I will cut a long story as short as possible.
I say it’s a long story, because, like all people who are abused, it reaches back to childhood. One of my primary care givers, my mother, was a domineering and controlling woman and my father left her, and me and my brother. She played my brother off against each other (I now use the term triangulation, though I didn’t at the time, of course). She was never satisfied with what we achieved at school or in sports. “You got the second best grade, why didn’t you get the best?”. She made us take responsibilities we shouldn’t have been asked to as children, including supporting her emotionally. She hit us, occasionally, although that was rare and happened to my brother more than me. She called constantly when we were out with friends, often demanding we come home.
When it came time for boyfriends, I was a late starter. I was kind of the quiet, bookish type who kept herself to herself at school. But when I was seventeen, I fell in with a guy who treated me wonderfully. He brought me flowers, organized romantic evenings. It was what they call love bombing. But about six months into the relationship, he began to change. The love bombing dried up and he began to lie to me. First, he lied. I knew he was lying, and when I called him out, he denied it angrily. Whenever I challenged him in any way, he got angry, so I learned to be quiet. I was never hit or sexually assaulted, thank goodness, but I was treading on eggshells all the time. Eventually, he discarded me and moved on.
And then there was another man, and the same pattern occurred. This relationship lasted much longer. He manipulated me into giving him quite substantial portions of my money and was always suspicious of who I spent time with. There was monitoring of my communications. There were extensive sulks, silent treatments and use of tears to manipulate.
Over time, the put downs and the lack of support, the gaslighting and (especially, with me, although I know this isn’t always the case) the use of guilt took their toll. And it became a vicious cycle, in which I was told I didn’t matter, I felt I didn’t matter so I treated myself as if I didn’t matter. I couldn’t see any hope or sense that what happened to me mattered.
My brother saw I was unhappy and urged me to leave, but whenever I did, the boyfriend put on pity plays and used guilt to keep me. He tried but never succeeded in cutting contact between my brother and I. Eventually, with my brother’s help, I left and cut all ties.
At this stage, although I knew he had not treated me well, I did not consider myself an abuse victim. In my mind, abuse victims were raped and beaten up, and that hadn’t happened to me.
Anyway, one day, when I was thirty five, about six months after I’d finally disentangled myself from this individual, I happened to be scrolling through social media. And a post came up, “Eight signs of narcissistic abuse in a relationship.” Narcissistic abuse? I thought to myself. What is that?
I read the signs (I don’t recall them all, but one was ‘isolate from family and friends’) and I recognized them at once. I went home and began to enter that term into google and youtube and I read and listened to whatever I could find on ‘Narcissistic abuse”, And that is how I discovered the work of a writer called HG Tudor.
I highly recommend HG Tudor’s work for anyone who has experienced abuse in any form. By giving me understanding, he helped me break the cycle, and by doing that he saved my life. I believe he can save others too, and that’s why I wanted to draw your attention to his work.
Kind regards
MC
