How did you realize you were in an abusive relationship?

28 comments

1. Took family, friends, therapists, psychologists to detail it out for me because I didn’t understand what an abusive relationship was. So I never realized it but everyone else saw it clear as day.

2. The first time she slapped me for no reason.

   “I’m just being playful,dummy.”

   Like,who tf raised you and let you get away with that?

3. I, somehow, had to be equally wrong or at fault about anything they did.

4. Feeling unsafe in your own home. Second guessing your words or actions with them when you wouldn’t do that with another person. Feeling hesitant to tell them things or do certain things around them.

   Try writing down things that they say or do that make you feel bad. Wait a little while and then read them while imagining your best friend or mother is telling you these things are happening to them. It’s easy to ignore bad things that happen to yourself but it’s harder to ignore bad things that happen to someone you care about.

5. a shane dawson documentary

   this is embarrassing because i despise him and i don’t watch him anymore. but Shane Dawson’s documentary about Jake Paul being a sociopath made me realize that i was in a relationship with a sociopath

6. Therapy, mostly. Also, she forced me into polyamory under duress, so I started seeing other people who actually treated me well. It was hard not to notice the contrast.

7. She didn’t listen to me, what I want…she became very manipulative

8. When I figured out my parents/siblings were trying to control my life (and that of my wife/children) though pressure, guilt, extended family relations, etc.

   Haven’t talked to them in years, apart from funerals/weddings never see them, while sad it’s a lot more peaceful this way.

9. I had to pay them money out of every paycheck and then at the end of the year was forced to submit proof to get a small fraction of that money back. Over the years I was conditioned to look forward to getting that tiny amount of money back every year while they rolled around in my cash.

10. It was a lot of things, bit by bit. The realization that it went further than “sometimes our conflicts are rough” took far longer than it should have because I was constantly making excuses for their behavior to myself and not sharing much details with anyone else.

11. It was when I started to notice that I’d jump and go into fight-or-flight mentality every time the phone rang with the special tone I had set for her #

12. When one of you or both begin to feel offended by the slightest mishap.

    An example would be coming home late and being interrogated to see if the other person was cheating. There’s about a million reasons why someone could be late, but to jump to conclusions and say coming home late = cheating is downright abusive.

    Not getting up fast enough to help your significant other. This is straight up text book entitlement, one party is upset not because they didn’t get help, but because they didn’t get help “fast enough”. Some people are under the idea “if he loves me, he should help me right away”. I don’t even have to begin how much a nazi that sounds.

    Long story short, if either party is beginning to feel offended over small mishaps. That’s one of the first clear sign to abuse.

13. I told her my limits and when she was angry she would intentionally break them.

14. The refusal to apologize is usually a surefire way. I had one lose her shit on me simply because I didn’t open the passenger side door when we were leaving a mutual friend’s house. After 2 hours of awkward bitterness she finally said “I know I have high expectations and I’m not going to apologize for them”.

    She (rightfully) broke up with me after I replied “You’re a single mother working through your second divorce, so maybe it’s time you start lowering your expectations”. Don’t care, glad I’m out of that one

15. At 31 and going through therapy, some angry conversations with my parents revealed that my mother resented me because despite not being disabled like my sister, I still needed help sometimes, and my dad simply wasn’t present enough

16. I kind of knew for a while. For a long time it was “Well it can’t be an abusive relationship because I’ve never been hit”. And then I did eventually get hit, then it was “Well they were just really angry at the time and didn’t mean it and it didn’t really hurt that much and she did apologize. So it’s OK”.

    I also distinctly remember googling “Am I being verbally abused” and all the websites saying I was, but I just couldn’t get my brain to reconcile that the person I trusted and loved most in the world and who loved me back so fiercely could ever purposefully abuse me, so therefore all the awful things she did couldn’t “really” be abuse. I had in my head that the real abusers are always awful all the time (cause of how they’re portrayed in TV and movies) and so because she still had a lot of great qualities even in the middle of all this, she wasn’t an actual abuser. I kept thinking it would eventually go back to how it was in the beginning when everything was wonderful, and they’d finally go back to being the “real” them.

    It wasn’t until I finally decided I had to leave because I couldn’t take it anymore and I read the book “Stop Walking on Eggshells” where I figured out she had Borderline that everything finally clicked. All those excuses and justifications were exactly what almost every DV victim goes though. I definitely then had a few days of shock once I realized what was going on and felt like an absolute idiot for not seeing this all far earlier. But when you’re in the middle of it, you just make excuse after excuse after excuse for terrible behavior because “True love means not giving up” and you think you need to be strong for a troubled partner who just needs some help and who’s still really good deep down.

    Life is so much better now and leaving was by far the best decision of my life. But it really is difficult to see through the haze when you’re in the middle of it.

17. When I was always the shoulder for her to vent her emotions and speak her mind, but me talking about my emotions and feelings always ended up in a fight, which become suffocating. Also, she believed that I owed her forgiveness by default for all of her toxic episodes.

18. Ex gf kept accusing me of trying to sleep with her already cheating friend just because I was trying to be friendly.

    Single me absolutely would’ve

19. When it ended.

    We both played a part in it but thank god that’s in my past now.

20. When everyone with her same mental illness said there was no excuses for her behavior.

21. When she attempted suicide in my bed, with the idea that I would wake up with her dead next to me. That didn’t really work, and I woke up to her babbling incoherently (drug overdose). I should have let her come down, then kicked her directly out of my house but I was dumb. I thought I could fix her but there were so many issues. She has BPD. It took me a few more months to go no contact with her finally. But yeah, she was incredibly abusive, and a liar, and a cheater, and always twisted my words, and always played the victim. Also she was easily the most vindictive and manipulative person I have ever known.

22. Used to ignore me for days at a time or berate me with insults (calling me pathetic and a joke of a man) if I tried to say no or set any form of boundary. Any issue was always my fault, and would frequently gaslight me about her phone going off at strange times in the night. She would also try to control how i spent my money and demand i justify what i was buying and for how much even though all the bills were paid and never late… Discovered after some time she’d been sleeping with one of her colleagues for a few months.

    I initially didn’t leave because of our daughter but my friends convinced me to. It wasn’t until about 6 months after I left her that I realised I was in an utterly abusive relationship the whole time and the extent of the damage it had done to my confidence and sense of wellbeing.

    After I left she began to tell our daughter I was a piece of shit, that I didn’t love her and that she was protecting her from me… She still regularly slanders me publicly on social media and tries to alienate our daughter… Even though we’ve been divorced for nearly 4yrs.

    I’ve accepted it’ll never end, but yeah…

23. after hearing my therapist describe it as such, years after it ended

24. When you see your friends and you feel like yourself again

25. When she said that it was my job to make her happy.

26. When it was everyone elses fault except for hers.

27. I took all feedback seriously and, after a couple of months, was mentally almost broken.
    I realized that i was walking on egg-shells.
    I took some steps back and went introspective, just leaving her alone for some time.

    After a while she explained how she was afraid of me, which was the flipping light-switch for me. I knew for a fact that i would never harm her and, for the lack of any other reasons, she just had to be the victim regardless of the situation.

    Enough was enough. I threw all the bullshit back at her and gained more confidence in myself than i could ever without this situation. She tried to bring me down, but acchieved the opposite in the end.

28. I was on an assertiveness course via my place of work, the facilitator picked up on this just from my train of thought in reaching my answers throughout the study day. Because most of the abuse was cohesive and financial control and to a degree sexual abuse, and it was after years of conditioning and I had become used to it, honestly how do you define sexual abuse when you don’t truly know what is normal, and that’s not the mechanics of sex, it what would be classed as kinky or a fetish what is classed as a fetish for some is someone else’s normal.