So much enjoyment in my life comes from interaction with other people, be they family, friends, mere acquaintances or even complete strangers. Meeting people in the Hope Café here in Hove has been, and I trust will continue to be, interesting and rewarding. A year after I had started talking to Sami Gupta, who had been made bankrupt by the Post Office scandal (see PCs 235 and 271), he introduced me to a woman he had met on a tour of the Indian Mutiny sites in November 2022 (see PC 309). Lisa Wallace lives in Folding Over Sheet, up in the Derbyshire Peak District, and is a writer.
Celina and I had them both over for supper in March (PCs 329 & 330) and Lisa had mentioned that a couple of years ago her now ex-husband left for a new life with his secretary! Charmingly she had defined his actions as a cliché but you could tell by the way she had said it there had been some serious issues. Later she admitted siting his coercive behaviour in her divorce action and I made a mental note to find out more.
Lisa is currently at home working on an assignment so before I spoke to her by WhatsApp, I wanted to get up to speed with the issue that in the last decade has become main stream and rightly so.
In 2015 ‘Coercive Control Behaviour’ was defined in law as when a person with whom you are personally connected repeatedly behaves in a way which makes you feel controlled, dependent, isolated or scared. Sadly there are many examples of how this plays out, from isolating you from your friends and family, controlling how much money you have and how you spend it, monitoring your activities and your movements, repeatedly putting you down, calling you names or telling you that you are worthless, threatening to harm or kill you or your child etc etc. Those charged with coercive control will be guilty if, for instance, they knew or ought to have known that their behaviour would have a serious effect on you.
Lisa knows that I spent two decades assisting people to sort out what was inside their heads in a coaching capacity, so is not surprised by my first question:
“So, Lisa, can you tell me more about yourself?”
Well, I was born in 1976 up here in the Peak District. My parents were both teachers and I have a younger brother Simon who went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and got commissioned into the Royal Engineers. I did quite well at school, who wouldn’t with parents whose life was education (!) and got a place to read journalism at the University of East Anglia. Graduated in 1997 with a first, but found that most full-time positions needed ‘experience’ – the classic Catch 22!! Wind the clock forward to today and I write regularly for The Derbyshire Times and have a monthly column in the magazine Red!”
“I remember Red. My mother used to buy it: didn’t it launch in the late 90s?”
“Yes. Aimed at the ‘thirty something’ market and now an international brand. Occasionally I contribute to Grazia and have written a number of short stories about local relationship.”
“Why relationships?”
Lisa laughs and thinks. “Probably as I feel I have experienced a lot and not all of that experience was good.”
“This about your coercive relationship with Andrew?”
“You’ve heard that a frog dropped into a beaker of hot water leaps out, but put the frog into a beaker of cold water, gradually heat it up and the frog dies? Coercive behaviour is just like that; someone also compared it to living in a house with a boiler leaking Carbon Monoxide. It’s as dangerous and possibly fatal.
I recognise now that I always go for the posh, broken guy and my heart says I need to fix them. Andrew was like that and, you know Richard, it went on for years and years. We didn’t live together but spent a huge amount of time in each other’s houses. One evening he had a supper party, some of my friends and some of his. Andrew felt very entitled, would ‘love-bomb’ me for weeks then turn and accuse me of sleeping around. Anyway this particular evening he got very jealous of my friends, who were confidently talking about their love of work, bringing me up-to-date, as this conflicted with his own lack of a work-ethic. I could see he was becoming very agitated, which was worrying as he never knew when he should stop drinking.
The party ended after midnight and, as I was loading his dishwasher, he grabbed me by my hair, which was quite a lot longer then, and pulled me upstairs to bed.
“I’m going to teach you a lesson, you cunt, flirting with my friends, avoiding me ….”
And he got out this riding crop and started hitting me. In extremis I can be quite physical so I guess we rolled about on the bed, Andrew trying to hit me, me pushing him off and still trying to reason with him. He would have raped me if he hadn’t had so much to drink and couldn’t get an erection so, in a moment of frustration, he put his knee between my breasts, put both hands around my throat and squeezed. I wriggled free twice but he just pulled me back. Eventually I fled out into the street, bleeding from the wounds inflicted by the riding crop, and bumped into an elderly chap who was walking his terrier. As he put his coat around my shoulders he called the police; I was absolute jelly! Andrew was arrested but, do you know what, I felt really embarrassed and wouldn’t press charges. I now know that’s normal, both of us worried about losing the relationship and he not recognising what he had done.
Since then I have been involved with RISE (note 1) and am undergoing therapy for PTSD.”
“It must be so difficult to have any relationship afterwards, so wary of meeting others, so suspicious! Then you met bankrupt Sami! In India of all places!”
(The story doesn’t end here!)
Richard 19th May 2023
Hove
Note 1 “RISE is an innovative staff-led mutual that designs and delivers behavioural change programmes and new approaches. Our work can be used in the criminal justice system and community to transform the lives of individuals, families and communities.”
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