah, he was very much the jail bird. As soon as you looked at him, you knew I've had a very colorful life, and I find it a lot easier to see males that have at least knowledge about a colorful life.

3:47Speaker 2:They hung out all night, chatting about what turned out to be a heap of mutual friends they shared. They laughed, had banter, and yeah, there was very obvious flirting.

3:56Speaker 1:It was just really fun, like we just had fun. And as the night progressed, there was a few moments where he just he would freak out and go, oh, this is trouble. I would act o'coy and be like, what do you mean? This is trouble, and he's you because you what do you mean? He's like, you're my future ex wife, and then because I was so infatuated with him, I was like, oh haha, hopefully hah. He kept coming up to me and going, fuck, you're so hot. And then it ended just me and him in one of the spare rooms together, just talking shit the whole night, laughing.

4:35Speaker 1:It felt like I'd known him for twenty years and we were from not the same area, but areas that were very close, and it was just so fun and comfortable. It was the comfortability of it. I ended up going home about four am, I think, and that was the Saturday. And then on the Monday he messaged me and he said, I'm so upset I didn't go home with you. And I was like, we're on here, girls, like message to the girls, cup chat, let's go girls. And then it was just back and forth texting, really flirty banter, sarcasm, kind of like making fun of each other. And that's the thing that really gets me that it's the ongoing banter.

5:19Speaker 1:That's the thing that makes me go hard eyed. And then he just said, oh, what are you doing on Friday, Let's catch up for a drink. I thought, okay. In all week I was like, oh my god, I believe. I was so excited and so nervous at that point in time because we did have a lot of mutual friends, and I had asked maybe two or three of them what they knew about him as a trade he was a carpenter, and that he was a very violent guy. The thing that everyone referenced was he got found guilty of these really big charges. He ended up going to jail for it, and you know, his victim services, you know, two hundred thousand dollars or something, and I just thought, oh, that's pretty crazy. But it was in his I think it was when he was about twenty four, and I just thought, oh, you know, like young. He was a very cruel guy in the area too. Everyone knew him.

6:13Speaker 1:All the other guys were scared of him. Quite masculine, and you know, really like held himself, and someone with a past like mine, I like to feel protected. I like to feel like someone's holding the reins and I can just kind of chill, like I'm an independent woman, but sometimes it's nice to, you know, hand the reins over and he was exactly that, and I was just so infactuated by it.

6:39Speaker 2:Tessa decided to overlook any potential red flags. Yes, they could have been that for others, but for her, this was exactly the type of guy she wanted. So it was time for a proper first date.

6:50Speaker 1:They said, let's go to a pub New Yorks. So I lived in a very cool inner city suburb. Lots of really cool pubs are aunts. So we arranged a pub to meet up. I walked in, I couldn't see him anywhere, and then I went into the poky room and he was there playing the pokys, and I just thought, oh god.

7:09Speaker 2:But there.

7:10Speaker 1:Of course, within about ten minutes, I was back to being absolutely infatuated. And we had a few drinks there, and then we went to another bar. But the whole time his phone kept ringing consistently, over over over, like to the point where he couldn't really use his phone. It was just NonStop, and it got to the point where I was like, you probably want to answer that it might be an emergency. Oh no, no, no, it's nothing, it's nothing, okay. So we kept partying at this bar, went back to mine. Obviously, he stayed the night. We slept together, of course, and then he literally never left my house from that day. It just felt so comfortable and even though we hadn't known each other for long, it felt like we had And with myself being thirty living alone for many years, it was really nice to have that comfort. And he was the same age as me, had the same values as me, and I just thought, oh my god, I found my person great. So I just completely I wanted him to be there. I loved having him there. Probably within the first three weeks, really really quickly. He made me feel so comfortable and so

8:25Speaker 1:at ease, and yeah, it's almost like I felt more relaxed having him there than without him there. He was telling me I was the love of his life and that we were going to get married, and we sat out a timeline that did it approximately in about a year's time. We would try for a baby before then, we were going to go to Thailand. We had all the plans in the world. We were speaking about where we were going to live, what he was going to do with his career, what I was going to do with my career, and I just thought, oh my god, this is it. It's finally my turn. Finally.

8:58Speaker 2:I know what you're thinking. We've released enough of these episodes by now, isn't this about the time our spidy senses prick up hearing these stories, and we get that sinking feelings something's about to burst the bubble.

9:10Speaker 1:During that time, I'd noticed he was very suspicious, I guess with his phone and it would always be ringing always, And he was at my house for about two weeks and then a friend of mine messaged me and said, oh, I heard you're seeing Daniel. You do know that he's got a wife and two kids at home, right, and there it is. I confronted Daniel about it. He apologized profusely, said that his ex wife he had left weeks and weeks ago and she just wasn't over it. And then he told her that I knew that she knew about us.

9:53Speaker 1:And then every single day she would call his phone and he would answer it in fear it was about his sons, and she would just hurl abuse of me for like a good twenty thirty minutes. It got to the point where it was comical. But then the longer it went on, the worst it got. It got to the point where she would call and be speaking to her sons. Oh, this is the fucking dirty slut that your dad left us for. These kids were about four and nine maybe, and she would say, like, oh, go, your dad's nothing but a fucking dirty jail bird. He's just run off through this fucking dirty ganger. It was to the point that I actually felt for this woman, like it was annoying, but I was just like, Oh, whatever, it's going to make her feel better for twenty minutes a day, go for it.

10:47Speaker 2:But the thing is, Daniel had never mentioned an next wife at all, let alone kids.

10:52Speaker 1:When he apologized, he said that he did want to tell me, but he was just so infatuated with me that he didn't want to ruin any chance of us being together. He was quite insecure about it because he knows a lot of single women without kids don't really want a guy with kids on first Bay, which I understand that he apologized profusely. He really really utilized the fact that I'm a mental health social worker, so I'm very understanding, very empathetic. And he said he got abuse and it started to all come back up and it's impacted everything in his life, and he started crying, and I just was like, I was heartbroken for him. And then when this woman was calling daily and saying all of this stuff, it made it seem believable, like really believable.

11:46Speaker 2:Now it was all out in the open. Tenser never questioned whether Daniel was telling the truth when he said he and his ex had separated months ago and he'd been living with his parents since that's why he was staying with her so much, so it only made sense. He slowly started to move in, but from there the drama only worsened with the ex, but also with Daniel himself.

12:06Speaker 1:It went on for months and months, and just more of his stuff he just started bringing every week. There was just more of his stuff at my house. And then she would go through periods of stopping him from seeing his sons, which would really upset him. I think after about three months of that, we were partying with some of my friends one night and he just turned around to me and said, I know, when you went to the bottle before, you were sucking cock in the alleyway, and I was like, I'm so what. For probably about the first ten seconds I was laughing because I actually thought he was joking, And then when I noticed that wild look on his face that I'd never ever seen, it was kind of, oh, crap, he's being serious. I'd never seen this look on his face before. I'd never seen him look that absolutely terrifying. It's like his whole eye shape changed, and he'd never spoken to me like that before. It felt like the person I knew had just been thrown out the window and this was a whole new person. And I just kept saying, Babe, what are you talking about? What the heck are you? Have you taken something? What is wrong with you? And it

13:24Speaker 1:was like just like he couldn't hear me, and he was so livid and serious and had this crazy look in his eyes, and I just thought, what the fuck is going on? And then he just told me that, you know, he can't fucking deal with me, and then he left and I didn't see him till the next day, and then just walked out, turned his phone off, and I just stood there for so long with my girlfriend, like what just happened? And I was so perplexed my brain was spinning. The next day, in the afternoon, he called me. His phone had been off that entire time.

14:02Speaker 1:He was living with me by this stage too, and he had been out all night all the next day, and then he called me in the afternoon and he just said, yeah, I'm really sorry, hey, And I said, do you know what you're sorry for? And he said, yeah, absolutely, just I just love you so much and it's just so scary, and you know, because my ex is such a psycho, I'm so paranoid that I'm going to get another one. And me being me, oh babe, like no, I understand, like I understand trauma, I understand triggers and how you'll respond to them, etc. Everything went back to normal, and then about two weeks after that, the exact same thing happened when we were out with friends, and it was just a repeat. He went out all night all the next day, called me, apologized, and ended up coming home.

14:57Speaker 2:But it wasn't all bad. Tessa swears, outside of these blow ups, the relationship she thought was otherwise wonderful.

15:04Speaker 1:It was absolutely beautiful. Just on the way here, just to refresh my memory, I watched a video of the day he came home with these huge buquet of flowers and he filmed it and he just said I love you, baby, and gave me a big hug and kiss. That was just for no reason, or he would he was so affectionate, and he would present it in a way, even though he would use my trauma against me. When he was not being an asshole, he was so caring and empathetic, and he saw me as a whole person. He didn't just see me as a stripper. He saw everything. It seems like he saw everything about me, and that's what was I thought he's the one.

15:50Speaker 2:But dear listener, once a leopard shows his spots, it's rare. He'd change them. The same toxic patterns kept coming back.

15:57Speaker 1:So we would be at a pub, for example, and he would just say, I just saw you looking at that guy. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there, what guy? I can't see him? And he would really believe it and be really angry, take it and run with it. And even if other people kind of interjected and said mate, like no, she wasn't she wasn't doing that at all, he would just try and fight them, and because he was this big, tough jail bird who everyone was really scared of, no one would say anything to him, and then he would just leave again. I truly believed that he would never ever, ever be unfaithful to me, but I couldn't think of anything else until I did find out through the grape vine that he apparently used to have a really bad gambling Pokey addiction, so I thought, maybe he's going to do that. I started to think, well, maybe what he's doing is he's creating a fight with me to create a reason to be able to leave and storm out and I guess, a reason to be away from home for the next twenty four hours so he could go and gamble and get on Pokey's without knowing and be really undercover about it. Then the way he would speak

17:16Speaker 1:about it the next day, he was super gas lighting. He would tell me that I was the one with trauma and I'm the one who's triggered by him, and really use I guess my trauma and my life experience against me. When I would try and call him out on these behaviors, he would get really angry and say things like, well, no, wonder your dad didn't fucking want you, and my dad left the country when I was three days old, and I've never heard from him, don't know who he is. And obviously because I doing sex work, he would say, oh, you're nothing good but a fucking pair of chis to stare at, or you're nothing, or go and fucking hang out with those old gross men that pay you like, really really demeaning things, and it really quickly broke my whole self esteem, ego, self worth, everything.

18:08Speaker 1:So at the beginning, it seems like it was a few you know, every few weeks something like this would happen. But then as time went on, it progressively started getting shorter in time of when it would happen and more intense. He started being quite physically abusive, but I think the worst thing was the verbal abuse from him, because he would really go for the jugular and say things that are really out of line, really personal, hurtful things with the intention to hurt me as well. But then as that journey continued over time, the worst he got and the more frequently he did. This time had gone on, so my self esteem and my self worth had gone whew so quickly. And he would come home the next day and say say sorry, but not really explain anything.

19:07Speaker 1:And if I asked, he would just say, we've spoke about it, it's done. Leave it in the past.

19:12Speaker 2:Now, Tessa is going to jump in here and answer the question she thinks you're all asking at this point, why did she stay?

19:19Speaker 1:I grew up in a really really really low socio economic household, grew up in social housing, a lot of addiction, a lot of domestic violence. My home was always really chaotic, and the men in my home abused every woman, and that was a very normal thing to me. I ended up leaving home when I was fourteen or fifteen because I told my mother, you need to make a choice me or him. With her boyfriend that she'd been with for about ten years, and every weekend he would beat her black and blue, and she told me, you can get your stuff and go. So I was out, and then being so young, homeless, so traumatized, without realizing it was trauma, I ended up in a relationship with a twenty three year old and I would get fourteen fifteen at the time, and I lived with him and he ended up being horrible too. I somehow managed to finish high school, though, and it's just been a pattern since then.

20:21Speaker 1:And it's the amount of self hate I have about it, because someone who grew up in it, someone who's a social worker, I've worked in dev services, I should know better. And there's so much shame in that. And I think a lot of not leaving was just trying to keep hoping it would get better, rather than admitting default that it was ruined. And I think also my age. I mean I was thirty at the time. A lot of my girlfriends, if not all of them, were in long term relationships. The body clock's ticken, you know, and that was still only about five months in. Everything moved real quick.

21:05Speaker 1:It was kind of like, oh, well, that's what just happens at this age, because everyone's like, we don't have any time to waste, We've got to get going, so I'll just roll with it. So much had happened. So he's living with me already. I'm helping him do his divorce and line through the government portal to divorce his ex wife, who's calling me every day. Was coming up to Christmas and I hadn't met his children yet, but we were doing toy shopping together for his boys and Christmas wrapping, and he was like, you're going to be the best step mom. I'm so excited for I was, you know, already planning things. Oh, take them to Muay Thai training, I'll do this, do that. So excited to be stepmom. So excited.

21:46Speaker 2:But of course there was always the niggling question about why Daniel would behave and speak to her the way he did. Time after time. She didn't go digging per se, but she decided to keep her ears a little more open.

22:00Speaker 1:He had started doing this very odd thing where I would go to bed around ten pm and he would stay on our unit balcony and I could see him from the bed and he would just stand out there on his phone so intensely, and I would lay in bed and think, what the heck is he doing. I started to hear notifications from his phone that I didn't recognize the sound for. And on that Friday it went off and I said, what app is that? I don't know that noise? And he said, oh, it's just a car one, okay. And then the more I started hearing it, the more I was like, so I was sitting well with me for some bizarre reason. It's just all very like, it's very odd. And then he started to pick the fights with me and leave for the whole night, you know, multiple times a week at the stage, and he was drinking and taking drugs very heavily. That definitely ramped up.

22:57Speaker 1:This was a six month smart At the time, though, I was saying, oh, it's because his ex wife and he's not seeing his kids as much, and that's a hard transition and really being empathetic and understanding. One morning, I woke up for work and he was asleep next to me, and I heard the weird notification noise that I previously had never heard. When I was in an abusive relationship in my early twenties, I sware to myself after that relationship, I would never check a partner's phone ever again. If it's even up for questioning, that's my answer there, and I never had up until this point.

23:36Speaker 1:I looked at him sleeping, and I looked at his phone charging on the floor, and it was like this, it's so hard to explain. It was really like that gut feeling that go check his phone. It was like someone was telling me, go check his phone, and I were looking at him. No no, no, no, no no no no no no. When I had breakfast got ready for work, and I kept hearing this strange notification noise and I kept having that feeling, and it was so intense. I kept going in there and going no, no, no, I can't do it. I can't do it. I promised myself, you yars ago, I wouldn't. And then eventually I was like you know what, There's one thing I know, it's always trust your intuition. And I walked in there he was sound asleep, snoring. I picked up his phone and there was just photos of a man holding my partner's coop in notifications from Grinder. It was like my eyes started to go cloudy and I was holding his phone looking at it, and I started shaking. I remember the screen shaking, and I'm looking at it frantically swiping through, going through this app. So I'm trying to navigate how to use this app while trying to also confirm to

24:55Speaker 1:myself that it actually is Grinder. I remember trying to find like an about or settings option because I didn't believe it was Grinder in a weird way, because my brain just I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And then I felt sick and they're lightheaded again, and then sick again, and I was just shaking. It was horrible. It felt like a really I know everyone says it, but really an outer body experience. I think for about a good five minutes, my brain couldn't even process that I was shaking. Is this real? Am I still asleep?

25:33Speaker 1:I can't what trying to frantically go through his whole Grinder account, which he had sent photos on multiple conversations about hey I'm here, Hey, here's the address, I'll be there in twenty five and some really really really descriptive conversations. And I've always prided myself on being a very strong, independent woman, but this fucking humbled me. I'll tell you that much. And just how long it had gone on for. And I started noticing the days and the times, and it was all the times that I would be asleep, and there was nights that he had come to bed with me, I'd fall asleep. Then he snuck out. He told a lot of people on there, I have to be discreet because I'm married, wife's at home. So he's very aware of what he's doing, like he is kind of confirming that it's wrong before he does it, I guess, but then still goes and does it. So there was probably about seven months of conversations with people he had matched with on Grinder, and pretty much every second of those conversations were he would start talking with someone and then it would eventuate to a plan. They would send an address and then you'd see the conversation. He would

26:59Speaker 1:say ten minutes away, I'm here is the door here? Heaps of that, But within that, something that was really really prevalent was these they're called puff and play parties, basically these big mess orgies, but there was probably about up to fifteen of those where he had clearly attended. I think the most heartbreaking thing about it all was it doesn't make you feel great if your partner would go and do that then be at home with you when you're sleeping. And I remember just standing there, going I don't even know what to do, and I remember having the thought is it really the worst thing though?

27:46Speaker 1:And thinking, oh, well, you know, I'm getting older, and really trying to rationalize it. The next way my brain went was, this is definitely harder for him than it is for me, because, as we know, coming out is a really hard thing, particularly if you've kind of earned this reputation around your local area for being the big marcho guy who's covered in tattoos and speaks to jail. Then ever scared of me, and I just felt heartbroken for him, And then it was how do you bring this up with someone? So I got all the evidence I needed on my phone, took photos of everything, and I went into where he was asleep, and I sat on the bed next to him, and I just kind of like stroked his head and like rubbed his hair a bit, and he kind of softly started to wake up, and I said, hey, babe, I think we need to have a chat about something. And as soon as I said that, he looked on the floor, so his phone was gone, and he was out of that bed in about two seconds flat. He knew straight away as soon as I said, he knew the panic. And then he quickly ran to the bathroom and started having a shower.

29:03Speaker 1:And as he was in the shower the fact that he had done that and ran to the shower and dismissed me. I was so upset. My brain was not functioning. I was shaking. I didn't know what to do. When he got out of the shower, he opened the door and I just grabbed his hands and I just said, Daniel, I fucking love you so much. I know this is harder for you than it is for me. Yeah, just know, regardless of fucking anything, I can be your best friend, your girlfriend, whatever, but I'm here to support you through this because I really want to acknowledge how much worse this is for you than me, and I was trying to make him feel comfortable enough to sit down and talk to me. He just kept denying everything. And when the photos and I was showing him photos, I was saying to him, if you still want to stay together, but you want to sleep with men in your own time, I'm fine with that, babe, I love you, and he was just so beyond defensive. That's when he started to really kick off and just exploded. He physically assaulted me and left. Then for the next month, I didn't tell a soul out of respect to him, and during that

30:23Speaker 1:time I was trying to reach out to him and say, you will need to come and talk to me face to face, and for weeks my messages to him were so supportive and still so welcoming, understanding kind. I was saying to him, don't worry, I haven't told anyone. We can get through this together. I don't care. At the end of this, I'm your best friend and that's it. And he would just write the most horrible messages back to me and just go fuck off. You're a fucking crazy You can't you don't even know what you're talking about, and just her abuse at me. For the next few weeks, I was just saying, you owe me an apology. You've been living with me rent free for the past six months, You've put me through all of this, and I'm still being supportive of you. The least you owe me a face to face apology, just respect, human to human. And the messages back were just horrible. No man will ever like you outside of the fact that you can get your tits out really really horrible things. So I got to the stage where my friends started to ask why we weren't together where's he been? Because I still at this stage had not told a soul for a month,

31:36Speaker 1:and that was firstly out of respect for him, but also shame and embarrassment after trying to get him to meet with me face to face to have just a simple conversation. After about four weeks, we were at a friends, a mutual friend's house, and I just lost it. I just I was holding so much shame within myself and holding that type of information in The only people I told were my dogs and I live alone. It was killing me, It was really really killing me, and I just got up and told everyone and dropped a big ass truth bomb. His closest Duh boys. They looked like they had seen the most scariest ghost of their entire life.

32:22Speaker 1:I wish I could have taken a photo of their faces. They almost went like anime face. But then a few seconds after that, no, nah nah, now you're talking shit, and all these guys that were our mutual friends, keep in mind, just started telling me, Tessa, you're talking shit. You're a spinner. You're crazy. They always say extra pers are crazy. But then everyone else there was just it was almost a bit of a silence, and everyone just being what do we do. Some of the people that were there were friends that I had been friends with and really good friends with since I was in year seven in high school. People I had grown up with knew me really, really really well, and the fact that they were questioning my honesty was heartbreaking.

33:19Speaker 2:And then came the real kicker, the last thing Tessa expected to hear four weeks after finding out Daniel had been cheating on her with men.

33:27Speaker 1:After that moment, everyone kind of scattered, and you know, think the night went on, and this really young guy came up to me. And I'd not met this guy before. He would have been about twenty and he just said, oh, you're Tessa Daniel's X. So crazy now that he's dayed in that really young chick. And I just said, so what. And the look on this guy's face, he just went, you didn't know, and I just said, no, tell me fucking everything right now. This poor boy, his face was like translucent white, and he said, oh, as of last week, which was Valentine's Day, this girl that everyone knows from the area, who is nineteen, was posting all these beautiful stories of all these gifts she got for Valentine's Day, and it was my ex partner who was tagged. I vomited.

34:27Speaker 1:I was in my friend's backyard with this young guy who doesn't realize he's just led a massive cat out of the bag and he's freaking out and I was just there go because by this point, my self worth, my everything was minus a hundred. And that was just the real cherry on the top. I think.

34:47Speaker 2:So she gave up once and for all in trying to get any answers or sense from this man. She tried being kind, empathetic, asking for face to face meetings to be able to talk, to understand, and to get herself some closure, but she was done.

35:02Speaker 1:A couple of weeks after that, a very very couple of rough few weeks May I add I hung out with a friend who worked with him doing carpentry, and he was saying that Daniel was actually on the job site for those few days, laughing at the fact I was still asking him to come and talk to me about everything that had just happened, and he was already shacked up with this nineteen year old girl. I think because it was around that time I was already starting to get that female complex about my age and time running out and you know, not looking how used to and it really really really bucked me up. And then, yeah, probably about three or four weeks after that, my best friend of fifteen years fired me from her best made Judy because I was too mentally unstable. And then that was the end of it, Like that was I don't know how I'm alive. The stuff with my partner had happened, then this stuff with you know, my best friend. I felt so abandoned. And because I don't have a good relationship with my family, my friends become my family. I honestly don't think I've ever been that sad in my entire life. I went a week without showering, and it

36:24Speaker 1:got to the point where I actually called the mental health access line for myself, just deep depression mess. I just really felt like every trauma about abandonment or not being good enough for any of that stuff, it had all just been solidified within this tiny little humans will just lie to you, even if they say they love you, they don't care. It just solidified all of it. And honestly, I don't even remember that period too well. It's all very blurry, but I think the week after that, I just decided I'm moving. I felt like my body couldn't handle how to stress and how sad and heavy and depressed I was, and I fight or flight, I guess, and I had chose to flight to another town. I quit my job, everything, and I moved myself, knowing how it was crazy. For months, I couldn't talk about it even a few words without bursting into tears. But then, obviously as a social worker, I started doing some research around kind of therapies that would be good to deal with this kind of trauma, and you know, if there was any frameworks out there, just having a squiz, and then I just discovered a women's health clinic that is

37:50Speaker 1:all government funded, that had a counseling service within the women's clinic that was specifically for straight women whose partners have sex with men. I got a counselor from there, and she was fucking awesome. I remember the first session with her and she was telling me how common it was, and I was just bulling because there was this period where I felt like I was in the pits of hell. No one could really help me, and I felt like it was literally all just me. But when she started to talk to me specifically, she would say things like Tessa, I said, here with women who are sixty and have four kids and six properties with a man and they find out he's been gay his whole life. I really started to feel like there was no one in the entire world that this had happened to. And I found a service that this was for and from the first session with my counselor, I was crying, but it was happy tears because she made me feel so seen and assured me that this is so common. It's very eye opening, to be honest, but just knowing that this happens to other people, and I remember the warm feeling. It gave

39:14Speaker 1:my heart because I'd been so emotionally ruined by it and it's such a shameful thing because you don't even want to tell people. But then the more I started telling people about it, the more I started hearing oh, yeah, that happened to me too, which was really interesting. Being a social worker, I worked alongside an occupational therapist and I went off the cough comment about it to her and she said, oh, that happened to me in my early thirties. Two was horrible. I was like, what tell me?

39:48Speaker 1:And I was just like, holy crap. So then I started getting really curious, got onto Facebook and I started finding support groups and I actually made a support group in Australia, which is cool. But there's so many support groups, and the stuff you read on there is you really start to realize how common it is. As for Daniel, still to this day, he hasn't reached out to me, He hasn't contacted me, nothing to say, hey, look, I want to acknowledge what happened and you know, just kind of have a conversation with me about it. It's really sad because I do believe there is a good person in there. It has just been dulled down by so many like demons, self hatred, shame, typical male things. I guess I hope he goes to therapy hates of it, and I hope that he just realizes that it's okay to let people in. And I think a lot of his stuff was a lot of self hatred that he hated himself, but he covered it in this you know, fake ego and big marcho man persona. And I would just like him to feel more connected to himself rather than connected to just his ego. That's yeah, Like I don't I don't wish any ill against him now. I

41:14Speaker 1:just yeah, I hope he gets what he needs. He still has two beautiful young boys that he needs to raise. What I did, still trying to be supportive of him. I wouldn't change it for the world because I can sleep well at night knowing that. I think a really big part of the healing was trying to focus on the fact he is a really unwell person and I'm never going to get any closure out of it. The only thing I can take as a benefit from it is lessons. The biggest one was probably don't mix love and chemistry. Don't put them in the same basket because they're both completely different and just how manipulate even scary people can be. I think was a really really big eye opener and just if something is wrong, and it's wrong because I knew this before I checked his phone.

42:13Speaker 1:I had a weird gut feeling about it, and I just let it go. Kept trying to tell myself, no, no, no, it's fine, it's fine because I wanted I was thirty, I wanted to have the husband and the kids, and but no more of that. It's yeah, just a really big reminder that you end up worse off if you ignore it. I honestly think that it was a lesson of kind of the universe, challenging my kindness and compassion and will you still be kind and compassionate after this and nonjudgmental? And I think it was a really good lesson and reminder to continue being like that. Because my thing is as long as I can go to bed every night knowing every action I took that day alignce with my moral compass as closely as possible, then I sleep good. Everyone else, that's their shit.

43:16Speaker 2:Everyone has an X. It's a MINTI Media production and proudly part of the Muma Mea Network. This episode is written and narrated by me Georgia Love and produced by Linda Scott. If you have a story you'd like to share, email podcast at momamea dot com dot au. You can support us by following the show in your favorite podcast app and leaving a five star review