Unmasking Psychological Abuse

A few years ago I lived with people much younger than me. If it hadn’t been for the decision to go back to school, I might never have had contact with them. They were between my generation and my children’s. One thing that caught my attention, especially among girls, was how they were submerged in relationships of abuse and psychological abuse without even realizing it. Are your futures like that?

They told me how they argued and fought with their partners: a speech that always had a similar structure. For starters, they explained the reason for their anger, how they reached the limit, and ended the story with some guilt like “this is because I have a bad temper”, “the poor guy didn’t even do that much…”.

If I’m telling the truth, when I heard these stories I shuddered. All reflected what a girl should never endure. They ended up apologizing for everything, all of them, even though they disagreed about the treatment they received, and if they had thought coldly, they would not have accepted any of the justifications they clung to either.

I saw them arrive some mornings with sad eyes, and at some interval they would tell me some detail of what had happened, until they expressed everything that worried them. It was so obvious: these weren’t the faces of girls in love. They were faces of dependent and toxic relationships, all invaded by psychological abuse.

I wondered if there was nothing I could do to warn them. Does everyone have to see it with their own eyes and suffer the dire consequences of abuse to really be aware of it? Here I leave for them or for those who might be useful, the testimony of a young woman, a friend who slowly descended into the clutches of psychological abuse without realizing it, until it was “almost” too late.

A real case of psychological abuse

“Perhaps I should have realized (innocent mind) that while I was trying to feel the air I was breathing, beside me there was someone much more experienced and older than me, who watched the whole situation with a great deal of interest as I walked. worried about her heartbeat, vulnerable.

I let myself “fall in love” or “enchant” with a ghost, dressed in a seductive cape made to measure. I didn’t see it, didn’t identify it, because at that time I didn’t know about psychological abuse. And I couldn’t open my eyes until it was too late. I just wanted to feel myself and live through my son the childhood I thought would be perfect in the context of the “happy family” I had always wanted.

When I got pregnant, the person he really was started to appear: he treated me badly, shouted, insulted and argued about any nonsense. It made me feel inferior and unable to do anything. Who would I be without him anyway?

Everything got worse when I became a mother

When my son was born, the river continued to contaminate its course towards the abyss, and he even attacked me with the baby in his arms. From then on I started running away from the fighting, from their attacks of rage, and I let myself be persuaded by an “I’m sorry”, an “I’m sorry” after each tantrum, which was more frequent every day. I fell into the trap of psychological abuse. Most of the time I felt responsible for the confrontations. Was I, with my strong temper, to blame for everything?

He stopped working and helping around the house. If he drank a beer, he turned into a monster, verbally attacking, hitting and breaking every object he found in his path. But even so, I still kept my goal standing: a happy family. Discussions everyone has, I told myself.

When he argued, I avoided him, it wasn’t possible that in my own house there were also shouting and cursing like in my parents’ house. Worst of all were these acts that hurt, don’t heal and that get deeper every day.

He started mistreating our son when he was 3 years old. By humiliating him, as I did me, my baby became easy prey for all that hatred inside him. And hate for what? I will never know. What I do know is that he always tried to have a victim around. It was clear that he was not happy.

Friends were essential to open my eyes

Gradually I managed to expand my social circle, making friends, despite being quite closed. And I saw it, I started to see it, and they made me see that those weren’t normal discussions. He and they were destroying my self-esteem.

I was killing myself in and out of the house working so hard to bring in some money. In the summer, after nine or ten hours waiting tables, I would run away with my friends for a few hours to comfort myself between her words and her affection. However, as I arrived each winter, I returned to my prison and more and more the dream drifted away.

My son was three years old and I hadn’t looked in the mirror for two years, I was so lonely that I lost interest in dressing up. For what? I looked ugly and tired. When I was 30 years old, he called me an old woman, yelled at me and belittled me at events we went to together, and nothing I did was right. Until my eyes grew sad, as the sea darkens on a moonless night. I took this as a warning sign: that was not the plan.

Being aware further increased the anguish.

I felt that the responsibility for the life I had chosen was entirely mine and I was always lying about my relationship to everyone else. He made excuses and still managed to convince others that this massive hair loss was a hormonal outage.

One day something broke and my body told my mind that enough was enough. I had an anxiety attack that took me to death’s door, feeling my body slowly stop functioning. First I stopped feeling my fingers, then my hands and feet, face, tongue, arms, legs…and my breathing stopped having a rhythm.

I don’t want anyone to be fully aware and feel their body stop functioning little by little. My friends took me to a hospital and I had to stay there that night for observation, and he went home with our son. The doctor in our small town, in addition to being a friend, is a psychiatrist and recommended me to stay at a friend’s house for the rest of the week to be calm and recover.

I learned to say “no”

That’s how I started my recovery, which lasted 5 days until I returned home. There he was, on the porch. I went upstairs, hugged him and said: “I came home, I feel much better”. He pushed me away with a shove so hard it made me lose my balance. And he started yelling at me, I don’t remember his words, I couldn’t hear; only the screams, the blows, the violence of their gestures and the voice that terrified me.

I was afraid for myself, for my son and for the friend who accompanied me. I just thought like someone scared: running! Not without taking my son, who was only five years old! I feared he wanted to hurt him to hurt me. That’s what I thought, that he would do this to get back at me. And I hadn’t done anything!

We ran away from there, terrified and goose bumps. The whole way I couldn’t say anything. When we get home, we remain silent. Shortly thereafter he arrived. I went to the second floor terrace and saw him downstairs.

And once again he said “sorry”

But, you know, it was too late and only one sentence came out of my mouth, from my soul: “NO! I can’t anymore, you’re killing me! ”. There I decided to escape the cage of psychological abuse.

I wished you were happy alone, as with me you weren’t. I asked him to seek his happiness and told him that I loved him very much. Because of the breakup, he started calling and sending messages wishing me dead, insulting me and threatening revenge for the “humiliation” I had suffered.

No, we don’t want him around, he hurts us, sinks us both, my son and me. Being apart is the only way to keep our peace of mind, which is what anyone should have in life. I will never allow them to harm my child, least of all in the soul. And it’s my duty as a mother to raise him without confusing love with humiliation,