She Was 5 ft, I Was 6 ft 2 — I Was Mentally Abused by Her
I learned the hard way that all of us can be victims of an abusive partner
They say that anyone can find themselves in an abusive relationship, all they have to do is be unlucky. But after getting bullied at school, in my mind I became a person who I felt was untouchable on that front. Never again would anybody bully me or mentally abuse me in any way.
My close friends, based on my personality and how ruthless I was with any person who attempted to take liberties with me, never believed me to be a person who could find themselves on the end of abuse — especially of the relationship kind.
Except I did. It happened.
And it happened because I never expected it to happen. It happened because I didn’t see it coming. It happened because I didn’t truly understand how abuse happened in the first place even though I thought I did.
Before going on, I wish to add some points here, I was dating somebody who was heavily addicted to alcohol. I don’t want to give excuses. However, the alcohol drinking is an important part of the story. Also, we were not living together, nor did she hold any form of financial hold or any type of material hold over me.
Finally, for anyone who has suffered abuse, I wish to add a trigger warning.
With that said, to tell the story, one minute I’m dating a kind caring person, the next I’m being torn into left right and centre. And there was an inciting incident, but something I never expected would be one. An old injury flared up badly which affected me mentally, and rather than her supporting me, she started figuratively kicking me while I was down.
We had been dating for about a year, and due to her having many problems, which I won’t list here but the alcohol addiction was only one of them, I had been giving her a great deal of support — especially on the emotional side. But then my injury flared up big style. And I needed support, but instead of giving it she instead started laying into me — unrelentingly at that.
Every time I came over, she would rant non-stop about how hard done by she felt because I was injured. If I asked for support, she would rant endlessly about how she had not signed up for this. She began endlessly belittling me, highlighting how skinny I was getting — I’m one of those people who when I stop lifting weights, lose weight. On and on the hateful comments would come.
My first response was to blame the alcohol for her behaviour, and so I started to highlight to her how drinking so much was leading her to be excessively aggressive and cruel.
Her response was to shout at me some more and drink some more, and most evenings went along the lines of this: I would get there, find her already intoxicated, and she would rant at me about how hard done by she felt because I was injured. Then we would go somewhere, she would be sort of relaxed. We would get back, she would rant some more about how she hadn’t signed up for dating someone with an injury, spend some time belittling me while I tried to calm her down, she would then drink some more.
She would then start getting increasingly aggressive, and as she drank more and more often adding weed to it, her eyes would go wide, and frequently she would start dancing around like a crazed maniac. She would then start slapping me repeatedly before running away and laughing. She would also start grabbing at my crotch like she was trying to rip my you know what off.
To defend myself, once it was clear my requests for her to cease were not going to be heeded, I would then have to grab her and pull her into a bear hug like cuddle, to restrict and stop her from further attacking me. I would hold her like this for between ten and twenty minutes until she calmed down, the whole time during which she would say to me repeatedly while trying to break free: “I hate it when you restrict me like this.” Followed by: “Are you trying to calm me down.”
After holding her for about 10 to 20 minutes, I would feel her whole body relax, at which point the physically aggressive part would normally be over.
Next though, would come more mental abuse, and she would enter what I came to call the “self-depressive you’re a monster I’m a victim mode”, where she would imply endlessly that I didn’t care about her, and that I was a terrible person and that I didn’t know what it was like dating somebody whose hands were injured. She would highlight how I was muscular when she started dating me and now I was getting skinny and on and on she would go — I’m not going to share the majority of what she would say for reasons you can probably guess, but basically she would make clear that she felt she had been screwed by the gods to end up with someone broken like me.
If I tried to call her out on her verbal assaults, she would tell me that she wished she was dead, and then threaten suicide — implying my apparent lack of caring about her would be to blame.
She would then want me to cuddle her to sleep, but I would tell her because I was injured I couldn’t cuddle her to sleep. That’s the downside of my injury, no cuddling to sleep as sleep is dangerous for my wrists, all it takes is sleeping in a bad position and I’m crippled for a week. I found this out the hard way.
I would remind her of this, she would then yet again rant at me about how terrible a partner I was and how hard done by she felt, and she would finish by telling me that if I was not going to cuddle her to sleep, then I may as well leave because there was no point in me staying. And so, I would leave, mentally drained, and my wrists normally in agony from having to spend a large part of the night trying to restrain her.
For several months, this was a repeated pattern, and yet I kept going back. I kept putting up with this behaviour, more than that, I ceased even gently trying to call her out on it. Something which to this day staggers me. Since leaving school, I had called out every person who had even remotely tried to take liberties with me the moment they had tried to do so. Yet here I was, letting her get away with it, again and again, and putting up less and less fight.
In truth, my desire to protect her and excuse her behaviour had for some unfathomable reason become far greater than my desire to protect myself.
Don’t get me wrong, during the times when she was not totally intoxicated, I would tell her about her behaviour, and her response would be to go sort of silent, before telling me she didn’t remember doing any of it. She would then start apologising and get all upset. I would then ask her to stop drinking so much, that if she did so it may help things.
And you can guess what would happen, the tirades would start, and history would more often than not repeat itself. Not always, sometimes she was calm. But mostly she was not. And I kept going back, for this one reason:
In my head, for a reason which I cannot fathom, for several months, I felt her behaviour was increasingly justifiable.
Don’t ask me why, I cannot explain it. But I felt that she had been hard done by because my injury had flared up, that she had not signed up to date somebody as badly injured as I had become. I even forgot all about what I had to put up with, her being an alcoholic and refusing to do anything about it — I had not known she had an alcohol problem when we started dating. And that was the least of her problems.
Despite this, all I saw for a reason which I cannot fathom, was her side of the story. She painted herself as a victim of my injury, and I bought it. Madness I know, but it happened.
So rather than calling her out on it and putting a stop to her unjustified treatment of me, I allowed it to keep happening. People may question my use of the word allowed. But I use that word on purpose. I could have easily stopped it.
I did not. I let it continue.
And “let” is the word. I could have stopped it. I could have left and never come back — I was not living with her. So yes, I could simply have stopped going to see her.
I did not. I kept going to see her, willingly walking into it. In hindsight, it feels unfathomable. Yet I kept doing it.
Hell, I could have simply put my foot down at the times it was happening, I’m 6 ft 2, she was 5 ft. I weighed 12 ½ stone and despite my injury was packed to the brim with sheer muscle. She weighed 7 stone. I could have stopped it if I’d wanted to, I had that power.
Yet I did not use it. At least not for several months. And that’s what taught me the greatest lesson I have ever learned. About how some people find themselves getting abused by their partners: because for some reason they come to the belief, like I did, that the person they are with is justified in their feelings and actions towards them. That the abuse is justifiable, warranted even.
It is not and never will be. The alcohol is not and was never an excuse. Me being injured was certainly not and could never be an excuse. But I gave her those excuses. She sold them to me, and I bought them. And that was her power over me. And only once I took those excuses away, could her power be taken away, and was it taken away.
After it had been, her power was gone.
Every story is different, and abuse happens for different reasons and in different ways. Some people are simply trapped and cannot get out, that’s how they are abused, some people are like me and can get out but for what feels an unfathomable reason, do not.
I can’t tell anyone in the position of the former what to do, but I can say that if you are in the position of the latter, so the same position that I was, that this one thought process changed everything for me: I realised or remembered or even acknowledged that no matter what, she had no right to be the way she was with me. She had no right to mentally abuse me, she had no right to repeatedly use alcohol as an excuse to force me into physically restraining her to stop her from attacking me, she had no right to punish me for being injured.
She had no right to be abusive, full stop, and no excuses for being so. She had no defence. She was not a victim. She was and is the guilty party. Once I acknowledged that it was game over for her and all her power vanished. And instead, she spent several months trying to persuade me to remain in her life. She failed.
Final words
If someone had told me that I could be mentally abused and to a small extent physically abused by a 5 ft tall, 7 stone woman, I would have laughed. And yet, look what happened.
Abuse can happen to everyone. It doesn’t matter how big you are, how physically strong you are, how mentally switched on and strong you are, how small they are, how physically weak by comparison they are, if they are in your head, they have the power to abuse you.
That’s why to win the fight against abuse in relationships, a lot more understanding is needed about how abuse happens. I never fully understood, I used to always think that even when it was a woman on a man, there had to be some sort of physical power behind it, or financial hold of some sort.
I was wrong.
Abuse can happen to any of us — even those who have the power to stop it with ease. That means men are just as at risk as women. All of us are just as at risk as each other. Anyone can be a victim. Only when a lot more of us start acknowledging that fact, and we change the narrative from men versus women, to good people versus bad people, do we start winning the battle.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, I have changed some minor details to help protect her identity, the reason, you guessed it. Even now I’m still protecting her. That’s the power of an abusive partner.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading!
If you found this post of interest, you may also enjoy the following:
Twelve Brilliant Wiseass Comebacks To Common Insults
Seven Ways to Stop People from Taking Advantage of You
26 Killer Comebacks to Nasty Remarks
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