The Quiet Pain of Emotional Abuse

Making noise to stop suffering in silence

I used to spend a lot of time in stillness.

Not the good kind. Not the mindful meditative kind. But the kind where the pain inside my body was so overwhelming that it felt like my heart would concave, like my throat would close for good, like the echoes of his words and his actions had replaced the blood running through my veins.

I spent a lot of time standing in front of windows, staring out at a world I wasn’t a part of anymore, and standing in front of mirrors, wondering who it was who stared back. I spent a lot of time sitting — in chairs, in baths, at the dinner table while everyone around me ate what I had prepared.

I spent a lot of time not talking, not thinking either at least not deeply. It was more of a foggy confusion I existed within, not understanding how my life had taken such a turn, unable to wrap my head around the reason for this unbearable pain inside that refused to offer any answers. Thus, I spent a lot of time existing, not living, not moving, not doing anything really except trying to make it from sunup until sundown.

All of this happened before my then-husband was diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Before I had any idea that I was in an abusive marriage. And before I realized I was a victim of emotional abuse.

I suffered in silence all those years due to one reason only: I thought abuse was physical. Since I lacked any bruises or black eyes or broken bones, I believed that the pain was all mine. Inside my head. I was the crazy one. I was the one responsible for whatever discord happened in my marriage. If he was cruel, I thought I deserved it. If he was emotionally unavailable, I believed it was because I’d done something wrong.

I didn’t know what gaslighting was.

All I knew was that I started to doubt my mental capacity, my memory, and my sense of what was up and down and right and wrong. My moods became unrecognizable to me. I wasn’t the mother I once was. I believed him when he said I was needy, too emotional, too sensitive, high maintenance. I spent my days in a fog, always searching for a door that wasn’t even there.

I didn’t know what love-bombing was.

All I knew was that the man of my dreams who showered me with so much passion and love at the beginning of our marriage was, for the most part, gone. The last few years with him, the man I knew only showed up when he needed something from me, like approval or sex, or when he risked losing me when I threatened that I couldn’t take it anymore. Gone were my pedestal days when he was the man of my dreams. In their place was my view from the floor, staring up into his black eyes that no longer had any love or empathy to give.

I didn’t know what normalizing meant.

All I knew was that he wasn’t hitting me, though at times I wanted him to so I’d have proof of my pain. He wasn’t calling me bad names, though his words still cut me to the bone and left me unable to function. I had become used to his changing moods, never feeling safe with him, and dreading his arrival home every night. It became normal for him to ignore me for days on end while I begged for his attention. It became routine for him to stay out later and later, upping his social game while I holed up at home, living a life that now seemed separate from me as if all our marital goals and dreams no longer existed. Like a frog in a pot of cool water that was set on Boil, I got used to the change in temperature because it happened so subtlety. Until such point that it was too late for me to do anything about it.

I didn’t know what projection was.

All I knew was that I spent much of my energy defending myself against claims that changed on a daily basis. He accused me of flirting, cheating, lying, and being somebody that I wasn’t. I never knew what he would accuse me of next, and I mistook his accusations as love, even jealousy, which is why I vigorously tried to convince him of the truth and that I would never hurt him like that. On the few occasions I went out to dinner with my only two friends, he waited up for me and once I arrived home began his line of questioning: What did you talk about? Did you talk about me? What did you tell them? I grew exhausted with spending so much time in the witness chair being grilled to the point where I actually began doubting whether I had possibly — without my knowledge — done any of the things he accused me of, leading me right back to that mirror where I stared into the eyes of a woman who by that time confirmed my worst fear: I must be crazy.

I didn’t know about emotional terrorism, coercive control, narcissistic abuse, or the violence of silence.

All I knew was that the same man who used to fill my heart and soul with massive amounts of love and affection had been replaced by a man who took pleasure in watching me writhe in pain. This pain was silent and remained unseen. It followed me everywhere, becoming so intense that I isolated myself more and more within my home, afraid to go out even on a grocery run and risk bumping into someone I knew who would ask, “How are things?”

Emotionally abusive relationships are so damaging to a victim because of the lack of noise within them.

Unlike physical abuse, where the violence is loud and shakes the surroundings, emotional abuse functions best when silence is employed by an abuser. It’s quiet (for the most part) and relies on convincing a victim it’s not happening, normalizing abusive behavior so that a victim becomes accustomed to it, and facilitating instability in a victim’s mind through tactics such as gaslighting so reality can no longer be distinguished.

Because of this, recovering and healing after an emotionally abusive relationship is no easy task, mainly because many victims are unaware of their circumstances until after escaping the relationship itself. In addition, abusers are only as strong as their victim’s silence, so they — especially narcissists — will go to great lengths to ensure that silence is maintained.

When I first escaped the abusive narcissist I had married and spent sixteen years with, even though I wasn’t physically in his presence anymore, I still had to contend with the conditioned way of thinking I had due to over a decade of head games wreaking havoc on my senses. Even years after, I maintained a heavy sense of silence over what had happened to me.

That quiet place I used to go while in the marriage was still a place I returned to once I was alone. The heavy throbbing pain that tortured me when I lived with him was now a dull ache that crept up on me in waves when I least expected it. But I was used to it and thankful for the reprieve of its intensity.

In those silent places, my mind housed the voices of my past, who taunted me in moments of weakness or exhaustion. And still, all movement remained within my body. To the outside world, I was calm, waveless, windless.

This is the quiet pain of emotional abuse.

My eventual arrival at a place of freedom from my past was a journey of healing and recovery that made more noise as it went on. Since any kind of abuse relies on a victim’s silence, escaping it equally depends on a victim’s voice getting louder as it moves through time.

In order to reach emotional freedom and take our power back, it requires only one act of chaos, an interruption of the calm. That moment when we shatter the stillness, break those windows, make a seismic shift, disturb the quiet around us by opening our mouths to speak and tell the tale of our pain.

If our suffering in silence is the darkness, then it is the sound of our pain that is the light. This is how we heal. We expose our open wounds so they can begin to scab over with our acknowledgment of them. We see them, accept them, talk about them, feel them go from open and tender to closed and honored until such time that all that remains is a scar to remind us of where we’ve been and the lessons we’ve learned.

This is how we heal. This is how we stop being quiet and stop living in the painful stillness of emotional abuse.

It’s time to make some noise.

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