Warning Signs of Abusive Relationships

[imperfect_cupcake]

Originally Posted by CherylNYC

I have to say that I really admire all the survivors here who are living, loving and functioning after leaving abusive long term, committed relationships. I know what it took for me to come back from my long term emotionally abusive relationship many years ago. I simply wouldn't be the person I am today if my next partner had not made it her business to heal and support me. Sharon was everything that my former partner could never be, and she was the single healthy romantic relationship I've had in my life. By the time she died four years later, I knew what it meant to be well loved.

Fast forward to my recent dating experience with an emotional abuser. It's flipping HARD to recover from this! It's been months since I told her to never contact me again, yet I'm still randomly furious, and I'm still replaying those damaging events in my head and thinking about what I could have/should have done/said differently. She managed to undermine me in some pretty fundamental ways in the short time we dated, and I'm still telling her to go f**k herself in my head. I can't imagine how much harder this would be for me if I had stayed longer.

Brava/bravo to all of you who have come back strong from this sort of thing. It's really, REALLY hard.

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Blackmail-People-Obligation-Manipulate/dp/0060928972"]Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You: Susan Forward, Donna Frazier: 9780060928971: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]

This book really helped me after my brief relationship with the narcissist. It was given to me my her ex. After we broke I had people very quietly come up to me and tell me "my ex saw her just before you..." And tell me stories as well as other femmes in my community come up and have a very quiet word.

I need to re read it from my last person. I was having an affair with her, something I thought I'd never ever do again after 10 years previously learning my lesson about being the other woman. But I was in such a place of emotional wreckage and frightened and she was my only good friend, I was completely alone in that city, trying to find a way out. Tbh I don't think I would have done anything differently because I was so unstable and alone.

She wasn't a monster. She had incredibly good qualities along with the abusive traits. That's why I don't like calling People abusers unless they are like that narcissist I was seeing. Rather they have abuseive behaviours. I don't like reducing people to roles. It makes me feel icky.

But some of her behaviours I feel the same as you... I am still fantasizing and getting angry about. It's finally starting to fade and I'm finally occasionally starting to hope that now that she's getting married and moving, to a place more stable and to a woman who is kind and doesn't drink, perhaps she'll get back on the wagon and her behaviour will change. And I wish her well.

But I do still get angry with how she treated *me* and I get so angry that I actually became so desirous of her praise that I did horrible things for her to try to show people she wasn't a bad person. That she was just misunderstood. That she was just hurting from being treated so poorly (she was but it wasn't one sided - and she always owned up to treated her ex wife poorly).

The girl she was seeing used to call me and cry and talk to me, as I was "just an ex" and I'd listen and you know I used to feel relief that it wasn't just me, that she treated other people just as insanely, and that I wasn't imagining things or nuts (because past partners made me feel that way about their abuseive behaviour)

I have a beauty and the beast problem. I know this.
It's why I don't trust myself.
And why I do not trust words. At all. I've been called names like ice queen cause I have no use for romantic words now.
Show me. Show me how you feel with how you behave and how you help me with my life, I have no use for romantic flower talk. None. If someone wants to express how much they care about me, then observe my life and see how you can offer to enriched it through your actions. Words are cheap ( and I'm a writer, I should know lol)