Today is my one year anniversary of being free (mostly) from my long term abusive relationship.
I'd been with him for almost nine years, and he and I had been living together for most of that. He started out nice and everything, but he slowly isolated me and conditioned me to a point where I was under his control. He had me move across the country, away from my friends and all my support system, and I was emotionally dependent on him. At first he and I were both low income earners, and we worked together paying our bills and such, but I was always better at saving than he was, and he had bad credit card debt in his name he wasn't able to pay, so for things like rental agreements and later mortgages, everything had to be in my name.
Well anyway I'm sorry, my career went better than his, and after I had my first good promotion to a good job about six years ago, I think is when things really started to get bad. I've spoken to a friend who is a psychologist, and he thinks as I was earning more money my boyfriend might've started feeling more desperate to control me and to keep my self confidence and my esteem from getting too high. He did a lot of little things to make me feel bad about myself, if I'm making sense?
Some of his worst things were how he gaslighted me, making me feel like I was doing so many things wrong and how out of control of my life I was, and how much I needed him. He'd make me feel like everything was always my fault, even when he'd get really angry and violent, he made me believe it as my fault for causing him to get that way, and I had to apologize and always make up for what I'd done wrong, because of how I mistreated him. He guilted me into sexual acts I wasn't comfortable with then, and one time he hit me on my jaw and I ended up needing a root canal, because his impact loosened my tooth just slightly enough to start an abscess and cause an infection (I didn't have a cavity, but it's where he hit me and my pain started not long afterward, that was one of my worst physical experiences in my life).
And things got really bad after he lost his job, he was out of work for about six months, and he was home all the time (I work from my home office, so I saw him too much). All he'd do was play video games, watch sports, and drink beer. He gained about a hundred and fifty pounds, and even though I'm working full time I still did everything like cleaning, cooking, laundry, and such and such. Things finally got really bad when he talked about how my baby brother should be euthanized (my brother has severe Down's Syndrome), and that was finally when I knew he was a truly horrible person and I couldn't live with him any more. I'd been secretly saving up some money, because I'm a saver and I didn't want him to know because he'd just spend it, but I gave all of that to him if he'd just leave, and he took my money and he left on November 14th 2017. He's called me a few times since then, but I've never seen him again, he moved back to Canada and as far as I know he's alienated almost everyone by now.
Oh dear I'm sorry if this sounds like a rant, but really I'm feeling so much happier now, it's been a whole year for me. I'm finding it easier to talk about, I accidentally shared with some of my other friends last night while I was heavily intoxicated and I probably went way too far with my sharing, lol! But anyway, it took me a long time to realize just how bad things were (I didn't recognize my situation as abuse until months after he left), and talking about it now feels like a huge release for me. My next steps I think are making sure it never happens to me again, and once I'm feeling completely recovered and comfortable I feel I'll probably need to do more, to help other women raise awareness of what might be going on and how they can also help themselves.
Congratulations.
