STORY OF SURVIVAL
Author’s escape from abuse
The Full Catastrophe: A Memoir Karen Elizabeth Lee She Writes Press
ERIC VOLMERS
On the morning of her interview with the Calgary Herald, Karen Lee received an email from a woman who had just read her book, The Full Catastrophe: A Memoir.
She wrote that it was amazing how close Lee’s story was to hers, says Lee, in an interview from her home in Calgary.
Authors generally like it when readers can relate to their work. But given that the book is largely about domestic abuse, the frequency with which she hears similar sentiments is a little unnerving.
“The first thing (the book) does when women read it is give you the sense you are not alone,” said Lee. “That’s how I felt. I felt as if I was the only person in the world going through this. That’s why I wrote the book.
“I wrote the book because I wanted women to pick it up and hopefully get enough insight to say, ‘I don’t have to put up with this anymore.’ ”
While she may have started the book as an exercise of self-discovery, it has become clear her story wasn’t singular as she had always suspected. During her second marriage, Lee was wealthy, successful and cultured. So was her husband, who she calls Duncan in the book.
She returned to school and became a psychologist in 1991, but she had trouble unravelling a fundamental question about her own life.
“There were a lot of questions I still had about my own past and about how a person from a non-violent family, intelligent and capable, ended up with not one but two very different, but very controlling and eventually abusive men,” she said. “I really didn’t have the answer to that, even though I had gone to therapy and I felt healed. I felt happy. But it was kind of a compulsion to look back and see what really happened here. How did that happen?”
While The Full Catastrophe is a book about domestic abuse, it is also about healing. From her upbringing as a sheltered child in rural Ontario, to the physical abuse of her first marriage and the psychological and emotional abuse of the second, Lee said revisiting her life was therapeutic, perhaps even a little cathartic.
Now retired and remarried, this time to a man she calls “a gem,” Lee said she was in a good place mentally to re-examine her life, but that didn’t make it easy.
“I cried a lot of tears,” she said. “I kept a lot of journals when I was going through my second marriage. I have 14 journals from that second marriage. My retreat was to write.”
Lee said she realizes now how her past contributed to her marrying the wrong men. There was a domino effect. She was raised on a farm in rural Ontario, where her strict parents rarely socialized and kept the family living an insular, “hermit-like” existence.
As a result, she was unprepared for the world when she went to university. That was where she met her first husband, who she calls Joe. They married and had children. But his reluctance to be a family man eventually evolved into outright abuse, which would turn physical.
After leaving her first husband, she quickly met her second. Duncan was a cultured, well educated man who was nevertheless a bully who mentally and emotionally terrorized his wife, even as they found success in Calgary by starting their own management consulting firm.
“It’s the notion of what is being called, for want of a better term, upscale abuse,” she said. “In other words: a well educated home, … fancy vacations, a full-length mink coat, beautiful home — people say ‘domestic abuse couldn’t be happening in that home.’ The women who have enough money to shop at the fanciest stores and have lovely jewelry, it’s not supposed to happen to women like that.”
They eventually left for England, where Duncan got a good job at a university. Outwardly, her world seemed perfect. But the abuse — yelling, belittling, flights of rage — continued. Just when Lee began thinking about divorce, Duncan was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The Full Catastrophe begins with his funeral in England, and a gnawing realization that his absence in her life did not mean all her demons were at bay. So she began the long process of self-discovery and healing.
“I went through a lot of — I realize now — unnecessary regret,” she said. “I can’t change that happened. When my first marriage ended, I didn’t heal. After my first husband left I was traumatized, both by physical abuse and the fact that I was left with two tiny children — they were three and five. I had a job for $20,000 a year. I lost the house we had. It was just a traumatic time.
“When I look back I think, how did I ever survive? But I didn’t heal. I was traumatized.
“Two to three months later, this man comes into my life He’s handsome, he’s well educated, he wanted to look after us, he had a great job in the oilpatch, he was worldly …. He seemed, on the surface, an ideal partner.”
Lee said her training as a psychologist eventually helped her with her own healing process, but it was particularly useful when it came to writing her memoir.
“Not only was I able to tell the story, but I was also able to informally do a psychological portrait of my healing process,” she said.
“One of things about my book is you get right inside my head with what I was thinking at the time. I did the very thing I couldn’t do when I was in the marriages. I was able to step outside myself and see with a much greater perspective.”