TRIGGER WARNING: Emotional abuse.
I never thought it would happen to me.
I was strong, independent, and confident in my sexuality. When I read books I could not empathize with the characters that could not leave abusive relationships. “Why don’t they just go?” To be honest, I thought I was “stronger and better” than them.
I wasn’t.
The end of my senior year of college was a maelstrom of emotion. The economy crashed. I started looking at the Navy because there weren’t any jobs left in my field, and I had four years of enormous student loans waiting in the wings. I got involved with guys who were only using me because they could not get the girl they really wanted. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life. Frankly, I was a mess.
Along came “J.” I had known him for the past several years; we were in the same theater. He had just gone through a messy breakup and needed a friend as badly as I did. Friendship grew into something more, and we started dating that summer. It was blissful in the way that all new relationships are for the first few months. Then my roommate got a job in Texas and left almost overnight, leaving me struggling to pay the rent alone. It was a mistake to move in with J so early in our relationship, but it made sense at the time. We were sleeping in the same bed almost every night, and it seemed like a waste to pay for two apartments.
I can look back now and see that we rushed things; that moving in together triggered a lot of our later troubles at the same time that it convinced us that we had to just work through them. It created a commitment that neither of us was ready for, and it led me to become emotionally dependent on him.
The fights started almost immediately after we moved my stuff. They were little things at first, the sort of thing that an hour of space and some make-up sex could fix. Soon, however, they were big enough to interrupt my job — a data-entry position that I loathed. We decided that the job was to blame, and I quit. The freelance work I was able to pull in at the time was only enough to cover my loan payments, but J said he was happy to help. I was now financially dependent on him as well.
The fights did not stop. I should point out that they were never physical fights; they were screaming matches, mostly. Because I was raised in a household where you had to raise your voice to be heard, I usually walked away from these fights feeling like the bad guy because I had been louder, more aggressive than he.
Meanwhile, we moved several times, got a cat, and got close to a group of my friends from college. We met each other’s parents, talked about the future, called our apartment a home. At least, that’s what we showed the outside world.
Behind closed doors, we were a mess. We fought. He withheld sex. I lost jobs. I lost contact with my old friends. I even began to see hanging out with our local friends as an ordeal. We were both convinced that our shared misery was my fault because of my depression.
The few times that I considered leaving, I thought better of it: Our friends preferred him over me, as did my parents. No one would believe me if I told them the truth, and I was convinced that no one would help me otherwise. I started referring to myself as “broken.” Any self confidence that I had was wrapped up in how he saw me, and I was convinced that he was only with me out of pity, and that I should have been grateful.
I know when the turning point was; the point where I realized that it wasn’t all my fault…
I can pinpoint it exactly. We were hanging out with old friends after a wedding, and I found myself constantly pushed to the outside of the group so that J could flirt with an ex-girlfriend. I would have written it off to keep from appearing jealous, but the groom, who had been a close friend of mine in college, noticed it and asked if everything was okay. It was the first time anyone had noticed that anything was wrong. I said everything was fine, of course, but the moment stuck with me, and on the car ride home the next day, I confronted J about it.
I don’t know why I stood up for myself that day, but we had never had a fight so big. At one point I got out of the car and walked aimlessly off into some Connecticut suburb, just knowing that I had to get out. But nothing was fixed that day. He apologized, so I apologized, and we went home, presumably where things were going to get better. I really believed that they would get better from that point.
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They didn’t.
Then things hit rock bottom. J took four days off of work to “try to mend things between us,” and spent them trying to passive-aggressively crush me back into the subservient little broken thing I had been before that wedding. I did not have any emotional energy left to fight with, which, consequently, meant that I didn’t have any emotional energy left to fear calling up my parents and asking to move home. Even then, I could not bear to tell them the truth.
I’m living in my old bedroom in their house now, trying not to fall back into high school habits after having an apartment for the last eight years, and trying to come to terms with the past four and a half years of mistakes.
Five years ago, I would have scoffed and said “I’d just leave a relationship that was not working out, never mind one where I was being emotionally or physically abused.” Back then, I was confident in myself and my judgement. No more.
You never realize just how thoroughly your world can be turned on its head, how easy it is to find yourself willfully trapped in a position that you swore you would never get taken in by. I never realized it.
In a way, writing this is an affirmation of sorts; it’s forcing me to admit the truth, despite the parts of me that would rather just bury it and start over. I’m lucky that the scars will be emotional instead of physical. I’m lucky that I was able to get out, lucky that I was given a chance to heal. There are so many other people who don’t get that chance.
You hear so much about amicable breakups, or the angry ones where everyone moves on with their respective social circles… but this? This is the sort of thing you expect to see on Lifetime original movies, not in real life. Not in your life.
I never thought it would happen to me.
Wow. Me, too. I was a very smart but naive farm girl in honors classes in university, desperate to do ANY thing else because I was so uncomfortable and intimidated with the whole “fitting in” thing. In the 80’s you had to be preppy; or have half your head shaved, and the rest dyed green. So when I met a guy and we fell MADLY in love, I quit college to move to his country and live with him. When he started acting possessive, needy, suicidal(disappearing for days) or throwing things at me, I was just mad and confused. I couldn’t call the police because I assumed I would be deported. For two years everything was either great or insanely horrible.
I met a woman at a mall who saw 2 minutes of how he treated me, and when he left she explained what abuse was, that coercing me into having sex was still abusive, and the clouds cracked open and I could see. Weeks later he left to visit friends out of town on Valentine’s Day!HAHA!, trudging through 8″ of snow to catch his ride… (My last view of him was rather pathetic.) I waited an hour after he left with the house dark, in case the bus didn’t come. Then I turned on the radio and Annie Lennox’s “Would I Lie To You? was the first song, I took it as a sign I was doing the right thing. I still do, 28 years later.
With all my house possessions sold to neighbors, I had almost enough money to take the bus 36 hours(1300 miles) to get home. I stayed with this woman I barely knew, and her husband checked the bus station every few days, and the unemployed asshole was there for every bus that was going my direction. After 2 weeks we decided to drive two hours south to get on the bus at the next stop.
It took five years for me to be alone in a car with a man. When I read “Sophie’s Choice” I finally understood just how bipolar he was. Another 20 years for me to get that diagnosis for myself. So, yes, when it was good, it was very very good (we were both high) but when it was bad it was AWFUL! (Both of us suicidal & evil). Now amateur psychology is my favorite hobby.
Of all ways to mend myself, the best was a bar of soap. I had a special facial bar because of a skin condition, and I only swiped 2 wet fingers across it every morning and night. I decided when the soap was gone I was fixed. Again, 5 years, but a tiny reminder day and night that I was further away from the insane past.
About 20 years later I went to an acupuncturist for depression and back pain. He looked inside my ear and said, “when did you have major back trauma?” First-seriously? you can see that in an ear? Then I remembered asshole kicking me out of bed with both feet in the small of my back. I flew out of bed and hit the wall with my face. I had blocked that memory. Another scar shows whenever I put on eyeliner, so I have to do that an hour before leaving the house, so it fades by then…
So now I’m suspicious of all men who show a small sign of possessiveness, trying to isolate their women, with snide little comments, and I have two friends that I’m just worried about. It’s SO HARD to understand when you are inside the relationship, and SOOOO easy for other people to see a few disturbing signs.
The first several years after I left I was very worried that I looked like a victim, that every man interested in me was also an abuser. Because if they can tell I’m abusable, I’m more attractive to them psychologically. It took 23 years for me to find a decent man, but while dating I treated a lot of men like shit, to get over my issues, and test their sanity.
So my advice to anyone is leave in any way possible. Vacation with a friend, stay anywhere else, go to the beach for a day, and take a look at your life from a distance. Would you let a friend stay in your life? Can you imagine a life where your partner DOESN’T make you feel like shit on a daily basis? Imagine a happy life, with no shitty asshole ruining your life, and start to move in that direction. Friends, social agencies, the YWCA are all waiting to help.
Dear gods.
Firstly, Jes, thank you for sharing your experience. I know how… wrong? dramatic? strange? it can feel to look back and admit that, yes, that was an abusive relationship. The exact details were a little different, as they are bound to be, but I almost could have written this post about my own experience. I think that most of us never believe it would happen to us. I watched a friend in high school go through an emotionally abusive relationship because her self-esteem was so low that the negative attention from a boy was better than none. I thought to myself that, in spite of my own self-esteem issues, I’d never stand for that. Then it happened. I can’t go into detail because this is my main handle, but suffice to say I fell into such a deep depression that I was sleeping until 2pm on a regular basis, barely getting out of bed because my life was so bleak that it didn’t seem worth it, contemplating suicide daily, and making excuses not to see people because he got upset when I did ANYTHING without him.
When I finally left, it was hard for me to admit it was abuse, but it’s important for strong women to be able to own that these things happen to us, too, lest other strong women bullheadedly persist in believing that it can’t happen to them, even as it IS happening. It doesn’t make you weak to have fallen for an abuser’s practiced, false charms. It makes you strong for seeing it, formulating a plan, and getting out.
This is a great article, a great story, and thank you so much for sharing.
I’m so, so glad that you got out of that situation and that you chose to share your story with others.
The thing about emotional abuse is…it’s hard to recognize. Physical abuse, you know it’s wrong the first time it happens. Emotional abuse, there is always that part of you that doubts. Like, am I just being sensitive? Is this in my head? And the support level from people in your life is different, too, in my experience. “He systematically wore down my self esteem and personality until I was a ghost of myself” is a lot harder for people to understand and empathize with than “he hit me”. Especially if it’s a shared friend group.
I hope you find a good, supportive group of friends to help you and that your life continues to get better from now on.
How is OP’s relationship abusive per se? A shitty relationship, sure, I can see that, that’s obvious. But how is it abusive? How did he abuse you? OP never mentions him manipulating her outright or anything of that nature. The closest thing is when she says he gets all passive aggressive after the wedding, which, hell, could have been an honest attempt to fix things.
Sounds to me like it was just a crappy situation, not his fault or her fault, but both of them.
I debated responding to this message for a couple of hours. I’ve spent a long time trying to get to a point where I don’t feel as if I need to defend myself against this sort of thing, but I think someone needs to respond. K, your comment is so indicative of the hurtful response that I got from the friends and family that I had hoped would support me, and I know I’m not the only victim that has had to face this attitude. But, it’s not like anyone is going to learn differently unless someone says something, so here goes.
In my particular case, I have come to accept that certain behaviors on J’s part were abuse (and not something that I inherently deserved). He created a system of punishments to control me (which began with withholding sex and grew to include verbal tirades about how I was ruining his life that lasted for hours until I was malleable enough for him to get what he wanted). He isolated me from my friends and family. He manipulated my moods and blamed me for his actions to the point of pushing me to self-harm and suicide (not idly, but directly). He perpetuated an environment where I was dependent on him mentally, emotionally, and financially. He repeatedly tried to convince me that everything he was doing was fine, acceptable, and normal (gaslighting, essentially, though I did not know the term until later), and that if I told anyone, they would believe him, not me. He did everything in his power to convince me that I was worthless, unloveable, and broken, and that he was doing me a favor by remaining with me.
After four years, I was a shadow of a person, an object he could control. It will take years for me to heal from those ingrained wounds and habits. And even if he never meant to start down that path, he had many, many chances to stop and chose not to. His actions even recently have included attempts to manipulate my mood to get what he wants. This is and was abuse.
If I can, let me point you towards some resources to learn more about emotional abuse and psychological trauma in intimate relationships:
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/02/20/signs-of-emotional-abuse/
http://www.loveisrespect.org/is-this-abuse/types-of-abuse/what-is-emotional-verbal-abuse
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/domestic_violence_abuse_types_signs_causes_effects.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/ipv_surveillance/11_section34.htm
I’m sure others have better sources as well.
Jes, this is such a brave and mature response, but I’m so sorry anyone asked you this. No one should make you feel that you owe them every detail of a painful situation so that THEY can decide if YOUR relationship was abusive.
Well then. I’m sorry you had to suffer such emotional abuse.
Still, your original article never really made mention of any of this. All that had to be done was mention what he actually did, as opposed to simply declaring the situation abusive.
Jes,
Thank you for providing some further explanation, although I’m sorry you felt you had to. I’m glad you did, because my initial thought when reading the post was ‘I do some of those things, and I’ve never considered them abusive’.
I have verbal fights with my husband sometimes.
If we’ve been fighting and it isn’t yet resolved, I have been known to ‘withhold sex’ (in the sense that I don’t want it).
I subsidise my husband financially at the moment (in order to allow him to pursue a path that isn’t currently financially profitable, but which will in the long term achieve mutually beneficial long term goals).
I can get emotional and upset, and I have a tendency (which I’m working on) to express myself in a passive aggressive way when I feel like that.
There are other things you mentioned that we don’t do (we don’t push each other aside to flirt with other people is one that jumps out) and for sure the emotional environment we have is not one that makes either of us feel worthless, in fact rather the opposite. Both my husband and I are very happy in our relationship, so I decided it was fine.
Still, I am glad to hear that there were other behaviours that went into you being able to identify the relationship as abusive rather than just the ones I mentioned above. I wouldn’t want to feel that someone who’s not us would look at our relationship from the outside and say it was abusive.
Writing this reply I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that it perhaps isn’t particular actions that make a relationship emotionally abusive, but particular attitudes. Either way, thank you for being brave enough to share your experience.
I know this was posted a long time ago, but thank you for this response, and the article. It really helps to read other people’s accounts, especially since to this day, I still wonder and worry if I am accusing my ex wrongly. I got out of an emotionally abusive relationship over 2 years ago. And it’s been really hard- I’ve been accused of overreacting by a particular group of our mutual friends. Sometimes it’s not outright, just little remarks in conversations, but it’s obvious they’re unhappy with me.
As a result, I have gone back and forth between questioning whether or not I was emotionally abused. It’s hard because although our friends know how bad his temper is, they don’t quite understand why I have accused him so harshly. They don’t make the connection between his incredible temper (which regularly resulted in very public, humiliating bouts of yelling at me – usually about “big-picture” issues, but still managing to insult my friends, family, opinions, etc. And of course, he was never wrong.) and how it translates behind doors.
Then there’s the other camp of mutual friends- the ones who were closer to our relationship and had experienced abuse themselves. They are constantly reassuring me that I’m not wrong in calling it emotional abuse. At one point they even held an intervention for me. I question my claim because I didn’t experience the isolation or financial dependency that occurs in some relationships, so some days I just don’t know what to think, and worry about “crying wolf”. That’s why articles and re-counts like this are reassuring in that they are still similar to my own experiences. I’m also curious, how have other people handled that situation? Have any of you had mutual friends who don’t believe your side? What did you do?
This line stuck out to me: “I even began to see hanging out with our local friends as an ordeal. ” I was emotionally and verbally abused by a friend in middle school, and one of her favorite tactics was to keep me from spending time with mutual friends without her around. She even dated a mutual friend that I was fairly close to; he and I sat next to each other in one class and walked part of the way home after school. I even tried to find him a girlfriend a couple times She kept me from talking to him while they were dating, and even after they broke up our friendship was not as close as it had been. In any case, restricting contact with other people is manipulative, and if nothing else I see that very clearly in this story.
Thank you for posting this! I know it’s scary and kind of shameful to admit that you had this happen.
I had an 7-year abusive relationship that I still have to deal with the repercussions, 5 years later. The details of my abuse doesn’t matter, but I wanted to let you know a few things you might find helpful in your healing process:
Please just keep in mind that if you choose to go to group therapy or talk to other victims, you may fall into the cognitive trap of minimizing what you went through. Abuse isn’t a competition, and your experience isn’t any less valid because of what others have had to go through. Remember, you’ve been in the habit of dismissing/minimizing the abuse.
I found it extremely helpful to read “Why does he do that,” which covers other types of abusers than the typical stereotype. It’ll also help you pick up on red flags to watch for in later relationships! I also found it helpful to have a rigorous vetting process of family and friends that knew what I went through; sometimes having an external source support your decisions is enough to cut through the “Oh god am I screwing up again” panic.
Thank you again for sharing! I’m sorry you had to go through this, but it gets so, so much better. It takes a lot of hard work and time to break yourself of habits/thought patterns learned from that long of a toxic relationship. Don’t be too hard on yourself for not “getting over it” – recovery doesn’t have a time limit. And it’s okay to explore what and who you want, no matter your age.
Thankyou for writing this post. I know that my experience in an abusive relationship taught me a lot about how powerful vulnerability is. It’s what makes good relationships amazing and the bad ones traumatic.
I’d spent many years in denial that (no matter what others might say or think about the subject) being coerced into sexual acts IS rape. There’s no scale for how much something counts, or for whether it’s fair to call it that if he was your partner – it is what it is.
If there’s one thing I plan to pass onto the next generation, it’s a frank and honest discussion about how easy it is for people to start embodying abusive behaviour without recognising it, and for a “strong” person to find themselves in a situation they thought they’d never get into.
Respect, consent, and love – that’s all we need for stories like ours to be a thing of the past.
Thank you for this. I was in an abusive relationship beginning my senior year of high school that lasted a couple of years on and off. Looking back, I was clearly mimicing behavior I witnessed from my mother and her live-in fiance (who was also terrible to us kids.) I never really told my mom the whole story because she is still so unsympathetic to victims of abuse. She doesn’t get why they don’t just leave. When I have tried pointing out that she was in a pretty horribly abusive relationship, she just denies the whole dynamic. On some level, I guess I get that its a coping mechanism for her, but its a really shitty one because it has made her unsympathetic to both her daughters when they got into bad relationships. I am not really sure how to convince her otherwise, but it has severely strained our relationship.
this resonates with me so much. My dad was an emotionally abusive control freak. I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me, that I was fat, stupid, and ugly as he always told me. I had no self-esteem to speak of. He was very charming to others, if I told someone the things he would do/say, they wouldn’t believe me, I was just being a difficult teenager. For years my mother and I thought we were crazy. We were constantly told we misheard his passive aggressive nasty remarks, that everything he did was for the good of the family and we were too dumb to understand. He’d get angry and withhold affection and kindness if we disagreed with him. He only ever told me he loved me when he wanted something. I cut my hair short a month before I turned 18 and he was so angry he didn’t speak to me for weeks. Not one word. Didn’t even wish me a happy birthday when I turned 18 which absolutely destroyed me. As a teenager, I WISHED he’d hit me so I could go to someone with proof of how evil he was, how fucked up is that?
It’s taken years to get to where I am now. I decided really early on that I wouldn’t let it define me. It affects me, but I won’t let it control me. I work on identifying my screwed up behaviors and adjusting them. I shut down and stop communicating when stressed, it’s not healthy but I’m working on changing that. My partner is amazingly supportive
I’ve cut my dad out of my life completely. Last conversation my dad and I had, he didn’t understand why I didn’t want to spend time with him- I started listing all his manipulative behavior and emotional abuse, I was told I was “crazy” and my mother was manipulating me.
Emotional abuse fucks with your head. You are not crazy, you deserve so much better. Surround yourself with people who aren’t friends with your ex, that like you for YOU and don’t doubt your word.
Wow, so didn’t mean to make it this long. I still am dealing with some issues I see!
Omg, as if the title wasn’t enough to reel me in, after the first paragraph it was like “omg are you writing about my life?!” down to the Baby part O.o seriously. I spent 7 years as the playtoy of a psychopath, despite having observed physically abusive relationships as a child. That made me more resistant to the fact, not less. But for now I am going to read the rest of this, probably in awe.
It took me moving 1200 miles away from everyone I knew (except my boyfriend) for me to realize that my relationship was not just unhealthy but had crossed into abusive territory. It never occurred to me that manipulation is a form of abuse, that words can be a form of abuse, that constant cheating can be abuse. It certainly never occurred to me that I could be abused. It happened slowly. We fought, I hated the idea of anyone being upset with me so I apologized, a pattern was formed. He talked to other girls, I was hurt, he promised he loved me the most, I accepted, a pattern was formed. He stopped working, I supported him, a pattern was formed. Then one day I realized I was silently screaming inside my head. It took me a year to get up the nerve to break things off and stick with it. I actually bought him a plane ticket out of my life.