Let’s get right to it …
It’s not that you’re not happy with them anymore; there is still lots of love, still lots of bliss and passion and comfort in each other’s arms. It’s just that now your happiness needs to make room for something else, as well—a sinister and nameless presence that joins your happiness, the color of dried blood and the texture of an antique saw. If it could speak, it would bark.
You don’t like it and you don’t think your partner likes it either, yet still you ask yourself if they hate this thing so much then why do they keep inviting it over?
At first there are only disturbances every couple of weeks. Another harried, vile phone call, another ultimatum that seems to come out of nowhere. You fight, and these fights are frequently miserable, draining occasions. But you tell yourself that neither of you are attacking or insulting one another; you’re just having miscommunications, misreading, misunderstanding each other or you’re just two different people.
But this thing of prefixes again: mis is coming before every word now, offering excuses for every violation or misbehavior. That isn’t ideal, but you think you can live with it. You think every couple goes through rough patches.
What you’re not sure you can live with are the ambushes, the emotional bear traps they seem to be leaving under the foliage of your life together.
During an uncomfortable conversation, they tell you it’s okay to say what you’re thinking, and when you do so as tactfully as possible they either leave or lock themselves in the bathroom and wail in confused dismay about why you’re trying to hurt them so bad. At one point you let the bubbles in a bath dissolve too quickly, and while this is far from the worst fight it is easily the most ridiculous and the most symbolic. You start to feel like your walls can never come down.
Strangely they never seem to want distance or silence. When you suggest that maybe you should stop talking to each other over the weekend to cool off they tell you you’re “being dramatic.” The two of you agree that you’ll only discuss your issues in person so that there’s no chance of misinterpretation over the phone, but they end up calling you no matter what. “What good would that rule do anyway?” they ask you, at 4 in the morning, as a neighbor looks out their window and wonders if the loud shadow pacing back and forth by the gate is real or an unpleasant dream.
It gets to be that you never know when the next fight is coming, what it’s going to be about or how bad it’s going to be. You start going out of your way to avoid conflict at any cost. Your teeth melt together and your grind jaw shut at the first sign of distress. Every conversation is now like a scene in a shitty action movie where you’re the bomb technician with sweat pouring down his face, desperately trying to not cut the wrong wire. You’re not supposed to be this nervous all the time. It shouldn’t be this hard just to talk to someone you love.
Have you made mistakes? Yes, of course. Sometimes you have been insensitive, demanding or even cruel. You try to catch yourself every time you hurt their feelings and apologize as quickly as you can but you know you can’t account for everything. The only thing keeping you even moderately sane is your assurance that both of your hearts are in the right place. I don’t think we’re trying to hurt each other, they say, and you agree with them.
Until they try to hurt you.
Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad goes the last fight. No blows, no insults as such, but if you stay together it will never be the same. You have dragged yourselves past the breaking point like two drunks stumbling out of an Uber. When you come home from their apartment you learn that some of your relatives have been involved in a violent altercation and that their well-being is presently unclear. Your nerves are shot; it is impossible for you to form a coherent thought.
Then they text you: we seriously need to talk.
There’s nothing you want less than to talk. You have been talking for hours and all your words, desiccated things that they now are, have gone to waste. You tell them about your present mental state and that you might have to stop talking if you feel yourself getting emotional or uncomfortable. It doesn’t work. You fight again, and when you’re done they text you this:
“I want a long, detailed, well-written apology letter about why you’re a bad person. If you can’t or won’t do this I am never speaking to you again.”
You get right to work. You don’t think you’re a bad person but it doesn’t even occur to you not to write the letter. Because while you may not be a bad person in the commonly understood sense, i.e. one of low moral character, you are a desperate, broken one and this new nature you’ve adapted to commands that you obey. You might not be a bad person, but this, whatever this is, is unquestionably who you are now.
I accept your apology, they text you later.
This proves to be the worst part of all, when you read it you feel the relief of absolution. You’ve proven to yourself that you know the difference between a healthy relationship and a toxic one and that this distinction doesn’t matter to you anymore. Nothing is good enough to make up for how miserable they make you feel, and nothing is bad enough to make you leave. You don’t like any of it, but you will accept all of it.
To say it breaks would be to imply that it had once been whole. But it does end. Contemptibly (and predictably) you are not the one who ends it. Even after your forced reconciliation things don’t get back on track; you reach an agreement to push the relationship back to “casual dating” and after one week of that vague cease-fire they decide it isn’t working at all. You tell them that since you don’t want to talk to them in anger it might take some time for you to collect your thoughts and bring what you had together to closure.
You haven’t talked to them since. You probably never will again.
Until you realized that you were being manipulated you had no idea why you couldn’t seem to make yourself less angry at them, why the knife wouldn’t seem to stop twisting whenever you thought about both the good times and the bad ones. You didn’t realize the degree to which the emotional wounds and the constant worry and anxiety that you were being monstrous towards your partner had started to define your life. You wondered why it seemed like you couldn’t be “fair” and admit to your role in things not working out, why the fact that they didn’t seem to be intentionally violating your emotions didn’t make it easier for you to forgive them.
But all the instincts you buried while you were with them never went away; you muffled them, but they never stopped shouting at you. Now you can’t imagine how you were ever able to ignore such deafening cries. You marvel sadly at your own ability to turn things off.
I realize this has all been portrayed as being very dramatic, perhaps theatrically. That’s because to a certain degree I resisted the temptation to balance the scales when it comes to speaking about emotional abuse. One will feel as though they must be “fair” and talk about the ways in which their partner was sometimes nurturing and supportive as well as manipulative and cruel. It’s a painful thing to realize your partner’s positive qualities are irrelevant when discussing their abuse. You feel ever more like the embodiment of the villain they’ve painted you to be.
But the biggest step in recovering from emotional abuse is to realize that you have to stop telling the other person’s story and start telling your own. Because your experience and your truth are all you’ve got when the judgements subside and the wounds heal. And if there’s something you should learn from what you’ve been through. The damage of emotional abuse is psychological and you may have PTSD. For help go to National Institute for Mental Health.
Many blessings on your journey,
Paula
