.docx My emotionally ab*sive relationship

by Bianca St Pierre

NB: .docx is a segment where writers can express their true experiences to encourage others to speak about their own. Readers are advised to continue at their own discretion and heed trigger warnings.

TW: emotional ab*se, s*icide references

Usually, when I write I listen to music, because it’s calming, but for something as serious as this, I wanted to give it my full attention. Besides, after a trauma, it’s common to report overwhelming sound constantly in your head as you try to process everything that’s going on. If you’ve ever dived into the bottom of the swimming pool and stayed down there for a little too long as you strive to reach the other side without coming up for air, you’ll know the feeling. It’s unbearably loud, even though you know it’s really completely silent. You feel at peace in the water even though you know you need to breathe as the water pressure is pushing against your head and inside your ears. This kind of numb pressure is how it feels in my head every single time I think about my relationship.

And it’s a whole year later.

The biggest myth I think that needs debunking about abusive relationship is the meaning of the word “abusive” itself. We have an image of an older, violent man, beating a younger, helpless woman. But much like sexual assault and mental health problems, being in an abusive relationship can happen to anyone. Luckily, once you are confident in recognising and walking away from them with your head held high, you can put chances on your side.

Abuse takes many different forms, but the most common are sexual, physical, verbal and emotional. In fact, physical abuse is the most recognised because of the visible marks it leaves and the tangibility of the pain, you know immediately what has happened, even if you are too scared to label it as anything other than a “one off” or “bad temperament”. Despite this, emotional abuse is actually the most common.

Emotional abuse is sneaky because it catches up on you and clouds your better judgement. The whole points is that it is often subtle and manipulative, so that you don’t recognise it. I thought I knew better when I entered into this relationship even though there had already been red flags; dragging me away from my friends into a clearing in the woods to persuade me to date his best friend, for example, even though when sober I had made my mind up that no, I didn’t like him.

I was smart, hardworking and down to earth, so never in my wildest dreams did I think something like this would happen to me. But that’s why emotional abuse is so dangerous: because by the time you realise it’s happening, it’s often far too late, and you’re a million miles deeper in that you thought you were.

Spoiler, though: you still have the strength to get out. The biggest step is deciding that you want to.

It’s all the little things that make you let people get away with emotional abuse, because every small thing doesn’t seem worth making an argument over, but it all adds up. It’s every time they insulted you then told you to calm down even though what they said was way out of line. It’s telling you your friends don’t really like you and that they conveniently heard them talking smack about you, because their word is law and therefore indisputable evidence. It’s every single time they give you the silent treatment, or glared at you in front of all your friends when you said something, or scowled at you and blocked you out of the circle you were standing in.

Because it all adds up until, feminist that you are, when they tell you you’re spineless, now you believe them. You never would have before you met them, you would have ignored it because you would have known how far it was from the truth. Now, when they blame your long-lasting friend’s attempted suicide, twice, wholly on you, you believe them. Even when they’re yelling it in your face and you’re sobbing into your hands.

And yes, this is 100% based off my real experiences.

The easiest way to describe an abusive relationship is therefore as a monster. Much like a mythical hydra (a creature with many heads that only increase) it can feel like addressing one problem will only spark two others, and this is in fact what stops many women, like me, from reporting this to an authority, be that the school, your parents, their parents, or the police.

Without wanting to seem pretentious, Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” comes to mind here, when Juliet describes her man as a “serpent hid with a flowering face”. Imagine if every head of this monster seemed like something innocent and appealing. Just because you’ve discovered one toxic behaviour, doesn’t mean you can see the whole picture. Every single toxic trait and disrespectful attitude is its own battle to discover and ultimately tackle.

It’s exactly as exhausting as it sounds. Just as strenuous.

It even takes months to recognise, and even when (when, not if) you find the courage and self-respect to leave the relationship and find safety, you might start to doubt yourself and even want to go back. Don’t. It wasn’t your fault then, and it still isn’t now. Tomorrow it won’t be either.

Every time you think about them from that moment on, you’ll discover more and more things that were wrong in the relationship. You’ll eventually build up the full picture in your head, and this can honestly take years so don’t expect it to necessarily happen in one flash of life where suddenly you see your whole relationship clearly in all its fear and denial.

That’s why in many ways, the recovery has just as much, if not more, of a toll on your mental health than the relationship itself. I was only in this relationship for 4 months, but nothing has ever felt longer. It’s now a year later and I still cry whenever I think of it, or them, or get remotely triggered by anything emotional. Something as simple as an inspirational speech will bring back every time that I hid my emotions or pushed them down and it all comes gushing out. If something makes me frustrated, it brings back all the feelings of anger I now have inside me, bubbling below the surface and I find myself running through my head with all the things I want to yell at my abuser, and, again, I usually end up sobbing angry tears and wiping them away as they won’t stop coming.

You end up reliving it so much that it often feels like your chest is going to break.

I’m embarrassed to be relying on so many similes here, but honestly, it’s the easiest way to explain it. I constantly felt like that moment when you’re about to throw up, and you can’t breathe because your whole lungs feel congested, and just not enough air is getting in. Kind of like a constant panic attack, for weeks at a time, and like I was on the verge of tears that I continually had to fight back, for entire months at a time.

It’s a whole year later and I’m still recovering. I still haven’t told my parents or either of my siblings. I haven’t told most of my friends. Most days I struggle to admit it to myself.

It’s depressing to say that I still don’t sleep at night, I still have between 2 and 4 nightmares every single night (since last February there’s been 10 days out of 400 that I haven’t had one, and 3 of those I was hungover, so I doubt much was going on up there anyway. 2 of those days I went to bed at 4am or later to tire myself into sleeping peacefully). However, the exhaustion is temporary.

The liberation isn’t. Free yourself and don’t look back.