When A Relationship Is Personality Suicide

I’ve been sitting on this story for a while. Not literally obviously, my ass has not confused it for toilet paper, and I hope neither will yours.

I have been sitting on this story because somehow, with all of the work I’ve done on my demons, my neurodivergie brain, my < stellar life experiences… This one, I think I haven’t properly processed yet.

A few years ago, my best friend told me she was still traumatised by what she saw me go through, to which I replied “Huh, really? Why?”. That was me about two years into therapy, too. Oops.

It’s funny how I have peeled back the layers on my childhood and the clusterfucks I got myself into after that, but this cunt of a clusterfuck salad? Nah. Some of it is still buried, and only pops up in the form of anxiety whenever my ringtone is accidentally on and I receive multiple texts, or nausea whenever I smell rum and coke. So better rip the fucking band-aid off hey?

Now please, for the love of all that is deeply unsavoury god, this is NOT a post to attack men. I know full well that it’s not just men who can be abusive, some men very close to me have been in incredibly abusive relationships with women in fact. It is also NOT my goal to attack alcoholics with this post.

This is simply my story, and I hope someone out here will read it, think to themselves “Hmm, this sounds a lot like my relationship”, then get the fuck out of there and start therapy. And if you recognize your own behaviour in my ex’s, please get help. Or at least stop dragging someone else along with you on your path to self-destruction.

I met P when I had been in Australia for a bit over 6 months. Imagine a profoundly neurotic and deeply insecure 26-year-old Belgian chick, still adjusting to a new country and VERY much looking for love because according to Disney that would solve all my problems.

We were both fundraisers at the time, and he had been hired to manage part of our team during a work trip. He was a bad boy, drinking and no-fucks-giving (also fucking) his way through life. Obviously, the kind of guy my anxious attachment demon thought I should be with. What a dick. The demon, and as it turned out, P too.

It took only 2 weeks and one drunk night for us to be a ‘couple’ (oh, how I wish my yearly tax return would follow the same rules). Obviously, I totally ignored everything I said in my previous paragraph, plus the fact that he had very likely molested another girl on the team right before we got together. But well, there was no proof, and maybe they were both too drunk to remember exactly what had happened… and and and.

Fuck, the shame still makes me choke when I think of this. Ahem. Moving on.

It did bother me that he’d rather spend time drinking with the team than spend time alone with me, but heyy, that was part of a backpacker’s life, and I was just being ‘boring’, right? No, definitely not right. He was in fact a high-functioning alcoholic, and evenings were for drinking because he couldn’t drink while he was working as his visa depended on his job.

I half-assedly (I usually use my full ass) picked up on his alcohol problem but again, we were backpackers and therefore ‘party people’ and I was boring. I had been living in Brisbane before the work trip and actually loved it there, but the company wanted P in Sydney and so of course, I followed him like a 16 year-old who equates attention to love.

My idea, after having lived with partners before, was to find my own place. I had (again, half-assedly) been thinking about my own wants and needs and so I was quite proud of my realization that it is better for me not to live with someone, especially in the beginning of a relationship. So I told him that.

Big mistake.

That one sentence turned into hours of him ignoring me, alternated with temper tantrums, and repeatedly telling me that ‘I obviously didn’t want to be in a relationship with him, so maybe we should just break up’. For the very unhealthily anxiously attached here: you know what that kind of statement does to us. For the others: he might as well have put a gun to my head. It ended with me begging him not to break up with me and telling him I’d move in with him (yes, seriously).

People like this don’t just go from being Prince charming to being a controlling cunt of a person from one day to the next. They tease out your vulnerabilities and build up gradually. So this is where it all started. After that moment, he knew that the words ‘we should just break up’ held power over me. And he used them.

A little while into the relationship, he started calling me multiple times per day and texting me All. The Fucking. Time. If I didn’t respond straight away, he would throw a fit and accuse me of cheating (though he was the one actually doing the cheating, of course). If I did respond straight away but he was having a bad day at work, he would find a way to blame me for it.

He would also do things specifically designed to upset me, like grabbing some other girl’s tits right in front of me, then invalidate my feelings and accuse me of ‘turning everything into an argument’. Because everything was always my fault.

One day, I tried just letting him do whatever he wanted. I didn’t ask, I didn’t complain. He still got upset. I was a cunt, a bitch, a slut, you see. And so I ‘made him’ stay out late with his co-workers to drink himself into obliv-ion. After which he would come home, drink and smoke himself into a negative-ion (SO proud of that joke).

He never laid a finger on me. He just took all my insecurities and forged a dagger out of them, then plunged that dagger into my heart and twisted it multiple times per day, for more than a year. Oh, one time he did drive us towards a wall ‘to end it all’, but he stopped right before hitting the wall, so I guess that doesn’t count.

It felt as if I was stuck in a cage, ingeniously created from the skeleton of my childhood, and he was slowly pulling the oxygen out of the room.

But I got out.

There were a few things that finally made me realize that being with him was, in fact, personality suicide. First of all, I noticed that my best friend was pulling away from me. I had almost no friends, because isolation is part of the game, so that hit me hard. Secondly, I accidentally came across an article about narcissistic abuse and let’s just say I recognized the whole fucking DSM-5 definition a thing or two.

But my final push came when he drunkenly crashed my office party just to start a fight with me. Two co-workers understood what was happening right away and stepped in. One of them interrupted the fight to ask me if I was ok. I still remember Kim’s eyes when she looked at him. They were spewing fire, the same kind of fire I then understood I had lost. The other one, Dot, checked in with me after and said to me “It’s ok doll, we’ve all been there”.

The fact that two ladies I didn’t even know that well understood immediately what was going on, and instinctively tried to protect me, finally gave me the kick in the arse I so desperately needed to leave him.

It wasn’t easy, because he had pushed for me to be on a partner visa and if he had decided to report the end of our relationship to immigration, my entire world would be taken away from me. Luckily I managed to get myself another visa before he tried to play that card.

I don’t really know how to describe the feeling once I did leave him, so I won’t. Instead I pasted a picture of the drawing I made immediately after I left below. Yes I know, I’m not the most talented artist out there, but I think it and its title conveys the message better than anything I could write.

Breathe.

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