Why did you stay?

The title of this blog post is the question I get asked the most when I talk about my experience with emotional abuse. It’s something I also ask myself regularly. There is no straightforward answer. That four word question still has the power to upset me and spark a tirade of angry self talk.

I don’t think I will ever fully get to the stage where there is no regret for those seven lost years of my life. While our relationship was 6yrs long he still managed to have a hold for another year after I left him and even now he is still trying to find ways in with new social media accounts and angry gaslighting messages.

There is a part of me because I feel vulnerable sharing this story that needs to say I was not perfect in this. I still blame myself to a point for many things. This is why it took the police handing me a domestic abuse helpline leaflet to make me realise that I was even a victim and for the record I hate that word, just as much as I hate the word survivor. Both label you and while this chapter of my life is very much something that has had a profound effect on who I am now it does not define me.

We are fast approaching a year since that day where I sat in the tea room at the stables answering the questions of the Dash Risk Checklist and repeatedly asking the police if they could get my dog back and the phone that had been used to stalk me for god knows how long. It’s been almost a year since my sense of self was stripped away and I was given the label of victim.

If anyone wants an indicator of where my self worth was this is the perfect example. I didn’t want to reach out for help even after the police had been, not because I didn’t believe that someone like me could be abused but because I didn’t believe my experience and how it had affected me was worthy of help. That there was people out there with much worse abuse than mine so I shouldn’t be wasting people’s time.

The reality is the police were only called because his behaviour was impacting other people by that point, I called the police to protect them, not myself. I had been dealing with him daily by text message for months. The messages would switch from telling me how much he loved me and why wouldn’t I take him back to drunken obsessive nastiness. And I took it, even now I still feel a hint of fear fill my belly when I hear that specific message tone.

I was letting him still see my dog because I felt bad for leaving him and taking her away. When I found out he had been reading my Facebook messages I passively didn’t kick up a fuss because he “wasn’t well”

I overlooked so much, if I had been firmer sooner and eradicated him from my life the moment I left then maybe last year would not have been such a catastrophe. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to bargain for my freedom with my dog. That should never have happened. That day still haunts me. Months, no years of being gaslighted and made to feel like I was responsible for everything that happened led me to a place where I offered him Esther so he would go away. I had weighed it up, if I took her and told him he could never see her again he would never stop, he knew where I lived, where I kept my horse, where I worked. He would never stop. So sacrificing her made sense. I couldn’t even see at that point what was happening.

The truth was it was never about the dog. The abusive and obsessive messages only escalated that night because he realised that I was prepared to give up something so important to me to make him go away. I still have those messages, they finish with “well done you woke the whole street up by calling the police and made my mum cry” of course it was my fault.

So why did I stay? Why did I let him still have a hold? Why did I let it get too that point?

The most simple answer I have to those questions is boundaries.

“Compassion without boundaries leads to self-betrayal”

— Piper Anderson

That quote probably defines a huge percentage of emotionally abusive relationships. You have the abuser, often someone broken themselves who have learned a series of behaviours to manipulate the people in their world to make sure that they have control and they have no issue with bulldozing weak boundaries. Then you have the victim, also broken but often the type of person who has low self-esteem but high levels of empathy to the point they shoulder responsibility for other people easily. They are compassionate to a fault because their low self worth means there are no boundaries to protect them, by default they are incapable of taking responsibility for their own self care, they betray themselves in order to appease others.

I threw myself into this relationship quickly, I had been struggling with London. I loved the city but I was lonely after many years of doing ski seasons and seasonal work I was always used to having lots of people around me and a big social group where we all had an instant common connection because of the nature of our work. Being a nanny in London was lonely and while I had been single for a while I was also starting to feel that pull of wanting to settle down. This was a ready made family situation for me as I was friends with his sister in law and he had a daughter I already really liked. It was easy and I felt a part of something again and he adored me.

We moved in far too fast. To this day I believe had we not moved in together that quickly I would have ended it once I saw what was behind the curtain. He was an addict, cocaine and alcohol. It took over a year for my rose tinted glasses to be smeared with the extent of that. I had discovered he had been reading my emails and messages only because he had exploded at some conversations I had been having with an ex.

This is where I am not perfect and I can’t share this story without revealing my imperfections, otherwise there are no lessons. They weren’t conversations that you should be having while in a relationship and in hindsight it just highlights how unhappy I was, I should have left at that point as well but I didn’t I begged him to give it another go because I didn’t believe I was going to have better options.

By doing that I handed him the control he needed as for years and years that was the excuse he needed for the abusive messages he would send me while I was working, it was the reason he drank and it was the reason he needed to keep invading my privacy and I let him because I constantly shouldered the responsibility for all of our problems and the running narrative of he wasn’t well so it wasn’t his fault.

Another thing used against me was my anger. You see when you are being continuously gaslighted you are constantly having your sense of self attacked and anger will manifest. Anger is a valid emotion as it’s your bodies way of telling you something is wrong and action needs to be taken. It’s not fight or flight, I was past that point I didn’t feel capable of leaving because I was so isolated and broken I had no clue how I would even begin again so I fought. I will never be proud of my behaviour, I smashed things, I hit him, I screamed like a child on a regular basis or I shut down and seethed. The worst part was the angrier I got the more control I gave him.

Even to this day when I feel anger I can instantly drop into a cycle of shame and I will instinctively go to suppress it. It takes a great deal of inner strength to remind myself that anger is a valid emotion and it’s ok to look at why I might be feeling that and that expressing it in a healthy way does not make me a bad person.

The other reason I sometimes feel like I stayed longer than I should have is because it was comfortable. Now this shouldn’t be confused for life of luxury comfortable, that is not what I mean. I was conditioned from a young age to function in chaos and drama. I didn’t have an easy childhood and the behaviour learnt from then very much followed me into adulthood. In fact my relationship with him in part I am grateful for as it pushed me into therapy which gave me so much awareness around patterns of behaviour taken from childhood and the horrendous relationship with my Dad.

So what do I mean by functioning in chaos? Well when you live in a constantly stressful environment on a long term basis you adapt, that becomes your version of normal and in some cases you can function highly in it. I can tell you firsthand that although I craved calm and still do, now that I have it, I find it uncomfortable. Calm is something I have had to get used too as it’s not something I have ever really had because of things happening or where I have self sabotaged myself.

The best collective example I can give is ask you this; Is anyone else feeling anxious about the lockdown being lifted? You know you miss normal life but we have also been living and functioning this way for enough time now for it to feel normal and the thought of that changing even for the better can be just as uncomfortable as the initial trauma/upset.

As well as that ‘comfort’ contributing to the reason as to why I stayed in such a toxic relationship it has the potential to see me wind up in another one. It’s so deeply ingrained in me it’s only because I am now aware of it that I can create boundaries to stop myself ever falling into that situation again.

That awareness is key. The lack of awareness saw me stop looking after myself, saw me allow myself to be isolated, saw me allow my privacy to be invaded and saw me stay in a situation that took away any self-worth I possessed.

What’s important now is that I take that awareness and use it to look after myself, with that awareness comes a responsibility to myself.

So, that is my answer for why I stayed. It took so much therapy to understand that. To look past the self-hate I felt for myself and find awareness. To get to the stage where I can see that what happened to me wasn’t all my fault and that there is no shame in why I stayed, only a journey to understand why I did so I can do my best to never find myself in that situation again.