Tauma reemerging after 3 years
After a breakup that occurred three years ago, I am back at square one reliving some of the most painful memories that I have experienced. In 2022 I got into a relationship with someone that I thought I could trust. He was someone who frequented the same spot I went to, and while I never noticed him before, he noticed me. I asked him out, and the relationship started after I made a joke asking him when he was going to ask me to be his girlfriend. Granted, this was just a playful joke but when he asked, I said yes because I thought he was a genuinely good person.
At first, he was loving and attentive, but something shifted that caused me a lot more trauma than I realized. After the honeymoon phase, which only lasted maybe a month or so, a subtle shift in the relationship became a power struggle. I noticed that I couldn’t be myself anymore. My ex was the kind of person who made me feel ashamed of my personality. The first instance of this was when I was playing cards with an extended group of his friends, and while we were out, I cursed and became very lively. For my ex, he saw that as inappropriate and asked me if I didn’t think I was making anyone uncomfortable. Because I was worried about his perspective I reached out to the hosts of the event to inquire about their perspective on my behavior and they all told me that they didn’t think anything was wrong and that because they were all cursing it wasn’t a problem. When I confirmed with him that they didn’t see it as a problem and that it was a normal occurrence for them, He started to get upset and asked me why I even asked them that question.
He told me that the reason he brought it up was that he needed me to be an extension of him whenever we go out. He told me that anytime someone saw me, they saw him. And during that time, I felt very weird about it because for me, it felt wrong to be perceived as just his girlfriend, but I felt bad so I tried compromising as much as I could. From his perspective, he felt as if I was too loud and that I should be someone who didn’t take up so much space.
So, after that conversation, whenever we were with other people, I started to become quieter, I barely started conversations and I tried my best not to say anything out of line or curse. But he felt like that wasn’t good enough. He felt as if I wasn’t interacting with people as much as I should have and that I was coming off as unsociable and awkward. And once again given that criticism, I decided to change once again. I made sure I talked with people that I had a connection with or that I had talked to before and I started asking them questions about their lives. It was nothing too interesting, but it was something that made me comfortable. But after a while, I noticed that he did something that I couldn’t understand. He started inserting himself in every conversation that I had with someone. When I was far away from him, he’d walk over and inserted himself in a conversation and would stay there. At first, I thought he just wanted to interact in a conversation, but it wasn’t until I realized that this was a constant habit of his.
I went out of my way to talk to people about similar interests and there he was right behind me repeatedly asking us “What are we talking about??” and then he would insert himself into the conversation, even though he didn’t know anything about what we were saying. Sometimes I had conversations with people about politics, spirituality, and even TV shows, and there he was listening to everything, not too far behind me, waiting for a moment to strike.
Every conversation I had with people that weren't including him, I suddenly felt his presence near and him looking at me, and him walking over, asking the weirdest questions that had nothing to do with the topic we were discussing. He would stand around giving us an opinion that really didn’t make any sense but I didn’t really care too much. However, that’s not the same treatment he gave me. There were times when we would be out talking to different people in his friend group, and if I did something that he “didn't like” he would reprimand me either in front of them or in the car. He would ask me why I crossed my arms, why I wasn’t talking enough, why I was on my phone, or why I was staring at the TV. He made it seem like I was making everything a lot more stressful or uninviting to people. And while those actions may seem rude, especially in social interactions, the only reason why I wasn’t talking much or looking for other stimulation was because there wasn't anyone else that would start a conversation either with the entire group or me.
And for some reason, he made that my fault, he himself never really started any open group conversations, he always relied on other people to do it for him. And during a specific outing with his friends, he looked directly at me and asked me why I wasn’t talking with everyone, and when I looked, there wasn’t anyone actually doing anything. They sat down and they just started staring at everything around them. I was so confused, and started wondering if I was ignoring everything that people were saying, but I remembered before I started looking at my phone, they didn’t say anything either. Because this wasn't the first time he did this, I became hypervigilant. I became worried about the narratives that he told me people might have of me and I made sure to talk with people, even though this may have been uncomfortable for me,I went out of my way to help people with their problems, and I went out of my way to engage myself bingger ground experiences and get to know them as much as possible, all because I was worried that he would say something in the car and on the way back to his family’s home.
The comments about my awkwardness and lack of social skills became a constant topic of discussion, he felt as if I wasn’t doing enough and that I was being a side character, I told him that I didn’t really care if I was a side character because if I was a main character, I'd be in a lot more compromising situations ( which I already was in). When I did talk about interesting things about my life like my hobbies people that I’ve talked to and things I was genuinely proud of, he dismissed it easily. For example, I once told him that I was very proud of being a very funny person and that I can make a lot of different people laugh, and he did this odd chuckle and asked me if I didn’t find what I said pretentious. He told me that I can’t label myself as funny and that other people have labeled me as such and that it was weird that I would even call myself that. He also later told me that my jokes weren’t even that funny. When he was with his friends, he would use the same joke and references I had told him before and benefit from them.
I knew his family, but he barely knew mine. He never really made the effort to actually see my family, in fact when I had to pushed him to actually see my family, he left such a bad impression that most of my family thought he was a rude person and that he didn’t make much of an effort to actually talk to anyone. Unfortunately I didn’t even know this information until he broke up with me.
I think one of the most egregious things that he had done was a complete violation of my body. Our first month of dating, I was very open and honest about my sexual assault history. I told him that I had experiences with past partners which were very traumatic, for which I had to go to the police to report.And he seemed very understanding of my situation. But then the constant groping started happening. And I don’t mean subtle touching I mean full-on grabbing my butt, my side, and doing it so hard to the point where it became uncomfortable and unbearable that I started flinching when he touched me. I think the worst thing he didwas when I was in a really bad mental state and he asked me if I was in “the mood” and when I told him multiple times that I wasn’t feeling it and then I felt disgusting, he kept pushing and pushing and pushing until the point I had to give in. Throughout the experience, I was uncomfortable, when he saw me not enjoying it, he got upset, stopped, and left me in the room, I felt like I disappointed him, I just felt so disgusted with myself, and after that, he just ignored me for a bit and said the only reason he stopped was because I looked like I didn’t want it.
He only found my personality amusing when people found me amusing, he only thought I was smart when other people thought I was. When I showed that I had certain talents and abilities, he would make passive-aggressive comments about it and make negative associations.
What hurt the me most was when he broke up with me, and it wasn’t the breakup itself that caused me pain, but what he told me. He brought up things that I had said in the past and made them negative and threw them back in my face. When I talked about the feeling of being fine with being a side character, he brought up the fact that we both can’t be side characters in our lives. When I comforted him about how we aren’t that different and that we have certain parts of ourselves that are similar, he told me that the relationship didn’t work because we were too similar. He told me that I didn’t like being told what to do and he saw that as a negative. And he told me that we acted too much like friends, even though I told him that one of the most important aspects of being in a relationship was being able to understand each other as best friends and not idolized each other as just partners.
I felt destroyed to know that he held onto a lot of these things and threw them back in my face and acted as if these were negative. Every heartfelt conversation that had brought us closer and made us feel more like a couple, he threw back in my face and made it a reason as to why I wasn’t a good partner.
Throughout the relationship, he compared me to different people, he wanted me to look like a specific adult entertainer, he wanted me to dress more like “goth baddies” and openly told me that my body looked more like a teenage boy. Even though he had told me before that he likes to “show me off” to his friends because of my physique. I feel odd for saying this because everything feels so minuscule, but during that time I couldn’t help but feel so burdened with insecurities that I never had before.
After the breakup, I talked to some people specifically his friends, and they told me that everything he said behind my back, they knew was fabricated. He told them that I wasn’t sociable enough, but they all talked to me and saw me as a great person who went out ofy way to talk to people, he kept telling them how awkward I was, but they never got that feeling for me; instead, they thought he was the awkward one for making conversations feel more tense.
Every conversation, event, and subtle remark made throughout the relationship started to make less and less sense, one day I’m the greatest girlfriend in the world, I’m so nice and so loving, the next day I’m the most awkward person in the world and he feels like I don’t do enough. He made me feel ashamed for being the person that I was even in private, and he talked about our sex life openly in a bar and made me feel humiliated because he said we haven’t done it that much.
Even on my own birthday, which he didn’t plan or give me any kind of gift, he told me that he was ready to do “butt stuff”. I feel weird for typing this all out because I’m worried that it doesn’t seem like devotional abuse, but maybe things that I’ve been failing petty about.
But I can’t shake off the feeling of immense dread that I feel whenever I think or am reminded of something related to him. I started having anxiety about what he told people and how they viewed me. I started to dislike my body and my personality. And even now I’m always worried that he would treat someone better than he treated me because I just wasn’t good enough.
I feel as if the reason he treated me this way was that he couldn’t find me useful, even if he was friends with abusers himself. He only saw me as his girlfriend and I didn’t have an actual life outside of him.
I’m still recovering even after so long and it’s weird, but I think it has everything to do with the fact that it’s his birthday soon, or at least I think that’s the reason. I’ve talked to my therapist and she was one of the few people who confirmed to me that what I went through was emotional abuse, and it’s still hard to navigate through especially when these feelings are abruptly coming back now. I don’t like to think that it’s about as intuition of him being with another person or him having a better life than me, but I think it’s just the overwhelming repetition of seeing things that remind me of him like his name, zodiac sign, or places that we frequently went together.
As pathetic as it sounds, there was a moment in time when I had immense anxiety going anywhere near where he lived or worked because I was worried about being humiliated if I saw him, and I’ve never felt that way before.
As of right now, I’m still processing a lot of the insecurities that he placed on me, I recognize that I didn’t deserve any kind of treatment that he gave me, and that the person I was with was more of a bully than a boyfriend.
I’m sorry if my story doesn’t seem that serious I’ve seen some of the posts from other people and I feel like mine is just a little bit weird but I’m grateful for this kind of space where we can talk about experiences because this didn’t feel like a normal breakup. It felt like eight months of traumatic bullying that made me feel inferior.