Realizing it was abuse.
TW: Sexual coercion, ableism
Author’s Note (please read)
This is a personal account of realizing I was in an abusive relationship. I’m sharing it to externalize my experience, and in case it helps someone recognize patterns I didn’t see at the time. I’m not naming anyone. This is not a call-out, not an invitation to debate, and I won’t be answering questions about who this is about, as the intention is not to expose a person. The goal is to name abusive behaviors and dynamics that are often dismissed as “not that serious.” If any part of this feels familiar, I hope this helps you leave before it hurts too deeply.
When I think of abuse in a relationship, I think of violence, screaming and feeling unsafe constantly. It feels like it should be obvious, it should be easy to see. I learned the hard way that abuse is not always like that.
It starts with jokes. Harmless poking and prodding. It’s playful and ambiguous at first. That’s how he jokes around, he’d say. I’d force a laugh. It’s harmless fun, right?
It escalated with poorly imitating my laugh or the way I talked. I genuinely thought it was harmless, because that’s what he would tell me. When I got upset, he would reassure me it was all in good fun, that it was just his sense of humour. I felt completely ridiculous getting upset over it. I felt like I was too sensitive, crazy even, for taking harmless jokes so seriously.
The thing is, when I’d joke back, he wouldn’t laugh. It felt unfair that I wasn’t allowed to joke around too. My jokes would go “too far” while his were funny.
It didn’t make sense but I brushed it away because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Looking back, I can see it was never just joking around. It was about control.
As I continued to force my laughs, his harmless “jokes” only got more hurtful. It wasn’t just badly imitating my laugh and going “hahaha, that’s what you sound like” anymore. It started to target my deepest insecurities, including my neurodivergence.
He started to speak to me in a baby voice, he mocked the way I talk by repeating something I said with the stereotypical “ret*rd” voice. I’d take it because he conditioned me into believing it was harmless. He made me feel insane when I got upset. I was too sensitive, dramatic, and I couldn't take a joke. I also couldn’t piece together how someone that supposedly loved me could be so cruel.
When I told him I didn’t find it funny anymore, he’d apologize, only to continue pushing my boundaries again and again. The cruelty was only building up, almost as if he was trying to test how far he could push it.
I pretended everything was fine, but inside I was starting to despise him. We would bicker and fight over the smallest things. Usually, I am not the type to fight, in fact, I try to avoid conflict as much as I can. I excused it by telling myself that we were just under a lot of stress or that it was just a bad day. However, the fights only got more frequent and I grew constantly anxious that I would say something wrong that’d inevitably end up in a fight and the silence treatment.
As I got hurt more and more without even realizing it, I became reluctant of him touching me. I became so insecure, I hated myself so much and I didn’t want to be touched by someone who made me feel that way. That frustrated him, deeply.
When we stopped being intimate, his abuse escalated. Everytime I rejected his sexual advances he wouldn’t look at me, or worse he would be mad at me. I excused it as him being sexually frustrated, and I felt immense guilt for not being able to “provide” what he needed. I thought it was valid, he was just reacting because he was insecure and felt unwanted. He had needs, and I couldn’t fulfill them.
I thought it was all my fault.
I thought I was defective.
As I grew more and more insecure, the only thing I wanted was to be loved. I wanted affection and reassurance without any other implications. But when we cuddled he always wanted it to lead to sex, while I just wanted to be held.
At that point I felt so self-conscious about my body, I didn’t feel like being touched or perceived in a sexual way, and I made it very clear. Instead of reassurance, I got mockery.
He’d call my belly a primordial pouch, reducing me to an animal. He’d touch it repeatedly even when I told him I didn’t like it, only amplifying my insecurities and making me less receptive to his advances.
He’d hump me like a dog, making me feel like an object or a toy. I pushed him away and I told him countless times that it made me feel very uncomfortable, objectified. He’d say he’d stop. He’d apologize. Then he’d do it again the next day.
He’d always say he needed to work on himself, that it wasn’t fair to me, and then he’d do it all over again.
Constantly having my boundaries crossed made me feel disgusted by him and myself. His insults masked as jokes only made it worse.
He stripped away my safety, trust and confidence. I was oblivious to it, he convinced me I was the problem. He didn’t need to explicitly say it, but he made me feel like there was something wrong with me while actively cultivating new insecurities inside of me.
His insults only got worse from there. I became self-conscious about things I had never worried about before. The way I laugh, the way I enunciate my words, the way I structure my phrases, even the way I walk or move my limbs. He’d mock almost everything I’d ever do.
The quirks he once told me he loved were now ridiculed, constantly. He said he accepted my neurodivergence while making fun of it repeatedly.
One day, I was insecure about my new haircut, and when I went looking for reassurance from my partner, all he had to say was:
“Wow, your new haircut makes you look more autistic.”
This one hurt a lot. I couldn’t articulate how wrong it was to say that to an autistic person at the time, but that was the moment I seriously began to doubt everything.
All these times he talked to me in a baby voice, saying my mannerisms were so adorable, saying I was “his special girl”, it wasn’t love or endearment. It was fetishization.
All my quirks were adorable. Until I stopped giving him what he wanted. Then, he became cruel. I did not recognize him anymore. I could barely stand being in his presence, but a small part of me wanted to continue trying, wanted to work it all out. I thought he could change, he told me he would. But he never did, it only got worse.
One night, he made fun of me as he always did but that time, I cried.
For the first time, I didn’t pretend to laugh, I didn’t fight back, I just cried. I sobbed. Was it accumulation? Was it my breaking point? I have no idea to this day, but that night was the moment his mask truly slipped.
As I cried because his words hurt me, he didn’t console me. He laughed in my face. As I got more and more upset at him laughing, he laughed harder.
That was it. Something clicked. As I saw him enjoy watching me cry, I realized he was not who I thought he was.
Of course he apologized later, as he always did, but the relationship was too far gone. A few days later, he broke up with me outside the main hall of my apartment building. In a few words.
“We should break up.”
No “let’s take a walk” or “we need to talk”. He had realized he had gone too far and that I would never see him the way I used to. There was no fixing this, and there was no need for a discussion, it was over.
A whole year of trying so hard to please him, of getting let down, of being diminished constantly, over in a couple words.
I almost destroyed myself trying to please him. I had developed insecurities I never had. I started to hate what once made me feel unique. For what? For him to leave me as soon as he couldn’t use me anymore?
I was devastated, but I was also relieved. Relieved that I wouldn’t have to torture myself just to feel loved anymore. I had to unlearn harmful habits. I had to fight toxic thoughts that all stemmed from how he treated me.
The more distance I gained, the more I realized there had been issues all along. He would throw fits of jealousy over me having male friends. I told myself he was just insecure. But with a new perspective, I realize it was all about controlling me from the very beginning.
It affected me so deeply, and it still does. For a long time, it didn’t fully click that I had been abused. It took months of introspection for me to understand the severity of what I’d been put through.
I was told it was just jokes. I was told I was too sensitive. He was just insecure. He was just joking. I truly believed it wasn’t that deep. When I realized it was, I felt painfully stupid.
“Why didn’t I realize it?”
“Why did I let it happen?”
“How did I let someone treat me this way for so long?”
As if the trauma from the abuse itself wasn’t enough, I became angry at myself for letting all of it happen to me. And for a while, I was almost angrier at myself than I was angry at him. It took months for me to realize that I wasn’t angry enough about what he did to me, and that I wasn’t stupid.
I was in love. I wanted to believe I was loved. I was manipulated and gaslit to the point where my self-perception was completely warped. That’s how abuse reshapes your perception, that’s how it works.
You’d think that it would never happen to you, you’d see it coming. But you don’t. And it’s incredibly frustrating to accept.
I’m still coming to terms with it. I’m still discovering things I couldn’t see before. I’m still learning about how to deal with the lasting consequences of it.
It was abuse. It was real, it happened. I didn’t deserve any of it. No one does.
