Dear Yuri:

No need to apologize for the long post, it was an honest share and I appreciate it. Neither did you present yourself as a victim. But you were this man, your ex boyfriend’s victim. He did abuse you. The fact that you did not leave does not make you responsible for his abuse of you.

He is 100% responsible for his behavior toward you. You are responsible for not leaving, not for his abuse of you.

You wrote about him: “The surprising part is that he does not even realise that he did something wrong”. More likely, from my experience, he doesn’t care to do wrong. And the reason he doesn’t feel badly for mistreating you is because he lacked empathy for you. He did not feel sad when you were hurting. Maybe he even felt elated.

I think that quality psychotherapy is the place for you to heal from that experience, one that you are re-living. This painful experience needs to be learned from and then removed from your present experience and placed in the past.

This takes time and work, to remove this painful experience from the here-and-now and place it in the there-and-then.

It is dreadful to “scream and cry and beg him to stop but he would either close my mouth or just ignore my screams and keep going. Once he was done he would either ignore the fact that I would be lying there crying in pain or he would tell me to stop being a drama queen”- dreadful, despicable behavior and I am so sorry you experienced it.

It hurts to be used and misused, to be lied to, to be treated so callously.

I can see how this past relationship traumatized you, and what you are experiencing now, those panic attacks for one, are post-traumatic, that is, after the trauma.

My healing from emotional abuse started in psychotherapy in 2011. It was my first experience with quality therapy, one with a hard working, capable, honest, generous (with his time and efforts and giving me all the tools and all the information he had) therapist. Regarding trusting others: I learned that it is not a good idea and is actually impossible for me to trust others blindly. I can’t and shouldn’t.

A child does that, trusts her parents blindly. After being hurt, betrayed, mistreated, I don’t think it is either possible or a good idea to regain a blind trust. Instead: I learned to evaluate an individual- is he or she trustworthy or not? If I am not sure about a particular behavior or the intent behind what he or she said to me, I ask: what did you mean by this?

I ask and find out the motivation behind this or that when I get suspicious. I check with the person.

I hope you post again. I would like to read more from you and if you’d like I can share more with you about my healing process.

anita