Was I abused am I still??

[edelweiss]

My situation is small compared to things I have been reading here.

I was for five years with a man, that always told me that I was the reason that his life went wrong, that I depended on him and could not live by myself, I am incompetent in social situations, he refused to know my friends because they were not good enough. We broke up two years ago and I was foolish enough to thought about friendship and now I feel his weight again, I will explain the latest event so to have your opinion

- I have been a bit depressed and I tried to talk with him, he was nice for four days and then snapped and told me that I should take more pills and leave him alone. He also told me if I do not have friends is all my fault

I am writing here because I do not want to call him or think of him, but I seem obcessed

Can someone give a hint about this; I fail to understand my behaviour

:confused:

[edelweiss]

I am I being stupid?

[Guest ASchwartz]

Hi Edelweiss,

You are not being stupid at all. Yes, this man was abusive towards you. He told you terrible things. Like most people, you want to continue to be attached to your abuser. This is typical of this problem and it means that you are not alone and are not stupid.

Are you seeing a psychotherapist?

Allan:)

[edelweiss]

Hi Allan

Thank you for the reply

When I was living in my country I had a therapist but when I moved out with my ex, I l stopped.I still get in touch with her and I really miss her help; we still keep in touch but we both agree it is difficult to do it by mail. When me and my ex finally broke up I went to a therapist that kept telling me that my problem was not going out enough and that a woman like me would find someone else very easily he even gave me his phone number :mad:

So I quit...

Today I spent my day alone, I feel extremely sad because I am alone and seem to fail in all my relationships, tomorrow I will be alone again, the weekends are so heavy... I am trying not to call him, anyway he had already told me that he has no time for me, he can make friends while I cannot

I am tired

[Symora]

Hi Edelweiss, It took me at least 5 years to get out. I wanted out, but it was as if a magnet was drawing me back to him, and he knows it. In some circles it is called co-dependance (toxic codependance, since some form of codependance is part of any relationship I think). His treating me with no consideration reinforced my low self-esteem I think, confirming to me that I don't deserve better. And he gets to feel like a big man, gets something I don't really understand with regards to domination, perhaps looking down on someone so they can see themselves as higher than they actually are .... That's my situation, but every toxic codependant relationship has it's strange forces at work and it is a great struggle to move away from them, as Alan mentionned.

I have been away from him physically for 1 year, last 6 months without conversation. He called me the other day and it has been a struggle again, my heart is torn again, I go back to the dream of how it <could> be. What is helping me this time is actually having made the choice to protect myself from this turmoil in my life, because it makes me crazy and brings nothing constructive - that was made abundantly clear to me over time. I think I have finally come to a place where I know that I don't deserve to be treated that way, that I truly deserve some peace of mind and not have that in my life. I've also realized that if I want to change that dynamic then I have to make that stand for myself, or else it's just going to be more of the same, over and over again...

There are so many things that make us go back to negative codependent relationships - do you understand why you go back?

[spiritual_emergency]

Hello edelweiss,

What I like about your story is you recognize where things are going wrong. Of course, you're not responsible for everything that went wrong in your partner's life. Of course, you are capable of making friends. Of course, it's unethical for a therapist to give you his phone number within the context of setting up a personal romantic relationship. See? Not so stupid after all.

Why do your thoughts go back there? Maybe there were some good times and you miss those. That's natural. Learning to let go is a process and it's often a painful one. In spite of whatever good was there however, you weren't happy with this man. Given that he doesn't seem to have changed, odds are very good that you're not going to be happy with him in the future. You already know that and you're simply letting go, in your own way, a little bit at a time.

Meantime, this blurb might have something of value for you:

From Chapter 2 - Stalking the Intruder: The Beginning Initiation

All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naïveté, inexperience or foolishness.

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A predatory person misappropriates a woman's creative juice, taking it for their own pleasure or use, leaving her whitened and wondering what happened, while they themselves somehow grow more rosy and hearty.

The pattern of surrendering one's core life may have begun in childhood, fostered by caretakers who wanted the child's gifts and loveliness to augment the caretakers' own emptiness and hunger. Generally, a woman with good instincts knows the predator is insinuated nearby when she finds herself involved in a relationship or situation that causes her life to become smaller rather than larger.

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Many women have literally lived the Bluebeard tale. They marry while they are yet naive about predators, and they choose someone who is destructive to their lives. They are determined to "cure" that person with love. They are in some way "playing house." One could say that they have spent much time saying, "His beard isn't really so blue."

While it may be the woman's actual mate who denigrates and dismantles her life, the innate predator within her own psyche concurs. As long as a woman is forced into believing that she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.

The deceitful promise of the predator is that the woman will become a queen in some way, when in fact her murder is being planned. There is a way out of all this, but one must have a key.

The key is both permission and endorsement to know the deepest, darkest secrets of the psyche, in this case the something that mindlessly degrades and destroys a woman's potential.

Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation —in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.

- Where do you think that door is, and what might lie beyond it?

- What is behind the visible?

- What is it which causes that shadow to loom upon the wall?

- What is not as it appears?

- What do I know deep in my ovaries that I wish I did not know?

- What of me has been killed, or lays dying?

Those who would develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable: the unseen chirping, the murked window, the lamenting door, the lip of light beneath a sill. They pursue these mysteries until the substance of the matter is laid open to them.

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Instead of reviling the predator of the psyche, or running away from it, we dismember it.

We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturing truths. Predator: "You never finish anything you start." Yourself: "I finish many things." We dismantle the assaults of the natural predator by taking to heart and working with what is truthful in what the predator says and then discarding the rest. We dismantle the predator by maintaining our intuitions and instincts and by resisting the predator's seductions.

When we refuse to entertain the predator, its strength is extracted and it is unable to act without us. When the predator's psychic energum is rendered, it is formable to some other purpose. We are the creators then; the raw substance reduced down, it becomes then the stuff of our own creation.

The predator's rage can be rendered into a soul-fire for accomplishing a great task in the world. The predator's craftiness can be used to inspect and understand things from a distance. The predator's killing nature can be used to kill off that which must properly die in a woman's life, or what she must die to in her outer life.

Source: Women Who Run With the Wolves

[edelweiss]

called me a selfish b... because I just think about myself and he is always worried that I do the same as my sister and he is tired and fed up of me. I did not react, couldn't , did not know how Why did I think he could just help me in this moment??? He said he could not be with on weekend because I am so boring, and that I have no friends that is why I spent my WE alone and he is just with me by pity, because I am just like my sister!!! He actually said I just pretended to be bad to keep him around Everything is about me. I just wanted to talk about what happened to my sister and I ended up more desolated...

I promise when I am calmer to read the previous posts

I am tired

[GettingWiser]

I agree with all of the posters here. Something I've found helpful in my own situation of extracting myself from an emotional abuser is to remember that I am a sane rational woman who has been driven to behave irrationally by a man with a disordered personality. I recall my sanity, my values, my beliefs, my other healthy relationships to date with people and, as SE and their extract mentions - the facts. I think about how other people I know would react in the same situations. Would they be so cruel? I doubt it! And therein lies the disintegration of the abusive predator! As you become aware of the facts and your own sanity which was there all along, you see more and more his insanity and how he is trying to project it onto you. No mature decent person tries to resolve a relationship issue by being verbally abusive from the start. Immature not so decent people do. Analyse his rationale, his accusations - you'll find that while they appear to hold water at face value, upon further inspection they will turn out to be (pardon my French!) complete bullshit!

I lilke many others here have been there (going through it at the moment) and I'm pretty darned certain, from what you describe and just the way you come across in your posts, that you are a loving rational decent human being who has had her head messed about with by an abuser and is reacting to the abuse in a rational natural way. he is the one with the problem and you will recover from this - I truly believe that xxx