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It seems like I can’t make it a couple of days without asking ChatGPT or my therapist how it could have been abuse.

I just don’t believe it.

I feel like I’m waffling through space with this one.

I thought he was just difficult, stubborn etc and I turned the other cheek, to you know, show how much I cared and didn’t take it personally and to be a “good wife”… I just can’t accept that this is classified as abuse, especially because I allowed it.

So, I’ll ask about timelines, how I’m reacting now, my actual symptoms. I’ll copy and paste massive arguments we had via text. I need PROOF. Hard proof that I am reacting to this so called abuse.

I’m a cynic of my own experience…

Every time the answers are… you had a “classic trauma response”. He lacked empathy, he was gaslighting, he was DARVO’ing, he wasn’t taking accountability, he’s making you feel guilty for his reactions, he’s making you caretake his emotions while ignoring yours, he’s reacting to your very clear and direct requests with immaturity and selfishness. He’s negating your reality, he’s not curious about how you feel at all. And my therapist even said, “you would have gotten nowhere with him, he clearly didn’t care about you, you would have lost yourself and probably have died early. I’m telling you this because I want you to know you made the right decision to get out of there.”

I also thought that was harsh, but… you know.

And people roll their eyes at these things. What is emotional abuse? That’s such a woke gray area. I get it. I felt the same way for my entire life. I thought I needed to toughen up, love them through their shit-tastic treatment of me and just carry on and find a hobby. “You picked him. You made this bed. Make the most of it and shut. Up.”

But, BUT… two panic attacks, an ER visit, anti depressants and anti anxiety drugs, therapy and “classic signs of trauma” all point to me healing from something other than just dealing with a difficult person or me being a little sensitive, having shame, feeling depressed or rejected. This was more than that. And I need to know what it is so I can heal from it, move on and never repeat it again.

I guess I’m trying to convince the naysayers that this was abuse and not just a series of misunderstandings within a very incompatible marriage. Or even he said she said.

(I know I’ll never convince the cynics and that’s an exercise in futility, but typing all this out will at least help me and others like me).

Okay, so… I’ll lay it all out:

The Timeline, how it was a classic trauma response unfolding in a predictable way

1. He emotionally abandoned me during an emergency and it was the last straw. I called it the snap. It’s when he didn’t answer his phone and then fought with me about it. This is the moment my body checked out because I finally realized I wasn’t safe here. I couldn’t rely on him. My nervous system went into freeze or detached survival mode. Tolerating, Coasting, Numbing. Physically there, but mentally and emotionally in outer space.
2. It was at this time I stopped having sex with him and stopped checking in on him, emotionally. And he started ramping up his frustration with me.
3. I had a very high fever of 104° about 10 months after the above. I guess this has been described as a spontaneous healing crisis or a spiritual awakening. I’ve also heard it described as a Kundalini Awakening. Illness like this purges stored emotional energy. I woke up on day 4 with a clear message, I don’t want my life to suck anymore. This kicked off the awakening. Crying with joy, love for life. This is common after trauma, it’s your body’s way of reclaiming its vitality after surviving.
4. At the tail end of the big awakening, I went into a personal transformation phase. I became obsessed with exercise, I found joy in movement and started feeling safe in my own body. I lost 50 pounds effortlessly. I finally started caring for myself because I wasn’t wrapped up in managing him. I was moving towards self ownership.
5. He kicked me out of the house because I wouldn’t sleep with him. To his credit, this was 3 1/2 years after I stopped sleeping with him, but it was still incredibly shitty. Not too long later, he told me he was proceeding with the divorce and gave me the details in what I describe as the serial killer voice. It scared the hell out of me. Deeply. He was a dangerous stranger now. He told me he had changed the locks and was keeping the house, even thought all my possessions were still in there and my name was on everything.
6. The reality of losing the house, the history and the final confirmation that it was over and I had no control pushed me into two panic attacks. This is where panic attacks begin, during the realization and grief phase, not the survival phase which was, you know, the bulk of the marriage.
7. The panic attacks from the severe disassociation started at this point because I was no longer numb, I was living on my own and I was finally safe enough to start feeling everything, I was seeing the abuse with clear eyes.
8. During this last phase, I gained 30 pounds. From the stress, from the anti depressants? Not sure. But when a body goes into fight or flight, it reverts back to panic, cortisol, loss of motivation and more cortisol. Ta-dah, you’re fat again.

Apparently that entire cycle from 1-8 is called Post-Traumatic Awakening followed by Delayed Trauma Activation and it’s incredibly common. Most people don’t fall apart during the abuse, they fall apart when they’re finally free and your system has time to process what happened.

If I just had a case of the sads from getting a divorce, I don’t think it would have been this dramatic.

Also, people just don’t start having panic attacks out of nowhere, there are usually reasons.

Defining Emotional Abuse

1. They minimize your experience (emotional invalidation)
2. They project blame back at you (emotional manipulation)
3. They make you the caretaker of their emotions even when you are the one suffering
4. They deflect accountability and paint themselves as the victim (DARVO)
5. They avoid your needs and make you apologize for having them (emotional neglect) and make you feel guilty for wanting to be heard.
6. Takes any request or expression of hurt as an attack

The Pattern/Emotional Abuse Cycle I was Specifically Dealing With:

1. I sought connection and repair
2. He redirected everything back to his own pain repeatedly (feeling attacked, feeling judged, feeling rejected, his shitty mother etc)
3. I comforted him instead of being able to address and resolve my own feelings. I even apologized for things I didn’t need to apologize for
4. Then I blamed myself for “troubling him” with my dumb feelings of not being heard, cherished, loved, respected, helped etc.
5. He never validated my experience
6. His emotions took up all the oxygen in the room
7. He framed my normal needs for partnership (him bathing, emotional connection, emotional support, comforting) as controlling or attacking
8. He would hint that his sadness and self esteem issues were my fault constantly
9. He gets me to give up my pursuit of repair by getting me to caretake his emotions and soothe him. I never got any soothing. The relationship was severely one sided. He never met me in the middle, I had to come to him.
10. This came from my conditioning as a child. I got shut down a lot and this felt familiar to me so I just let it happen. And he stayed in a constant state of being the sad, broken one so I couldn’t get angry or pursue repair because he was too fragile to take it. He couldn’t hear what I wanted, what I needed. I was never heard.
11. But after ALL this, shutting me down, shutting me up…he would guilt trip me into having sex. “Even if we are fighting or you’re mad at me, we should still do it.” And I would feel guilty and give in, which made me feel cheap, unloved, used, stuck and unsafe. This eroded any love I had for myself as I started feeling like an object who should just shut up and put out and make him feel good, validated, loved, taken care of etc… but how I felt didn’t matter at all. The self hate bubbled up from this. So did the drinking.

I talked about the drinking to put out on Reddit and the comments all blamed me and “there are two sides to every story”. I just wasn’t getting empathy or comfort from anywhere and it was killing my soul.

Autism or Narcissism?

I know this is very controversial and it may seem like black and white thinking. For 20 years I gave him grace for all the times he let me down and left my questioning my sanity because I thought he was on the spectrum. That he loved me, but he just couldn’t express it in a way that I might receive it. So, I spent a solid decade trying to decode his lack of empathy, his lack of care, his lack of showing up and his extreme combativeness, contrarian diatribes, his lack of curiosity about me in general, his dismissal of all of my feelings and severe aversion to any manual labor at all.

So, was he emotionally abusive or emotionally incapable?

1. Lack of genuine accountability – points to Narcissistic traits
2. Self centeredness and returning to his feelings instead of ever wanting to explore mine – Narcissistic
3. Victim playing – Narcissistic
4. Occasional self deprecation – Narcissistic
5. Emotional entitlement – Narcissistic
6. Lack of empathy – Narcissistic – Autism struggles with communication more than empathy. They struggle to express empathy but they feel deeply.
7. Consistent refusal to engage with my emotional needs, repeated invalidation followed by emotional manipulation – Narcissistic
8. Doesn’t want to engage – Narcissism (can’t engage = Austistic)
9. Turns my needs into threats – Narcissistic
10. Become defensive even when I’m being soft – Narcissistic. Autistic people don’t typically reverse the roles to make themselves the victim.
11. Assigned me the job of fixing or regulating his emotions – Narcissistic. Autistic people don’t do this.
12. He understood but refused – Narcissistic 100%
13. Avoid being vulnerable and avoid responsibility for anyone else in the name of control – Narcissistic
14. He said marriage should be easy, he guilt tripped me into sex and fought every request – Narcissistic
15. He wanted to WIN every interaction and wanted me to shrink down or be the one to apologize – Narcissistic

Signs that I was a Survivor of Narcissistic and/or Emotional Abuse

Let’s say we had nothing on him. No info. Let’s just go on my reaction, my symptoms, my timeline.

1. I am a chronic self blamer
2. I see myself as mean
3. I repeatedly minimize my own needs and assume I should have been nicer, even when I was expressing reasonable human needs and boundaries. I always blamed myself for not being nicer. This is called Internalized Blame and False Self Perception. My belief that I was abusive for asking for help or needing support points to long term exposure to someone who repeatedly frames a reasonable need as an “attack”.
4. Hyper responsibility. I feel responsible for the marriage falling apart, for my ex’s emotions, for his lack of healing, for my lack of understanding, I still constantly ask myself what my responsibility in all of this was. Apparently, this is the Hallmark of someone who has been in a narcissistic control dynamic because I carried all the emotional labor.
5. Panic attacks after escape. I didn’t have the panic attacks inside the relationship, which is common in survivors of emotional neglect and covert narcissistic abuse. Because I was in freeze/fawn mode and it all came out when I finally felt safe.
6. I apologized more than necessary and over accommodated him. I took responsibility for his emotional state and I minimized my own needs chronically.
7. An awakening followed by panic collapse was me reclaiming my nervous system after years of neglect. The panic didn’t come until the discard, the reality of the divorce and finally realizing that he was never going to show up for me. This pattern of feeling safe enough to fall part after the abuse is so common, it’s actually diagnostic.
8. Loss of self. I gave up my instincts during the relationship and only started feeling like myself again after I stopped centering him. Narcissistic dynamics require the partner to lose themselves in order to maintain the relationship. It required me to shrink so the relationship could survive.
9. Guilt over escaping. I felt that I should stay even if it was killing me. I’m having a hard time finding happiness now because of the guilt. Only a covertly controlling partner teaches you to feel guilty for saving yourself. Frankly, this could be conditioning from my mother more than my ex.
10. I still avoid my own needs and question question question and doubt my perception. I still worry if I was unfair, mean, had harsh startups, that my reaction to him was mean and I should have been stronger and more reserved. Survivors of narcissistic dynamics do this for years after the relationship, apparently.
11. In a nutshell, my nervous system reactions, my timeline, my guilt, my patterns and my panic attacks points to the fact that I show classic post emotional abuse symptoms: chronic self blame, trauma bonding, fawn response, panic onset after separation and loss of self patterns consistent with exposure to emotional neglect, gaslighting and control.

Some would say “well, if you are going through the stages of grief, if you are dealing with a divorce, which is HUGE, all the above would be true. Stop labeling this narcissistic abuse.

Okay, well, here’s what “normal” grief after a non-abusive relationship would look like:

1. Sadness
2. Missing the good times
3. Regret – about timing, incompatibilities or mutual mistakes
4. Loneliness
5. Some guilt, if there were real mistakes of both sides
6. Pain over the loss of the partner, even if the relationship wan’t healthy
7. Eventually, clarity, relief or acceptance come in more steadily over time

So, how do they differ exactly?

Abuse survivors don’t just mourn the relationship, they are dealing with:

1. Loss of self. You don’t just mourn the partner, you realize you’ve lost years of yourself. You’re grieving who you had to become (small, apologetic, hyper vigilant) to survive. You feel like you are rebuilding your sense of self and instincts from scratch because you questioned your worth on a deep, fundamental level.
2. Shattered reality. Was that real? Was it him? Was it me? Was I crazy? Non abused people don’t typically question their reality this way after a break up.
3. Persistent panic/nervous system dysregulation. Abuse survivors often don’t just get sad, they develop trauma symptoms. Panic attacks, flashbacks, chronic anxiety, frozen states and disorganized attachment.
4. Deep shame and self doubt. Abused people don’t just think: “We didn’t work out”. They think: “Was I abusive? Was I the problem? Did I ruin everything? Am I unlovable? This level of invasive self blame isn’t typical in mutual breakups.
5. Fawn response hangover. Abuse survivors constantly fear people will side with the abuser or won’t believe them. Why? Because the abuser trained them to question themselves.
6. You never felt safe with them and question that often. You feel guilty for even realizing you needed to leave.
7. Possible medication to deal with trauma collapse once you are out.

All of this isn’t about a pity parade, sympathy or attention. It’s about my nervous system acting like an asshole and wanting answers. And, if you’re like me, and I think you are because you are waaayyyy down here on this page, you have been dealing with one difficult narcissistic person after another and you’ve blamed yourself. Maybe you’re at the part of this fun odyssey where you want to hide in your house and never have a relationship again because the hurt is so overwhelming. Been there! So, I’ll keep writing and undoing this huge ball of rubber bands because just maybe in the middle there will the some peace. And a relationship that doesn’t shred our self worth and nervous system to bits.