When The Freedom to Fall in Love Becomes Your Last

The story of how I fell down the slippery slope of an abusive and narcissistic relationship.

Anyone can fall into the trap of an abusive relationship, as I found out.

You may have had the most regular and peace-abiding upbringing, educated parents who taught you good morals, and a life filled with good friendships. And then, one day, you realise that your life has become something out of a terrifying TV drama, and you wonder — “how has this happened to me?”

This is the story of how I found myself thinking exactly that, and wondering how the heck I had found myself there.

I fell headfirst out of a life that felt peaceful and predictable, in which shouting matches and violence didn’t exist, and into a love-induced, yet desperately unhappy embroilment.

I can’t truly call it a relationship. At least, it wasn’t recognisable as one.

It existed, yet a part of me found that, by pretending that real life only existed outside of it, I could stay sane.

I kept my eye on the prize that was a life free of anguish. I knew this prize also eliminated the man with whom I was embroiled. Yet, every time I tried to reach there, I found I couldn’t imagine life without him either.

This is when you know you are trapped by games of the mind.

From finding inner peace to chucking it down the hatchet

After leaving an unsatisfying and emotionally disconnected relationship, I was enjoying the freedom of singledom, leading a happy-go-lucky existence, and doing exactly what I desired. Yet, with this feeling of freedom and empowerment, I was open to finding new love and was ready for passion, spice, and adventure.

I fell head over heels into what I believed was the relationship I was dreaming of. The passion was strong. The sex was out of this world. Surely this was ‘The One’?

It only took a few weeks before things began to decline. A series of events occurred that resulted in me feeling like I didn’t have a doorway out of the relationship and that he had managed to put himself in control.

Initially, he did this by making me physically dependent upon him. This happened on a trip to Spain that went so unpleasantly that no one in their right mind would have remained in that relationship…unless they had no choice. I had no money to leave or pay for a hotel, nor for public transport or a new flight because I had ended up lending him all the money I had available, with the promise that his mother would pay me back as soon as I returned to England.

Following that, it was emotional manipulation: he made a dangerous sailing journey all the way from the Costa Blanca to the southwest coast of England which, had I ended the relationship and thus caused him to be emotionally off-kilter, I could have been ‘responsible’ for the trip going horribly wrong.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself in this kind of situation, and he knew that.

In addition, he repeatedly told me how he had bought this yacht as an investment from which the profit was for ‘us’ and ‘our future’, reminding me of the huge sacrifices he was making for ‘us’.

In truth, I didn’t especially want to go to Spain. I had limited money and I wanted to spend it wisely. I also had work that I wanted to throw myself into, and friendships I had ignored in the prior weeks, which we had spent in one another’s pockets.

It also wasn’t exactly going to be a holiday. He had purchased a disused yacht as an investment and needed to go to Spain to collect it and sail it back to England.

We would be staying on the boat while it was still out of the water and in a boatyard. It would need a complete cleaning and wouldn’t be the most comfortable stay.

However, the way that he spoke as he expressed how much he didn’t want to be away from me for so long — that me coming to Spain would mean we wouldn’t have to be apart for the whole summer — subtly told me that I would be revealing my lack of commitment to the relationship — and to him — if I didn’t go.

I didn’t want to lose this relationship.

Idiot that I was, I thought that I could lose the love of my dreams by making a wrong move.

Of course, I know much better now that in a healthy relationship there is respect for personal choice, and that it doesn’t break down from expressing one’s needs and priorities. If anything it is the instigator to strengthen the relationship, as you navigate one another’s boundaries with healthy communication.

But, then I was naïve and believed that my feelings and desires should be put aside for the sake of the relationship. And so, I went.

The moment I was cornered for a long time to come

On my last day in Spain, we sat on the beach after an argument on the long walk to get there. He had asked me outright if we were over, putting it all in my hands.

I was ready to say that yes, we were.

But then I realised that he had already shown himself to be so unpredictable that he could just abandon me then and there. He would have no qualms about not letting me even pick up my belongings, and I knew it was unlikely that I would then be able to get to the airport by public transport, in time to catch my flight.

And I had no money to buy a new flight.

I was stuck. In order to be able to leave and go home I needed to tell him that I wasn’t going to end the relationship.

It felt so wrong as if I was stringing him along to get what I wanted. I was questioning my own integrity and couldn’t make sense of why I would have to stay in a relationship to just be able to get on the flight I had already paid for, under the arrangement already made. I knew that I had been pushed into a corner and yet I couldn’t help but feel angry at myself for this.

This is the subtlety of gaslighting. I had been with him for long enough now to see that whatever wasn’t right, I was essentially to blame, and I believed it.

That decision not to end the relationship became an even bigger trap over the weeks, months, and years to come.

I felt I couldn’t end it because I had promised him that we would try. I felt like it would show me up to have been lying to him on the beach that day and, by not giving myself grace for the fact that I had been pushed into a corner, I condemned myself to an ongoing unhappy and manipulative relationship.

And, as with all emotionally-abusive relationships, the longer we were together, the more I depended on him. I wanted to be away from him yet, at the same time, wanted the love that was promised to me by him, and only him.

On this slippery slope in the early days, I also was being reprimanded regularly for things I said or did. I had drifted off to sleep one night after midnight, when we had just finished watching a movie, and I was awakened by a loud, annoyed exclamation. He was now ready to start having sex and I had just gone to sleep without even considering him.

At the end of that weekend, I was feeling ready for a break from him, which he picked up on. He had spent the weekend at mine and I was dropping him at his mum’s house on my way out on the Monday morning.

I was feeling worn down by him and there were some awkward silences as we drove and then said goodbye. This had put him on edge and he decided to phone me later to talk about it. Only, we didn’t exactly discuss it — he explained that he had been thinking about why I would be withdrawn and that it was because I hadn’t been in a proper, loving relationship before, and didn’t know how to handle it.

In other words: I needed to realise that real love was only achieved through being open to him and not shutting myself off. In that conversation, he managed to make me into the relationship failure, but let me know that, with him, I had the chance to have real love. I just had to let him tell me how to behave and what to do.

I was naïve and vulnerable, and he touched a nerve in me that allowed him to take control, tell me I was wrong for feeling worn down by his expectations of me, and that I needed to let him have the power so that I wouldn’t fail in another relationship.

This is the story of how I slid blindly into an abusive relationship

What followed were years of gaslighting, streams of verbal abuse, broken furniture, hands put to my throat, spyware installed on my laptop, and several police call-outs.

Being forced to drink a large quantity of red wine while in early pregnancy, until I was on the floor with my head spinning, feeling nauseous and like I might pass out.

Googling herbs that induced miscarriage and drinking vast quantities of infusions prepared with these herbs when he went out. It worked, landing me in hospital on Boxing Day and losing so much blood that I passed out. But not before he discovered my secret stash of herbs and worked out what I was doing.

I don’t know if I could even write the story of what I went through in those years. There’s too much to dig up, and it would spew out so incoherently it would take all I have to find some order in writing it. It makes me feel sick to even think about it.

But, acknowledging the path that led me into the loss of reason, the gaslighting, and the dependency helps me to keep healing, reassure myself that I don’t need to keep blaming myself and that I don’t need to keep playing down my experience.

I was finally able to release the emotional entanglement with him around three years ago. This was at the end of a slow road to get there, during which he had legal restrictions placed on him and a painful court case.

Still, he played me for a long time until I could finally extract myself emotionally and feel free. At which point, I shoved it all into a place in the deepest recesses of my mind and am only now digging it out and opening it up again.

All this time I have played down my experiences, believing that I made a bigger deal of it than it was, and still blaming myself for getting entangled in the first place. This is one of the long-term effects of the manipulation and gaslighting that goes on. It takes a very long time to accept that we are deserving of freedom and personal control.

Undoing the effects of such mind games takes years.

But, it’s okay — I can keep giving myself that time. I can be kind to myself from now on.

And please, if you recognise yourself in any of this, just remember to be kind to yourself too.

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