My ex would always yell at me for pointless stuff and make me cry in front of his friends. They didn’t even like him, they just tolerated him.
My sister’s friend would blame my sister for stupid things and try to say it’s my sister’s fault, not hers. She would yell at her too and try to pass it off as a joke.
(We are very much healing now 🫂 Not perfect, but healing)
When I was in the ICU for months and I asked my husband to please just tell me it would be ok and he told me no and that he “couldn’t lie anymore” - refused to give me even a drop of comfort in my most dire hour, being ok didn’t have to mean I would live but that he and the kids would soldier on and he would try for them but instead I just got a no and scolded for asking.
That’s awful, but I want to believe it gave you extra willpower to recover, just to prove him wrong.
Spite is a hell of a motivator. I had an uncle who had only ~20% of his heart working after a heart attack and the doctors basically sent him home to die within months. That fucker lived for 5 years before it finally gave out.
When I kept having to apologize for their behavior in front of my friends.
Tie between the time I threw my back out changing the car tires and it hurt so bad to breathe I had to lie flat on the ground, and she was mad because it delayed me driving her to go do laundry.
Or the time she was mad about me installing the air conditioner in our apartment to cool down (the cats loved it too), because, “It doesn’t benefit ME”. That was shortly after I asked her to start paying for half of the utilities while I was unemployed. I had been paying them all myself for 3+ years, including the two times she was unemployed in that period.
I only realized after breaking up. The first girl loved to talk me down, saying some of the stuff I liked was “just a phase”. The second was super manipulative, to the point I often wondered if I should start writing stuff down.
That’s the worst when a partner can make you doubt yourself
Yeah. Somewhat ironically, my dad also had to deal with a partner gaslighting him a few years ago.
When I divorced her and married a normal woman 🤣
After therapy. And even then, only gradually.
When I looked up the definition of “Emotional Abuse”. It seemed I was the last person to see it.
My ex-best friend’s behavior slowly changed over the years from joking back and forth banter to straight bullying. Constantly under the excuse of “it’s just jokes” and “we all do it”, even after expressing multiple times that he was going too far.
Ended up taking years of abuse before finally cutting him out for good
I have an aunt who I knew drank a lot but I never personally experienced anything other than the occasional late night “Love you soooo much!!!” when she’d be drinking. She is single with two kids who I get along with nicely and I’ve always wondered why she was single. Then I saw that I got the clean end of a really long stick of shit. She’d text her sisters, my other aunts, telling them they were dead to her, her kids don’t stay home much with her anymore, and she started to tell my mom, who is staying with me, that she should leave. She even tried to attack my sister when she visited me.
I had no idea. Now, I don’t see much of her anymore.
Maybe around college I realized my younger sibling wasn’t just mean in middle school but continued to today. From college to now I slowly have come to peace with I just don’t like them. They’re mean, easy to explode, and self centered. All family can be mean or sassy but I can make up with the rest. Never them, and always completely unreasonable.
Most recent massive blow out is when I got mad at them for putting their stupid little dog right in my very young child’s face. They then exploded that I’m using my child to hurt them… huh? As they go off I’m physically shaking but just laughing in their face. Protecting my child is hurting them, lol.
Still working on realizing it. Have seen many of the issues, but still thinking about situations and wondering ‘wait, that isn’t right, that was actually horrible…’
