Posted: 2025-10-20

From Adolf To Me With Love

I had been speaking with some friends about what I had gone through in a challenging relationship, and one of them pointed out that there was a direct through-line from Adolf Hitler to how I was abused. Looking from the outside, it is actually a remarkable story, and worth sharing. I will try to share the minimum to get the point across.

This ex's family are from the Polish diaspora. They were not Jewish, but several members of their family were active in the resistance against the Nazis. Her grandmother was captured and sent off to Russian Gulag camps. I'm not totally across how they ended up in Australia, and it's not terribly relevant. I was told that my ex's mother was beaten on a regular basis until she discovered that her father was not her father, and that she saw herself as the black sheep.

What kind of milieu does that provide for someone? What is the prime survival directive?

Fit in at all costs. Look respectable at all costs. Life and death.

When the Nazis come, who gets the bullet? The scrappy eccentric disabled person, or the respectable upstanding middle class professional? Should we move Heaven and Earth to present as one and not the other?

My ex's family were not sympathetic to fascism, but the echoes of what the matriarchs went through continued.

The relationship was full of forceful interventions to change how I appeared.

Family dos were a constant stream of being elbowed and my foot stamped on by my ex and asked "spacing out?" "do you need caffeine?" "do you need food?" "wake up!" because the fact that I wasn't actively engaged in conversation at all times was a giant problem that urgently needed to be solved. (NB. I am quite a good conversationalist but this crap made it basically impossible)

At home, my ex listened in (as much as she could) to sessions with my care team. When I spoke about how she had been treating me there were explosions and fire: "what are you telling people?!" Image first. Manage image even with the people whose job it is to listen and solve problems. But solving many many many problems is something I did more than anyone else.

One hundred percent of visits to government support offices were punctuated with my ex repeatedly announcing at the top of her voice that I can't just sit there like a victim because I am a genius programmer and businessperson and going to make millions of dollars and what am I even doing here.

Responses to my inventions were invariably some variation of "wow! Show that to a large corporation and they'll give you a really good job!"

When I had gained a "respectable middle class office job", the long curly hair that my ex used to delight in somehow transmuted into something "disgusting and greasy" which "makes you look fatter and older." Cut it short. Look the way you're expected to look.

The nature of my conditions is that I've got maybe 12 months of full time work in me before I crash and burn horribly. When I got a stable secure job, discussing quitting at that point became simply unacceptable. When I said I was in extremely serious trouble and had to stop immediately, she trotted out a wide range of deflections: "that's what you said last week", "has your manager said anything?", "your bipolar's gotten so much better these days!", "you just don't believe in yourself", "all you can do is try", "you work for (large organisation)! Just get transferred to a different department." etc etc ad nauseum.

She enlisted a group of people who resented their own work to join in: "burnout sucks for everyone", "you come across as condescending", "you're forgetting that not everyone gets a choice" and so on. Every single resentment around what they were forced to do became my problem, and the idea that I might get an out felt deeply unfair to them. This fitted my ex's narrative: you achieved the goal, you can't just give it up for something silly like your multiple profound mental illnesses!

The closest I ever got to recognition of how much trouble I was in was effectively Go Get Intensive Treatment And Fix Yourself, Then Back To The Grind. Obviously that's not how it works.

Being able to proudly introduce your husband as a "software engineer for (a large organisation you've heard of)" was peak image. "He is turning up to work and doing absolutely nothing because the job has profoundly fucked his health up" was easy to sweep under the rug in those conversations. She was fucking hell-bent on me staying in that particular job at all costs.

When I eventually managed to exit the role, she became actively hostile and her behaviour escalated. I ended up fleeing when she became physical.

I also need to be 100% clear that we did not need the money. We had a fully paid off house and would have been quite comfortable on one income.

The aftershocks of fascism still reverberated in all of this, two generations and the better part of a century later. Health, safety, finances and situational stability all took a distant back seat to appearance, because it was within living memory that appearance was life and death.

The situation in the US right now is turning into one which will create the same ripple effects. What I lived through was a tiny and narrow slice of fascism's aftermath, and it provides a window into the reality of what liberal democracy backsliding really means.

This story isn't a metaphor. It's a real-world example of how the survival behaviours learned under fascism can be passed on through many generations and still cause harm long after the regime is dismantled. Sometimes evil does not endure as an ideology, but as a habit.

I was expected to be the breadwinner and the social worker and the housekeeper and also be the punching bag.

This is an example of the stories which people who are focused on appearance will find any conceivable reason to bury and attack and criticise. We say these stories are personal and private. But it happened, and if we do not air our dirty laundry it will endlessly fester in the cupboard. Transparency is how society learns to do better.

You did a better job than the people who are paid to do this for a living. People. Teams of people. One person can't possibly be expected to do that."

Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2025-10-20

Written on: 10mg olanzapine since 2025-07-20, 7.5mg before that - likely causing severe cognitive impairment

Mental health was: poor - estimate 20% brain