u/yourspicysecretary

I’m stuck in my head about something today and just wanted to vent.

I was in a relationship with a narcissistic ex for over 10 years, and ever since then, any positive thought I have about myself feels like I’m being arrogant or full of myself. If I think for two seconds that I’m actually good at something, my brain instantly goes, “You’re thinking too highly of yourself.”

I know a lot of what I’m writing about overlaps heavily with CPTSD, which I do have as well.

I think a significant part of this stems from how he treated me. He would constantly find a hidden motive, or some negative spin on almost everything I did. So I started anticipating it…I began coming up with bad intentions or flaws before he could, basically so I wouldn't be caught off guard…I assigned blame and responsibility to myself that didn't even belong to me because I was terrified he was going to accuse me of being oblivious or "not self-reflective."

It all became an obsession. I am constantly questioning my own intentions. I catch myself worrying that I’m secretly a bad, evil, or fake person and somehow just don’t see it. If I make a normal mistake, I immediately start ruminating over whether I did it on purpose to be mean or careless. If I try to explain myself or give context, I tell myself I’m just making fake excuses.

Even stupid jokes trigger it… Once my boyfriend changed my car battery, and I jokingly said, “Yeah, I changed the battery.” Total obvious sarcasm. We both laughed and moved on.

But right after, my brain spiraled. With my ex, a joke like that would’ve started a massive fight. He would’ve told me I was full of myself, that I genuinely thought I was better than him, and when I said it was a joke he’d insist I was lying and had hidden motives. (Btw In reality he was literally the only person in my life who reacted like that. Friends and coworkers always got my humor just fine.)

He did it with everything. If I said something simple like “I’m really good at baking,” he’d tell me to tone it down or accuse me of exaggerating. He even told me once that he thought I had a personality disorder because I talked highly of my abilities.
He completely wrecked my sense of reality. Ever since, any positive belief about myself feels suspect, like I’m a liar or can’t trust my own brain. Healthy self-esteem feels dangerous now. Pride feels wrong, and confidence makes me feel like a bad person.
I’m just so frustrated.

Logically I know he messed me up, but my brain and OCD still treat normal self-appreciation like a huge threat. And like I said… I know this overlaps with CPTSD, but please don’t diminish what I deal with with OCD by seeing that

Anytime I wanted some basic affection, desire, or closeness, I was told that I was being codependent and that it was a problem I required these things. He’d say, “They should be wants, not needs. Because you need them, it means you’re codependent.”

And I believed it.

I believed for a long time that because I craved it and felt like I needed it, I was the problem.

For a very, very long time, practically the entire relationship, he just lived on the couch. He wouldn’t sleep with me in our bed, and when I expressed that I wanted him sleeping in bed with me, he’d tell me, “I don’t sleep in the bed because it’s a problem that you need someone there. I am helping you by teaching you to do it by yourself.”

Everything he did, he framed as a lesson toward me, like he was helping me.

To this day, I swear he genuinely believes he was the helper and that I was just so broken I needed that from him.

I also really wanted to take pictures together, have a pet name, or hold hands. We probably have less than 10 pictures together, and we were together for my entire 20s, lol. He wouldn’t hold my hand because he “hated PDA.” Again, he said that it was a "me problem" that I needed those things, and if I couldn't take him as he was, I needed to reevaluate because it wasn't fair that I was “trying to change him.”

It just makes me really mad sometimes, and I have nobody to talk to or tell. I kept this hidden from everyone for nearly 12 years of my life, and now I just want to let it all out.

I am out of this relationship. I was in it for over ten years but when I look back I can remember this exact moment. It wasn’t even 1 year into the relationship.

I’m looking to see if anyone else has experienced this specific feeling… I don’t know what to call it.

I remember the exact second my old self died. I just stopped fighting back, went completely numb, and gave up… It felt like watching the old version of myself die right in front of me. I had this intense feeling while I was happening like this is my life now… these are the cards I’ve been dealt… nobody will love me but him so I might as well accept his version of love… he’s angry but that’s just him…. I just accepted everything he had done up until that point, and everything he would do moving forward… like my life was just over and this was all I'd ever have

Tw for self harm

My ex used to literally interrogate me over the dumbest, most random shit that was never that deep. It could be as simple as if I dropped my bag on the floor instead of setting it down neatly…. he’d accuse me of having some hidden motive and demand a full psychoanalysis on why I did it.. all the way back to my childhood. Literally I’m not even exaggerating.

I was literally just tired or annoyed. That was it. But he’d posture over me, literally turn bright red, snarl at me, and then storm outside to smoke a cigarette or 12.

When I’d say I didn’t know what to tell him or that I needed a break, he’d lose his effing mind. He’d start screaming about how I don't know how to communicate.. and how we can never solve anything and I’m “breaking down the communication”.
But he’s literally be acting completely unhinged!!! Then blame ME for the communication issues. And the second I finally lost my patience or raise my voice back, he’d be like "lower your fucking voice”… as if he wasn't just screaming at the top of his lungs until he was sweating through his clothes.

Sometimes he would do this until I was literally pulling at my own hair. Like about to rip my hair out of my scalp. Right in front of him. He’d bring me to a point of so much frustrating that I’d be legitimately harming myself. And then he’d be yelling at me that too. Or coming and forcefully grabbing my hands away from me. How do you break a person down so badly that they are hurting themselves?!?! And then he’d say that we can’t ever have a conversation because I get too hysterical… he brought me to that point!!! I’d be begging him to stop.

I’d be laying on the ground with my arms covering my ears screaming and crying for him to stop and he wouldn’t fucking stop.

It was honestly so fucking exhausting. And once it happened, the whole day was over after that. He’d spend the rest of the day on his Xbox, stomping his feet and screaming at the TV. Over ten years of that shit. My entire 20s was spent walking on thin ice and feeling trapped and lonely.

I feel like I spent over ten years in silence.
I didn’t want anybody to know what was going on at home, and a lot of the time, I treated his behavior as just a character flaw instead of abuse. I convinced myself that’s just how he was, and if I wanted to be with him, I needed to learn how to brush it off or accept that he “couldn’t help it.”

Now that I’m out of that relationship and no longer hold on to as much pain from it, it’s like my mind finally feels safe enough to bring back old memories. Old situations, old fights. And I just have so much to say.

I wish I was a good writer, and I wish writing it all down helped, but it doesn't. I want a conversation. I want someone to know. I’ve kept this as a secret for so long and I just want to talk about it. Therapy helps, but it’s not the same. I don’t want therapeutic input, I just want human input.

I don’t have many friends, and even if I did, a lot of the things I want to share just don’t feel appropriate to bring up out of nowhere. Especially after successfully lying about it, to their faces, for so many years.

A lot of them, as isolated situations, don’t seem like a big deal, because on their own, they aren't. But together, they are all pieces of a fucked up relationship that caused me years of pain, grief, exhaustion, and an overall destruction of my self worth.

This is a bit of a rant. Just have had a lot of memories on my mind.. 1.5 years out of an abusive relationship of over 10 years.

My ex would have these moments where he would act so much like a child and humiliate me around people. Whenever we were with people, I kind of felt like I had to conform a little bit to him because I lived in so much fear that he was going to have one of his rage outbursts around other people and they were gonna see it.

A time I’ve been thinking about, which on the outside I’m sure didn’t seem like a huge deal to the people that we were with, but we were with our friends and we were drinking and I was telling everybody that they needed to not talk so loud because we had neighbors and it was late at night….. i don’t know why or how this then turned into him getting upset with me, but basically he decided that he was just not gonna talk at all for the rest of the night. Anybody that spoke to him, he would literally not respond to, and then look at them like he was defeated, like he had been personally victimized by me and had to placate me because I told everybody they needed to just not scream in the apartment…

I kept trying to include him in the conversations and he just literally wouldn’t speak, like he was acting like a petulant child and it was so embarrassing. It was exhausting because it was making me upset and I knew that if I got upset or reacted to it, it would then possibly make him freak out and make everything worse… so like always, I tried to act unbothered. It was so embarrassing.

Another time we were at a wedding and I don’t even know what happened, but he literally got drunk and flipped out on me and was cornering me and yelling at me on the side of this building. Even the bride came and asked if I was OK, and of course I said I was fine and that we were just joking around and we both smiled like nothing was happening, and then he stormed off into the woods….?!??

He would become so enraged at NOTHING that he’d literally start turning red, nostrils flaring, breathing weird, at me like he was legitimately going to kill me. Like he hated me. Like I was the most disgusting thing to ever cross his path.

Nobody would ever actually hear what he was saying to me. Only a few times people saw the body language and me being uncomfortable, but nobody really saw it. I always wanna believe he couldn’t help it, but obviously he could if he could control himself whenever there was a witness.

I want to know so badly if people actually believe the nonsense he spews about me. We were together for over 10 years and broke up a year and a half ago after he cheated.

I ended up talking to the girl he cheated on me with. She admitted that at first she believed all his lies, including that I was the abuser, until he turned on her too. The more comfortable he gets with someone, the more his true colors come out.

Side note: He literally used to tell me that he didn't need to put effort into our relationship because he already had me, and that effort was only for people he was trying to bring into his life.

I just really want to know if people buy it. I know it shouldn't matter, I get it. But I can't imagine I'm the only one who wonders this… I just hate the idea of being a villain in other peoples eyes.

I’m year and a half out of a 10 year long relationship..
Today I was remembering how a lot of the time in the car, if I put music on… he’d accuse me of trying to communicate my true feelings about him through the songs… Like he’d insist I was sending some hidden message when I literally just wanted to listen to a random song. It got so exhausting that I just stopped wanting to play music in the car at all.
He’d dissect the lyrics and start huge fights, insisting "that’s exacrly how you feel, why are you lying?" It was like an interrogation over a song in the car…
I remember one time a song called Not Today by Alessia Cara and she says “One day, I won't need a PhD. To sit me down and tell me what it all means” and he went off on me, accusing me of playing it on purpose because I secretly thought he needed therapy and think he’s not smart enough or capable enough of handling himself emotionally ???
I mean true, but I literally was just playing a song…

Just exhausting, honestly.

I’ve been watching this movie and it was making me uncomfortable, but I wasn’t really sure why until I realized it’s because the way Nikki acts in this movie is almost exactly how my ex convinced me I was acting….. Anytime I asked for the bare minimum, or for him to do a basic thing, or just asked for basic respect, he twisted it around and made it seem like I was acting like that girl!!!

He would describe me as explosive and volatile and emotion and claim he had to make all these changes to keep me from exploding…

It got to a point where I literally went to a therapist and told them I was behaving like that. I genuinely believed that was how I was acting. I also let him convince me I was a narcissistic and/or had some type of personality disorder. Looking back now in hindsight, I know I wasn't. Was I getting annoyed and angry sometimes? Yeah, absolutely. But I was not acting like that.

It’s just so bizarre and mind-effing to me how I legitimately believed it!! I let him convince me of all these things. He would tell me almost every single day so many things that were wrong with me. I remember asking him one time if he could name a single thing he liked about me, and all he could say was he liked my hair. And he didn’t even seem sure about that when he said it.

Then when he admitted he cheated on me, if I brought it up again or mentioned it during our breakup, he acted like I was going postal like that girl in the movie. He literally said I was "making accusations" when he was the one who confessed to it in the first place.

I don’t know, this is just a rant, but it’s alarmingly unsettling looking back and seeing how much he messed with my head.

This memory always finds its way back into my head and makes me physically cringe. It makes me angry and upset, and I don't even know if typing it out can fully explain how much it hurt.

Many years ago, I had no clothes on for some reason, and my ex and I got in a fight. I was trying to get into the other room to get my clothes and when I went to leave the room he blocked my way. I asked him to move so I could get my clothes, he eyed me up and down and made a face of sheer disgust, spit in my face, and said “I don’t speak cow”

I instantly started crying and he instantly realized he had just heavily crossed every line and then of course… the rest of the night was spend by me coddling him and making sure HE felt okay and was okay with the guilt of what he had just said and done to me.

It really upsets me and makes me mad. I’ve struggled with body image nearly my entire life, and that was such an intentional low blow. It was years ago and it still hurts.