Cult Feelings

cw: emotional abuse

Slowly overtime, he wore me down. He had an opinion about everything I did. And if I didn’t do it right, or by his standard, then he made small comments. Simple harmless jokes. Nothing that would stand out on its own as abusive. Little jokes that any person might say to their friend while they were hanging out and shooting shit.

Here is what I did not understand: what he was doing may have looked like harmless shit-talking — but everything he said was tainted with a subtle cruelty. This was purposeful. His voice was in my head all the time, laughing at my incompetence if I accidentally pushed a door that said “Pull”. Pointing out my lack of consideration for talking too loudly in a public place. Letting me know every morning that my breath smelled bad. Rolling his eyes every time I dropped something or showed any sign of clumsiness. I heard these words from him constantly: “I don’t know why you did it like that,” and “This is hard to watch.”

Harmless sarcasm, no? Just some innocent teasing, right? Coming from someone else, those words may never have caused those prickles of shame that passed over my stomach each time I heard them from him. Honestly, it’s amazing how he did it. Somehow, with just the right tone of voice, and just the right jeering smile, he managed to convince my conscious brain that he was joking, while still subconsciously telling me that I was a stupid, useless, mess of a person who could never survive on her own. Little by little, with his small comments, I internalized a staggering conspiracy of self-loathing and shame.

Little by little, with his small comments, I internalized a staggering conspiracy of self-loathing and shame.

It was more than anyone could see. It was for the most mundane things. How I organized the kitchen. How I followed a recipe. What I wore out to the store. How I drove. Which route I took to get home. How I ate my food. How I ejected a DVD from the Xbox to put it away. How I talked about men that weren’t him. The kind of music I liked. My inadequate singing voice at karaoke. A thousand things every single day.

I told him hundreds of times to stop making fun of me so much and to stop commenting on everything I did. He used specific manipulative strategies to convince me that I was wrong for the way I was feeling. One of his favorite strategies was demanding that I give him specific examples of times in the last week that he had been mean to me. He knew I could never recall in the moment each little thing that had happened — nothing he said was ever that rude or dismissive. Everything he did seemed harmless on its own; but when counted within the sheer quantity of comments over several weeks, it amounted to full throttled gaslighting. How was I supposed to remember every time in the last week that he laughed at my clumsiness or my forgetfulness? How could I remember word-for-word that small-but-cruel joke he had made under his breath while we were grocery shopping? Was I supposed to be keeping a list on my phone of every time my partner made fun of me each day? He knew that I would be too stressed out in the middle of an argument to be able to recall examples. I could never come up with anything bad enough, or specific enough, to PROVE that he was being mean to me. And so, he convinced me of the false logic that unless I could PROVE that he was being mean, it was clearly me who was being crazy and oversensitive — in fact, now that he’s thinking about it, he’s starting to think that I am the one abusing him, because I keep accusing him of things for which he is obviously innocent!

His other manipulative strategies included: going silent if I tried to tell him how I felt as if my authentic expression had deeply wounded him; blaming his behavior on his past childhood traumas without doing anything to work on that behavior; apologizing without making any changes; punishing me by going to hang out with other female friends that I didn’t know; making up statistics and “facts” about psychology and current events to back up his beliefs, and, of course, lying so often, and with so much conviction, that I lost my sense of reality when holding a conversation with him. It’s possible that there were many other strategies that he used that to this day have still gone over my head.

The effect of all this was that arguing with him always ended with me crying and apologizing and promising to be better. I blamed myself more and more every time I tried to cleanly communicate with him. And every day I continued to feel more and more insecure, embarrassed, small, and incompetent. He always managed to turn my grievances around, saying things like “I feel like I have to walk on eggshells around you, because anything I do could upset you,” and “You need to stop picking on me, I’m trying,” and “My friends don’t want to hang out with you because they think you’re emotionally abusing me.” And, while it seems unimaginable now, after enough time had passed, I fully believed that I really was the one abusing him.

I would try to talk to my friends about how I was feeling. Maybe I really was just taking the things he said too personally. My friends would try to be diplomatic about telling me that they thought he was no good. He would then accuse me of betraying him for “airing out our dirty laundry” and going behind his back instead of talking to him directly. He convinced me that it was abusive for me to talk to my friends about my relationship. He believed that if I really loved him, I would take his side no matter what. He sold me a horrific definition of unconditional love: the idea that no matter what your partner says or does, you will remain loyal to them — or else it means you don’t actually love them. And, like the foolish innocent child that I was, I believed him. I told my friends that he was my first priority and that I would not hear another word against him. And then, I shut them out completely.

He sold me a horrific definition of unconditional love: the idea that no matter what your partner says or does, you will remain loyal to them — or else it means you don’t actually love them.

Meanwhile, he only ever brought around his shittiest dude-bro friends to hang out — people who would back him up on anything he said or did to me. He would always say things like, “I asked the guys what I did to make you so upset at the bar last night, and they legit said they didn’t know. They thought I’d been totally normal.” Even though he’d actually spent the whole night roasting me in front of his friends about how I was stupid and bad at sex. To their uproarious laughter and my humiliated straightface of pretend indifference.

These things didn’t happen every day. Sometimes it happened multiple times throughout a long, miserable weekend, and sometimes he was perfectly kind and understanding for two or three days in a row. I was unable to keep track of what was happening. Over time I stopped trying to point out the emotional abuse to him because it never made a difference. Every time I tried to talk to him about how I felt anxious and embarrassed and stupid and insecure all the time, the conversation always ended with me apologizing, through tears, for how broken I was, and thanking him for his patience.

It’s incomprehensible because I was a confident, honest, intentional, transparent and clear-headed person before I met him. People frequently came to me for advice. People admired me for my comfortable and confident way of being. I did not see myself as broken, and nobody else did either. I had simply never met a person like him before. I strayed across his path like a little innocent kitten, and I had not a chance in the world to defend myself. I had no idea what was happening until it had already happened — and by then I was too in love, too down-trodden, and too insecure to do anything about it.

In documentaries about cults, there is usually a section where the narrator tries to explain how someone can condition a perfectly normal person to give away his money or become a sex slave or kill himself. I never used to understand how someone could give up their free will so easily. Of course, now I understand that the human brain can be deliberately hacked. Being cheated on was the least of his abuse. I was purposefully conditioned and brainwashed, to the point where I chose to stop seeing all my friends, and allowed myself to be disrespected and controlled by someone who wasn’t even employed or doing his chores for the majority of the time we were together. I, this well-traveled, intelligent, educated and competent person, allowed myself to be controlled by a broke loser with a big dick and a charismatic personality. It’s humiliating to think about it. It seems unbelievable and impossible. But it happened very very slowly over time. With little “harmless” comments every day.

It took a worldview-shattering event for me to open my eyes and understand what was happening. I’m almost glad he was cheating on me, because at least that was a piece of real explicit evidence that I could point to in order to fully break up with him. Otherwise I might never have been able to come up with a clear enough reason to cut him out of my life. At the time, I could not put a name to the experience of being gaslit. I thought every miserable feeling I had was my own fault, due to my own brokenness. I would never have blamed him for any of it, and therefore, I might never have broken up with him. Luckily, I could happily and righteously break up with him for having three other secret girlfriends.

The vast majority of relationship abuse is nonviolent.

So many people are emotionally abused without the presence of cheating or violence, making it difficult to justify leaving. The vast majority of relationship abuse is non-violent. And someone who has never experienced this kind of thing, who watches those cult documentaries and thinks “I’d never be that gullible,” will struggle to empathize. Emotionally abused people are unable to be their authentic selves, unable to have healthy relationships, unable to thrive in a world that they have been told is out to get them and full of people who won’t believe them.

It is very difficult to tell the truth to someone who has been so thoroughly gaslit. I refused to see what was in front of my eyes, because I had been trained not to trust them. That is what gaslighting does: you stop trusting your instincts, judgment, memories and physical senses, and instead, you rely on another person to tell you what is true and what is false. I went far far astray to a place that was irrational and contrived and controlled. It was not me. I pushed my friends away, and distanced myself from my family. I became isolated inside his world, and simply could not imagine life without him. I was miserable, but I blamed myself for my misery. I thought I was broken, irrational, irresponsible, incompetent and stupid. I wrongly believed that he was the one taking care of me, and that I was okay only because he was there for me.

I could spend more hours detailing the things that he did and said to me that contributed to my complete forfeiture of self-respect and autonomy. There were plenty of times when he yelled at me, pushed me, twisted my arm til it hurt, accused me of cheating, and pressured me into situations involving my own money that I was not comfortable with. But the point I’m trying to make is that emotional abuse works by creating an environment in which the person getting abused appears to be consciously allowing it to happen. From the outside it looks like they have full autonomy over the choices they are making. And technically, they do. My abuser was not explicitly forcing me to reject my friends and lie to my parents and ignore all his red-flags. No, his methods of tricking, manipulating, scaring, guilt-tripping, shaming, ridiculing, love-bombing, and bargaining were much more powerful than the simple word “force” can ever imply. He was planting ideas in my mind that caused me to act against my own self-interest. He was working on a subconscious level. I had no idea it was even happening. And the people in my life figured it out too late, after he had already closed his fist over the place in my heart where all of my fear and shame and self-loathing were festering. I was his puppet, masquerading as my old self. Blinded by his gaslighting, believing there was nothing more important than our love for each other. This is what emotional abuse can turn into, if allowed to continue for too long. He did not have to “force” me to make any of the choices I made, because he had me completely fooled.

Her abuser will try to make her feel alone, so that he is the only person to whom she can turn. Show her that she is not alone.

And with all this going on, the friends and family of the person being abused risk her rejection and isolation from them if they try to tell her the truth. It’s a careful line they must walk, as they must let her know that they will unconditionally support her no matter what choice she makes, while at the same time showing her that she is more than the relationship she is in, and more than the person her partner tells her to be. They might have to watch as she wastes years in this relationship. It will depend on her ability to leave on her own, something her abuser is working to prevent. She can’t be forced to leave him, even though she is technically being “forced” to stay. She is still a completely autonomous person who must be free to make her own choices . . . while at the same time her mind is being fucked with on a subliminal level that she doesn’t recognize. It is hard, and sometimes impossible, to be her support system. The best thing you can do is show her that her abuser is NOT the only person who loves her. Her abuser will try to make her feel alone, so that he is the only person to whom she can turn. Show her that she is not alone. If she rejects you, do what you must to take care of yourself, and do your best to recognize that it’s not her that is rejecting you, it’s her abuser.

The other thing to remember is . . . happy endings don’t always happen. She may stay with him forever. Or she may get back together with him as soon as she leaves him. Then it will be your decision to uphold what boundaries you must in order to protect your own sanity.

If I can say one last thing at this moment, it’s this: Love is NOT enough. But I’ll save that rant for a different day.

Further Discussions:

This article is about the personal experience of an abusive relationship, coming from a young woman who does not have children and had a support system to turn to once she finally ended the relationship. This article does not go into detail about the ways in which money and familial support, or the lack of those things, plays a role in abusive relationships. This article also focuses on romantic relationships, though this type of abuse happens with all types of relationships, NOTABLY those involving parents gaslighting their children. I also did not go into all the ways that my abuser’s own PTSD and history of being abused created much of his behavior, or the ways in which systemic vulnerability, whether that comes from being a woman, a child, a trauma victim, a disabled person, etc. leads to patterns of who gets abused and who doesn’t. And finally, gender plays into all of this in so many interesting and horrible ways, as well. To the men who are being abused by the patriarchy, I see you, and I’ll be writing about you too, don’t worry.