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surviving-the-trauma · 5 years ago

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My Story

I was 13, had recently moved to Pennsylvania from Maryland, and was living a great life. My parents were together, though love was missing from their relationship, unbeknownst to me at the time. However, they were together. I had made friends. Lots of them. I generally enjoyed life, had fun, and things were great. Then, I met him. We met at a corn maize park where I lived in PA. I was with a friend who had a crush on him, and his friend had a crush on me. It turned out, he was interested in me but had a girlfriend. He asked for my number, we started talking, he broke up with his girlfriend at the time, and we started dating. Things were great for a while. It was young love and it felt awesome. For the first year, we never fought, we were always happy and in the honeymoon stage. After a year, things started to change very subtly. He lied to me, talked to other girls behind my back, et cetera but at the time I thought these things were insignificant and he apologized and we moved on. This would happen every so often, and I just accepted them as mistakes and he would tell me how much he loved me and wouldn't do it again. Things very slowly got worse. It would take me forever to explain every detail, but over a period of years in high school, he would become more disrespectful and more comfortable with just being a total asshole to me. So much so, that it would happen in front of other people. Nonchalantly and indirect, but hurtful nonetheless. Still, I accepted his treatment and continued on though unknowingly, it would chip away slowly at my self-confidence. We broke up off and on throughout high school.

He was a year ahead of me, so my senior year, he went to college. It honestly was a pretty freeing time for me. I basically had my own life and we saw each other on the weekends. If I remember correctly, I was generally happy at this point in my life. I had decided where I was to go to college after high school graduation, I had a plan for my life, and knew where I was headed. My abuser decided he was going to go to the same college as me. I found this a little frustrating, but I wanted to be with him so again, I accepted it. I could tell at this point in my life that I was losing attraction to him, but I think I stayed because we had established this sort of imbalance of power. I subconsciously viewed him as this superior figure in my life, and treated him as such. I accepted any form of treatment from him. I would fight back, just to roll over on my back and submit after we’d fight, likely because he’d apologize, tell me he loved me, and say he’d never do it again. We had a very strong trauma bond. However, a lot of my memories from this time period are blurred I think mainly because my brain tries to forget.

Jump forward to a year later, we were both in college and casual fighting started to increase. I broke up with him, and proclaimed to my friends that I couldn’t accept his abuse any longer. I was sick of it. But, I had struggled to make friends that I seemed to fit in with, and the ones that I was most familiar with were mutual friends of ours and most of my life was based around him anyway, so I think that I just couldn’t wrap my head around leaving that life. We got back together. The fights and disrespect would continue. We drank a lot more than ever before, and he would become more abusive when he was heavily intoxicated. He frequently threw around names, calling me a bitch, a cunt, stupid, whatever he could think of. I started smoking weed more frequently, which he had smoked frequently before this point and I had a negative view of it. I believe at this point, weed became something I used to numb myself. I stayed through it all. I was afraid to give up my familiar life.

Sophomore year of college, we were high every day, and drank heavily on the weekends. The fighting ensued, increasing with each year. One day, I, again, decided I had had enough. I asked him to come over to my house so we could have a talk. I told him that we needed to break up because I was tired of the abuse. He then got so angry, and though I forget exactly what he said to me, he stormed out, slamming doors and I watched as he walked away back to his house. Afterwards, we texted here and there, mostly fighting still. One weekend, on April 2, 2016, I hung out with my friends. I went out with them, partied, and though I cannot remember the exact text conversation that was had between us two, I do remember the next morning waking up, and texting him to tell him we needed to let things be and move on with our lives. He texted me back, telling me not to worry, that he had moved on, and attached a picture of him and the back of a blonde girl’s head, snuggled up to him in bed. He had sex with this girl just two days after we split. It was then that I fell into a deep depression, crying most of the day, feeling empty, and wanting to have him back, probably only to prove my worth to him again. I wasn’t eating, I lost 10 pounds in a week, and mostly laid in bed crying. My parents came to visit me to comfort me. We had still been texting, and about 2 weeks later, we had reluctantly gotten back together. I started going to therapy to sort through what just happened to me. (Looking back now, this is very hard for me to write because clearly no mentally healthy person would have taken this sorry fuck back). My self-esteem at this point was solely focused on his opinions about me. I was highly vulnerable and was also stuck on the idea that we were high school sweethearts, we were untouchable, and we could work through anything. Things were okay after that for a little while.

Now, my junior year, I think at this point I was desperate to take control of my life. I had gotten obsessed with my weight loss, trying to lose weight I had gained from college, from stress, from my abusive relationship, and trying to fit the ideal image. I lived with 5 other girls, who I was friends with, but they were all in the same sorority so again, I felt like I didn’t fit in and we talked, but did not really hang out or anything. I lacked a secure community, other than my abuser and our mutual friends. At this point, I was smoking alone in my room, trying to numb my pain.

In the beginning of junior year, my mother told my father she wanted a divorce. Not only was I still trying to process what my abuser had done to me, but now I had another trauma to process. I completely distanced myself from my relationship, though we stayed together, to be there for my family through this hard time. I was at school, but many times would get calls from my grieving father, trying to help him get through it, basically ignoring my own need to grieve. I pushed it down and away, out of my consciousness, and continued to numb my pain. I was in therapy, but it didn’t feel like it was helping me. Because I had distanced myself from my relationship with my abuser, things were “good.” There wasn’t really any room for any sort of feelings and we developed resistance and resentment. However, we decided to move in together my senior year.

There was a specific moment I remember from that following summer that I will never forget. My abuser and I had gone to a music festival together. Of course, he got way too intoxicated, and on our way back to our camp that night, he began yelling at me, physically going up to other girls and pointing at their asses telling me how nice they were, and telling me that all these other girls were so hot and I was not. This is the type of shit I endured.

So, senior year comes, we move in together and things obviously would get 10,000x worse. We were disturbing roommates with our fighting and his abusiveness increased to the max. In October, we got in such a bad fight that I felt I needed to leave the house. He followed me out, and as I aggressively backed out of the drive, I had done some damage to my roommate’s parked car. So, not only could I not escape, I had to confront my roommate about the damage I had just caused, endured the verbal abuse from my abuser about how stupid I was, and curled up in bed and sobbed. Things got worse, and by November, we broke up again and I moved out. There was a girl who went to my school who also went to my high school, who was really the only one with available space for me to live. I moved into her spare room, with my cat, on an air mattress and again was in a deep depression. My anxiety was sky-high, and on top of that, my cat was anxious, wouldn't eat, and my ‘friend’ had shoved me into this room where she stored all of her extra stuff and hardly made any room for me. I had about 5x5 feet of space for myself. I couldn’t eat, I could barely make it to classes, and I struggled to just live. I was receiving texts from my abuser saying things like, “I don’t like it here without you. Please come home.” Though I knew that what things between us were gone beyond repair, I moved back because I couldn’t stand being where I was anymore. I didn’t feel comfortable no matter where I was. Thankfully, winter break started and I was able to move home. But, you guessed it- we got back together. It was kind of hard to live together, with no other room in the house to inhabit, and not be together. The fighting ensued, I told him I didn’t love him anymore, and I could feel myself finally breaking the bond that we had.

We graduated, moved back home, and broke up AGAIN. Like I said before, we were done mentally back in the previous November, but I still just couldn’t bring myself to remove everything I had known up until that point from my life. I didn’t want to leave the familiarity, and still, my own self-image was reliant on my abuser and I was scared to build my own view of myself. It was easy relying on someone else to determine who I was. We stayed together through the summer.

In August, we went to a music festival with one of our friends. The day I was leaving to go to his house to leave for the festival, some shit went down with my mother (my mother had just spiraled out of control at this point- this is a whole other story), and I was emotionally distraught, but ready to let go and just have fun that weekend. The second I pulled up to his house, he was chastising me, jumping on my case for everything, and did not once ask me how I was amidst the things going on with my mother. I grew angry, and we got in the car and I sternly told him not to ruin my weekend and that no matter what I was going to have a good time. He continued being an asshole, per usual, but I was having a great time anyway. After the festival, I told him I needed space and didn't want to talk. I felt like I could BREATHE. Then, a girl from my high school messages me on Facebook to tell me that she matched with my abuser on bumble. Now, at that time, we hadn’t broken up. So, I questioned him. He gave excuses, saying I broke up with him and blah blah blah. So, just like that, I broke up with him, blocked him on every social media platform, blocked his number and was finally free from his abuse. I did not give in, and I did not talk to him again voluntarily after that. I relished the newfound freedom I had given myself. However, I was unaware of the grief, trauma, and healing that would come afterward, that I am still in the depths of 1.5 years later...

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