What nobody tells you about abusive relationships
‘You don’t realize that in all the ways you’ve devised to stay strong, you’ve become your abuser’
A female UVA student tells the account of an abusive relationship she was in when she was 18. She has asked to stay anonymous for her personal safety.
It might not always be obvious at first, it may be little things… Criticizing your posture, the way you hold a glass of wine, what you wear in public. It might then escalate to pushing you jokingly, only a little too hard, thoughts crossing your mind, but not yet questioning. It may be fights over silly things, but you think it’s just a clash in personalities.
It may be the silent treatment for no reason, leaving you to feel insecure. Then it may become being pushed across a room, slammed against a wall as you get slapped and spit at. It may be defensively striking back, only to get your wrist fractured, but blaming yourself, because you’ve been led to believe that you deserve this. That something about you isn’t good enough, and no matter what you do never will be.
Maybe it will only happen once, maybe you’ll see it coming from miles away and know when to run. But maybe it will become a routine for you, and it no longer hurts, you no longer feel it, because you don’t feel anything. Maybe when you’re out of it, you’ll miss it. Because being in it meant you always knew if you were in the right or in the wrong. Maybe even though you know it’s wrong, you still blame yourself for it.
What you don’t realize though is even months of group sessions and therapy will never be able to prepare you for your next relationship. You forget that words hurt, that people should think before they speak, that just because something isn’t irreparable, doesn’t mean you should break it in the first place. That your frustration often needs to be sidelined, because compromise is normal. Not everyone is out to get you, and you don’t need to live your life like you’re fighting to survive.
You don’t realize that in all the ways you’ve devised to stay strong, you’ve become your abuser. You speak first and apologize later, because it’s what has been done to you. You justify hurt as playful jabs, because thats what played in your head as you nurtured physical and emotional bruises. You take your relationship day by day, because the threat of it being gone tomorrow is still too real.
And so you act defensively, as a shell of yourself, like you’re swimming into a high tide, too terrified to open your eyes, and you don’t realize, but often, in the process, you do to others what was done to you. But most of all, you live looking over your shoulder, always paranoid that it will creep up on you when you least expect it.
It doesn’t always have to be physical, it doesn’t have to be a utopian fantasy gone wrong, it can be the little things that you let slip, because it was just easiest to, or it could be something so theatrical, it couldn’t have possibly happened in real life.
Whatever it may be, your scars are not reminders to be weary or afraid, nor to be constantly defensive. They exist to remind you of how courageous and beautiful you are, to remind you of the hurt you have conquered to ensure that you won’t become a proponent in the same cycle.