u/filetmignonminion

I found out yesterday it’s back. I don’t even really know what I’m feeling or if I’m handling it okay. I just can’t believe it. I don’t want to go through this again

There was a long period of time where I just had no energy or ability to do really anything because of the life circumstances I was in and the depression/anxiety I felt. I spent years not really doing any activity, not being able to get myself out of bed, or even cook a meal for myself, or shower regularly. Here are some of the things I’m proud of that I’ve been doing the last few months:

-making friends
-going to a baseball game
-excelling at work
-standing up for myself in court
-being a good dog mom
-swimming in the ocean with my friends
-showering semi-regularly
-being honest with myself about the things I can work on
-getting closer to my dad
-giving my mom a chance to do better after over 4 years of no-contact on my end
-running around the city every day for work and loving it
-finding my own personal style again by buying clothes that I like, that feel like me, and that fit me
-attending individual therapy twice a week and dv survivor group therapy once a week
-prioritizing my friends over romantic/sexual relationships
-not feeling like I need to download the dating apps or meet anyone as anything other than a friend
-decorating and curating my own apartment (the first time I’ve ever lived alone!!!!) tree/wildflower themed with green, orange, blue, and yellow
-(honestly the most impressive bc of the sensory issues I have with autism) keeping my sink free of dirty dishes and making sure to keep up with unloading the dishwasher regularly
-cooking way more and eating healthier

There are a lot more things, these are just the things that come to mind right now :) I’m thankful to have a new lease on life and I am very, very excited to continue to grow as a person, learn who I am, and invest in myself :) !!!!!!! I am truly just so happy. Not all the time, but most of the time. It means everything to me.

Not in a way where I love myself completely. But I genuinely enjoy just being with myself. I feel comfortable with who I am and how ive acted throughout it all. That Noah Kahan song about the orbiter astronaut is how I feel about myself. I survived an unsurvivable thing and came out not only alive but happy that I get the company of me, and I know that no matter how this ends up I’ve done right by myself. It’s an amazing feeling that I know my abuser will never experience. In that way I genuinely feel sorry for her. And I’m surprised I feel that way because she doesn’t deserve any of my empathy. But she has it, somehow.

Not to say I’m not incredibly traumatized but the things she did to me taught me how much I can endure. And I can endure a court case. No matter the consequences of it. Because I’m doing the right thing, which is something she can’t ever say. And we both know that.

Sometimes I just go to the roof and stare out and am just in love with the city. I do my skincare at night and put my bonnet on and meditate and fall asleep. I take my dog out to socialize and I actually enjoy being outside. I think about how far I’ve come and the people I have backing me. I think about my wonderful job who are fully anticipating her contacting them and them telling me that I have the full support of the company and my boss, and my boss’s boss, and my boss’s boss’s boss. I think about the friends I’ve made. I think about the life I get to live now.

I just catch myself smiling. This sub can be painful sometimes because I remember not being out of the relationship and seeing people that did get out, and feeling incredibly jealous of them. But those people also gave me hope that I could get out. And it was gruellingly long and painful but I did it. I’m out. And I’m traumatized as hell but that’s not even close to the joy I feel now that I get to live a full life.

If you’re not out yet just keep doing whatever you have to do to survive. I see you and I remember you. I know the pain and the physical body ache you feel when you’re scared for your life all the time. Don’t give up. Don’t. I thought I might as well have been dead when I was with her. But now I get to rediscover how warm air feels on my skin when I’m relaxing outside. How comfortable my bed can feel when there’s no one in my apartment that can hurt me. How well I can asleep, even if there are bad nightmares, knowing that I am truly safe.

I’m not even close to my potential and I already love life again. I’m so happy and thankful. That’s something she can’t ever take from me no matter what. She didn’t kill me, I’m alive, I’m here, and she can no longer bully me into subservience. She can’t tell me I can’t survive on my own because here I am, surviving on my own lol. It’s a weird mixture of sadness for what I had to endure and just unbridled happiness knowing I get to continue to live my life.

There’s also a little piece of me that feels happy she is stuck with herself and won’t ever be able to escape. It’s a shame because she’s fully capable of taking responsibility for her actions and living a life she can be proud of, but I know she doesn’t think there’s a possibility of that and so she won’t even try. So I do feel sorry for her because I get to be free, but she does not.

Not excusing her actions or absolving her of the blame she carries. What she’s done is her shame to carry, not mine. I might be struggling with the aftermath of everything but I don’t have the type of soul rot where I know I’ve done what she did to me. I’ll never have to live with that. I get to go on to live a beautiful life and she just…doesn’t. I do hope she can make those necessary changes and also get to live a beautiful life. But above all she is a coward who only wants to protect herself. I sincerely hope she can self reflect and make better choices but if being with her for two years taught me anything, it’s that self preservation is her only goal. It’s sad because life can be so beautiful.

I am just so lucky that I get to love myself and nothing can ever ever change that :)!

Looking for book recommendations. I just finished the only plane in the sky and loved it.

I can’t talk about this too much because it’s an active court case. I filed an order of protection against my abuser, and because I won’t drop mine against her, she is saying she’ll file one against me. All of this is going through our lawyers btw. I’ve accepted that she’ll most likely do it, but dropping mine against hers was never something I considered and still haven’t.

I’m lucky in that I have a lot of evidence, about 60 hours of recordings and one where she clearly says if I file one against her, she will file a fake retaliatory one against me, so we’re relatively sure even if she is granted a temporary one that it won’t be upheld. But even if hers is somehow granted against me it doesn’t bother me too much. I don’t want contact with her anyways so that’s not really any skin off my back. I think it’s unfair but all of this is unfair and my main priority is protecting myself from her so dropping my case is simply something I’m not considering at all.

I’ve had an order of protection filed against me before when I was having issues with my roommate a few years ago, and it really didn’t affect my life at all (because again, I didn’t want contact with my roommate after that!). I didn’t even end up fighting it in court…I just let it go. I’m sure she’ll bring that up in court and it won’t look good for me but again, I don’t care if hers is granted against me because I don’t want to contact her anyways. It’s annoying but I’m not surprised, I figured she’d do that.

I haven’t decided if I’ll continue with the process to report her to her job (she is in a position of power over others), but her refusal to come to a settlement agreement makes reporting it a lot easier. Frankly, there is no world in which my order against her won’t be upheld, so after that happens I can just send her work a copy of the permanent OOP without having to go into too much detail. My lawyer is also going through the evidence because now there will be a trial so it all needs to be catalogued, which also makes sending the recordings to her job easier.

I’m sure she’ll reach out to my job in retaliation, but my supervisors and HR are already aware that she’s filing one against me and they don’t care because they know the story and I’ve been keeping them updated. I also have her on recording threatening to report me to my job that says she “will say anything necessary to get you fired”. The good thing about how much abuse there was is that she literally could not possibly remember all of the heinous shit she said and did and most likely has no idea these specific recordings exist.

I guess my question is how did you respond to/deal with/feel about threats of retaliation or actual retaliation once you escaped the relationship? It terrified me at first but something shifted in me and I realized that this person is just sad and looking for a way to regain their power over me.

But I’m not alone anymore, and I have the best people behind me and I’m building a life that I love. I’m exercising again, I’ve made friends now that I won’t be accused of sleeping with them if I try to hang out with them, my apartment is clean and brings me so much joy. I love walks outside in the nice weather and my dog is loving it too. I’m reading books again and sleeping well on the new mattress I bought. I’m going to the beach and having (virtual) therapy sessions from the roof of my apartment. I’m wearing clothes that make me feel cute and happy. I started a 10 week abuse survivor therapy group last week and it has just made me realize I’m not alone and I’m not crazy.

She’s used to seeing a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore, a version that doesn’t have to exist anymore because I don’t need to fawn to keep myself safe. She’s never seen the fighter part of me and although I wish I didn’t have to fight, there is no part of me that feels I should back down. I know she believes that the version of the person I was with her is who I truly am, but that’s just not true. I feel sorry for her because she could have had this wonderful version of me but instead she broke me and reduced me to a small, lifeless shell.

I just feel like…good. And I think that’s confusing me because I’m used to feeling scared of her and I know she thinks I should be scared of what she could do. And I am, but not enough to have anxiety over it or let it ruin my life. I simply forgot that there is a difference between reality and whatever distorted version of reality that she’s living in.

This turned into more of a vent than I meant it to be but yeah I guess my question is how did you respond to retaliation?

I’m currently in a 421a re-rental. I was wondering if i have to go through the recertification process when my lease ends next year. Is there any way to find out, and where would I look for that info?

Thank you :)

I recorded them in the voice memos app, saved them to files, then emailed them to a gmail account only my friend had access to. He would then upload them to that email’s Google Drive folder. I would just record whenever I thought my ex partner would say/do something awful, so most of it is full of blank space.

My court date is coming up to make my temporary restraining order a permanent one. I make too much money to be appointed a free attorney, but too little that I could afford one on my own. There’s a good chance I have to face the person that hurt me so badly in court. And that means I have to make a convincing case that they are a danger to me if I don’t have a restraining order in place.

Which means I have to go through 60 hours of the worst moments of my life. But now I can’t figure out a good way to edit those recordings down. This is agonizing as it is and although I feel like I’m a pretty capable person normally, when it comes to what i went through with that person, my brain just stops functioning normally.

I’m looking for some kind of free website/app/software/idek that will help me do this in the simplest way possible. I’m very sorry if this post isn’t allowed here, i don’t know how to explain it but my brain just barely works and i need someone to explain this to me like I’m three years old.

I appreciate any advice anyone has so i can go represent in a court hearing to protect myself against a person i barely survived

I have a queen sized mattress and box spring I would like to get rid of. I can throw it away, but would prefer to donate it if there is a service that will be able to pick it up at the curb for me.

Does anything like this exist here? To be clear I want to pay exactly $0 for this, since I could just throw it away with trash day for free.

Thank you in advance :)

EDIT: I have autism and I feel like you’re all speaking a different language, I don’t understand at all. I asked this question in good faith and I feel like maybe people are being sarcastic with me but I genuinely don’t understand.

Edit 2: I’m going to leave my original post the way it is but thanks to some education I realized I am not anti-Israel, I’m anti-Israeli government/Netanyahu. Definitely not against Jewish people having their own state.

I am a non-Jewish and I don’t have any middle eastern ancestry. For the past couple of years I’ve been wanting to learn Krav Maga as a form of self-defense. What drew me to it is the focus on protecting yourself at any cost. I’ve been the victim of SA before and I also just got out of an abusive relationship. I live in NYC and I need a way to protect myself, and this form of self-defense doesn’t prioritize the safety of the attacker. If someone attacks me, the last thing I should be worried about is THEIR safety.

Obviously with everything going on right now, I’m hesitant. I signed up a few years ago but then I broke my wrist and then got cancer so I never actually went. I’m just wanting to know more about what other people think about the ethicality of this.

I believe that Israel is committing genocide. But to be extremely clear, I am anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish. Antisemitism is extremely wrong, but being Jewish is not the problem. I posted this to understand if this would be supporting Israel in some way since it is the type of defense the IDF uses.

I got out five weeks one day ago. I oscillate really rapidly from being angry, to being grateful no one has ever come into my apartment except my dad the weekend he spontaneously drove down to help me move out, to missing her, to being just so sad. She just decimated everything I was. People say who I was will come back, but I don’t see how that can happen. I have all this freedom now and it still feels like a betrayal to do anything but miss her.

I’m just devastated. Idk if she will ever really get what she did to me. I was chronically in relationships, having crushes, hooking up with people before her. The thought of letting another person touch me makes me sick in all the ways it could. If/when I make friends again, I don’t want any of them in my apartment. I don’t want anyone near me.

I’ve started crying finally, thankfully, but only a couple of times now. I wanted to go inpatient a couple of days ago - I’m not experiencing any SI at all, and I couldn’t figure out why I would want to do that. I just want to be somewhere where I’m safe, and I don’t have to decide what to do or when, or how, or with who, or where.

I finally have all this freedom and all I want to do is go back into a cage. It makes me deeply uncomfortable that I have free rein over my own life now. I feel myself self-sabotaging. I knew it would be bad when I left but this is just beyond what I thought. People say I’m doing well all things considered but I feel destroyed inside.

I’m afraid of everything. I can’t relax. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t cry or talk to anyone about this, not even my therapist. I don’t know how to relate to anyone anymore. I hate her and I love her. I wish every day I could go back into time and never meet her.

I used to dissociate pretty bad even before I even met her, I had been through a lot of shit. But I could always pull myself out of it the consequences were bad enough. That’s not the case with this. I don’t think I fully understood what flashbacks were until I got out. It is literally like reliving it in the moment. I can’t pull myself out of it, regardless of the situation. Alone, with my therapist, working, outside, etc.

Every night without fail I have dreams that she found me. I’m on meds to make me forget my nightmares but I remember these. I can’t tell if I wake up screaming or not but I wake up and my whole face is wet from crying. They’re not even all nightmares. I have dreams I’m with her again, and that’s not always a nightmare because I miss her. I also hate her.

None of this makes any sense to me. People say to give myself grace, and time, and that I’ve been through the hard part already. I don’t know. I can’t trust myself to see things accurately