leaving
“Recently, L told me that I’m not a ‘whole person’, not fully real. I don’t think he realized it, but that was possibly the most hurt and connected I’ve ever felt to a person. By saying that, he saw me exactly as I was. I was only hurt because I don’t like that he's right.”
Someone close to me recently asked me if I had any advice for people who are in abusive relationships, or “the relationship underworld”, as they call it. I told them I’d think about it. At first I came up with all the motivational things that have been told to me over the years: you just have to learn to respect yourself; you have to build relationships that are healthy and seek help; remind yourself of what normal relationships look like, etc. All of those things might be true, but they never got me out of the abusive relationship I was in. I remember a close friend at the time casually saying “I would never let my boyfriend treat me like that, I have too much self-respect.” The shame and regret ate me up inside, but ultimately led me to the same conclusion: I should stay because I don’t deserve to be loved any better. The quote above is from one of the many diary entries about bad things my ex did or said to me, but it illustrates a big part of why it was so hard to leave. He saw me for what I was, he comforted me, accepted me, loved me, and alternately used my own eyes to reflect the worst of what I believed about myself. By him seeing it, and saying it, he crystallized and made truer what I already believed. In his eyes I was allowed to “be seen” as the worst of me, satisfying the sadistic self-destruction he always condemned me for.
Reading back these diary entries that span over multiple years, I can trace back the cycle of abuse so clearly. The worst part is that I knew it all along. At first, I lied to myself, but then I didn’t need to. Knowing what was happening didn’t get me out of the relationship. When I talked to my friends, therapist, or family about it, I pretended not to know what was happening. It was too shameful to admit that I wanted to stay. It satisfied the same self-destructive mechanism of shame to describe what he was doing to me, followed up with “but it’s fine, it’s not that bad”, to the chorus of “this is terrible, you need to leave! Where’s your self-respect?”
Why do people share stories of abuse? Why does it need to be public? Why is it one of those things where we pretend these stories are ‘silenced’ but they are actually loud, and everywhere. Maybe we love the spectacle, the sadistic imaginative play that is hearing about someone going through so-called ‘unspeakable’ things. But we do speak them. Victims of the most horrendous abuse get called onto talk shows to be questioned in great detail about what happened to them. Through this imperfect recollection, I want to contribute to other ways to talk about abusive relationships, without positioning myself as a "victim" by painting a picture of the worst ways I have been hurt. I am more interested in the ways some people let you fall apart in front of them only to later pick you apart by those cracks you showed them. The ways someone can see your drive to self-destruction and join you in it, dig at those cracks and make them deeper, slowly, until you feel completely trapped in those beliefs. By understanding myself as a person with drives and intent, rather than a victim, I can better understand the relationship and who I became within it.
The first time I left him was at the end of my second year of university. During the conversation, he told me “I don’t like thinking of myself as a rapist”, after I explained that the main reason for breaking up with him was the various acts of sexual assault and coercion that he had done to me over the years.
Here’s a snippet from an angry letter I wrote to him but never sent:
“The truth is that you only started waking up after I started breaking up with you. After you realized that I had a limit, actually. I know it’s hard to believe, after I begged and begged for 3 years for you to be nice to me, to respect me, to not yell at me, to not assault me. Why did I have to beg? Did you enjoy hearing it and thinking I was never gonna leave? You said to me that you didn’t think it was that bad, that it wasn’t a big deal. FUCK. YOU. I can’t believe I’m going to see you in 2 days.”
After this set of attempted breakups at the end of my second year of university, I never committed to him again, but I never fully let go either. Over the next two and a half years, I stacked up the lies, the breakups, the makeups, mostly the limbo-states. I built a life for myself that he wouldn’t recognize, but I couldn’t let go of him. The more I was outside of my relationship with him, the less I gave him, and the more his life grew outside of me, he slowly started treating me more like a person. It was not only my joy that I kept from him, but also pain that he could never know about, that helped me leave. I was raped multiple times by someone he didn’t know existed, and the many days I was wracked with pain about it, I couldn’t go to him. As I slowly recovered from it, I learned I could survive without him. I stopped seeing myself as disgusting, “icky”, “not a whole person”. I could see myself as just a person, like everyone else, trying to find a way to live. In the end, it was half a pill of ecstasy that finished the job. While I was high, everything felt pleasurable. I was filled with an intrinsic and unwavering knowledge of how to move my body, how to act, how to treat other people. At the peak, I remember saying “I really don’t want to talk to L anymore.” Within the next 10 days, I had cut contact with him. The heaviness of knowing that my entire life was a lie to him and myself, the heaviness of his shadow in the underbelly of my life disappeared.
The relationships that helped me the most, over the years, were the people who were willing to acknowledge the ambiguity of my agency in the relationship. Who saw how I was trapped, and who also pointed out, kindly, that I was contributing to my own trapping. Most people I spoke to reinforced the victim/perpetrator dialectic, encouraging me to see L as a “monster” or “the devil”, and myself as a powerless victim in his grasp. I reacted very defensively to those conversations, and always left feeling an even deeper sense of shame and alienation. Few people I spoke to allowed me to speak about him as a person, and myself as an agent. Few people also allowed me to consider my own faults, and the ways that I was acting against my own values. In the end, my way of forcing myself to make it end was to lie to him so much that the relationship would become morally untenable, and I would be forced to admit to myself that there was no other way than to stop talking to him. I was far from a perfect victim. It’s easy for me to look back now and to think if only I’d had the strength to leave earlier, to stop the cycle we were in much earlier, then we both would have suffered less. I can only be grateful to the friends who continued to see me as a whole person and who had infinite patience with me.
Finally, to anyone who’s written an angry, hurt letter they’ll never send to someone who is abusing them, please remember you are just a person too. Your pain and your joy are important. If you know you are engaging in the same cycle that is hurting you and feeling ashamed about it, I can only impart two things I’ve found helpful. The first is to try and notice when you apologize for things that aren’t your fault. The second is to talk to yourself with as much kindness as you can. Once you realize you can take care of yourself you start to realize all the things you might be doing to get care from someone who's hurting you.