A personal look at psychological abuse

Αt a friend’s house party last week I met a couple that brought back a few memories I had hoped to keep locked up, and now, huddled next to the radiator in my otherwise arctic flat, I try to write this for what seems like the hundredth time. I want to write about emotional abuse, its warning signs, and illustrate this all with my own experiences because looking back now, I feel like had I known what it was that was happening to me, I would have got out of there much, much earlier.

You don’t often hear people talk about emotional abuse, and in part, I think this is because sometimes neither the victim nor the abuser know it’s happening. Emotional abuse is a series of harmful, repetitive behaviours that slowly chip away at the victim’s sense of self worth and independence, making them dislike themselves. I, unfortunately, have experienced first hand what it’s like to be in a relationship with a manipulative and emotionally abusive person, and am living proof of how it can mess you up and leave you a mere shadow of what you once were. This is my story.

When I first started dating my then partner, I was a fairly confident person but he soon found a way to find my every insecurity and dig at it until I felt so horrible about myself that I no longer wanted to be alive. He was the first boyfriend I’d ever had – having come from a strict religious family, I wasn’t allowed to date. This meant that from the get-go, I had to hide my relationship from my parents because I was convinced they wouldn’t understand, and that was the first thing I did wrong. Initially, he insisted he wanted to keep our relationship a secret from our friends, because he wanted it to just be between us, because that would make it ‘more special’. The thing about manipulators is that they isolate you from others, and do it so subtly that you don’t often notice it happening until it’s too late. We’d been dating for almost a month until he decided to tell our close friends in halls, and that was after another friend of mine had expressed a desire to go out with me, an offer that I had denied. My boyfriend decided that it was time for people to know, because he didn’t want anyone else to think I ‘wasn’t his’. That should have been the first red flag. What emotionally manipulative and abusive people do is try and make you so dependent on them by isolating you from your friends and family that you start to believe they have some sort of claim on you, and worse, that you want them to have a claim on you.

Next came the ruining of my self esteem – it started subtly at first, as these things do, with small comments here and there. He would mock me in front of our mutual friends under the guise of ‘flirty banter’, try and counter my every point in group conversations and often cut me off when I would try and speak. When I would tell him, in private, that his actions were making me uncomfortable or upset, he mock me for being over sensitive, tell me to toughen up and learn to take a joke and that he didn’t mean to offend me. When we would go out with a group of people that I didn’t know, he never made any effort to introduce me as anything but his girlfriend, and by that point, he had whittled down my self confidence enough that I did not want to participate in conversations anymore in fear of being mocked or cut off. As time went by, it started to get less subtle. Whenever I would tell a joke, he would tell me that it wasn’t witty and would dismiss it, and then repeat later in a different group taking credit for it. A couple of times, I called him out on it, but he would claim that I was just misremembering it and he had come up with it on his own. He made me doubt myself so much that I couldn’t trust even my own memory after a while. Now, these are all clear signs of emotional abuse, when someone makes you doubt yourself so much that you no longer trust your own memory, there should be warning signs going off in your head.

Whenever I would mention that I had a problem with how he treated me, he would twist my words to make it seem like I was being needy, or childish, and make me feel like I was overreacting. He would make sure that I knew he was a great boyfriend by buying me presents, and constantly bring this up in arguments to make sure I never forgot that he obviously loved me and that I shouldn’t put him under so much stress when I know he’s so busy with work. He would refuse to speak to me until I apologised for overreacting. If you’re with someone who makes you think that the emotions you’re feeling due to something they’ve done are in some way unjustified, then that person is not worth being with. I cannot stress this enough, it doesn’t matter what the other person meant by their comments or actions, if you feel unsafe and bring this up, and they then constantly try and make you feel bad for feeling offended and refuse to apologise, then they’re not a very nice person.

Now, he was never physically abusive towards me and honestly it might have made it much easier to get out of that relationship if he had been. We’ve somehow been conditioned to think of physical and sexual abuse as being the only ‘legitimate’ types of abuse, which means it cost me three years and my mental health before I realised that something was amiss and that it wasn’t just me overreacting. Now, half a year later, after months of therapy I’ve slowly come to notice the signs and just wish someone had told me about them sooner. So I guess that’s what I’m doing now. If any of these situations seem familiar to you, then it might be worth thinking long and hard about your relationship (be it with a partner, parent, or friend).

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. Please remember that if you’re feeling under pressure, talk to someone. Don’t suffer in silence. – Section Editor