emotional abuse in relationships

“He is not your responsibility. He is an adult and he’s treated you like shit for a long time. You don’t owe him anything. People break up, it happens. When normal people break up, they don’t harass the other person saying that they’ll kill themselves so that they can guilt the other person into getting back with them. That is literally a method of abuse. He is an abusive boyfriend. You are a victim of domestic abuse. And he’s realising that he can’t have you, so he’s going to start trying to turn friends against you. Any friend that believes him over you, just let them go. There are 7 billion people in this world and you’re a good person, you don’t need them.”
This was advice given to me by a friend in April 2017. It came following a night out where I received abusive messages from my ex boyfriend, who I’d seen whilst I was out.
Emotional abuse is, in a way, interesting. When people think about abusive relationships, they often cast their minds to visions of domestic abuse victims who have suffered physically at the hands of their partner. What they fail to consider is that domestic abuse and the concept of an ‘abusive relationship’ spans beyond this; it incorporates relationships where a partner uses behaviour that is controlling or coercive towards another person in an intimate or family relationship.
Emotional abuse can include a lot of things. In my experience, it was predominantly about being made to feel guilty. This ranged from outright emotional blackmail (threatening to kill himself) to blocking me intermittently on social media without warning if I did or said anything he did not agree with. On one occasion, it even involved trying to get our mutual friend to tell me certain things so that I would feel bad. It’s hard to say whether any of this was ever done intentionally. But what is not hard to say is that this was manipulative, unhealthy and toxic.
One of the defining moments was when he came to a party that I was at, after sending abusive messages on the aforementioned night out and blocking me. He ignored me constantly, actively leaving the room every time I walked into it. After eventually confronting him about this, we argued. I cannot remember everything that was said, but I remember him making a comment that I scoffed at. He then commented on the fact that I had “changed” because I “no longer cried when we argued” — he didn’t know how to deal with this change and how to apologise anymore. But for me, it acted as a realisation of how far I had come, and how much I had developed independently of his influence. It was a sign of how much I had grown because we broke up. Not because of the circumstances he had created, but through the way I had picked up the pieces after every interaction — the way that I started to focus on my self worth, and paid my own mental health the attention that it deserved.

It took me longer than it should have to finally accept that somebody calling me a “slag”, or telling me that I’m “not worth oxygen” and to “go die” or “drop off of the face of the earth” is not language that I should have to stand for. Something I found hard to deal with in the aftermath was the people who would seek to justify his behaviour or try to dismiss the way I felt. I would get told it was excusable because he was ‘going through a hard time’ or was just ‘upset over the break up’. I can look at it this from a lot of angles, but I can still never fathom how depression can offer a justification for telling someone else to go and kill themselves.
If you excuse such behaviour when faced with these facts, then frankly you are taking the side of the abuser. People who tried to be sympathetic towards me, whilst refusing to actively criticise his behaviour, were taking the side of the abuser. I have now come to accept that people can and will still be friends with him. However, it will always sting that certain people did not stand up for me; that they did not ever comment to his face on how unacceptable what he was doing was. Choosing to do what is convenient is not an excuse.
Time has passed. It has almost been two years now since we broke up — one year since I decided to actively put an end to the abuse by blocking all contact. Realising that I did not owe him anything, that I dictated how much of an influence he could have over me, was empowering. I only wish it hadn’t taken me so long.
