He was hurting me. Badly.
He never once thought that I would see right through his schemes and free myself from his grasp. All he did see was a little bird whose wings he chose to break.
This man never saw me for who I was, so he shaped me to fit his own desires.
Sometimes, I felt like he didn’t know what he was doing. Genuinely speaking, I understand that there are people out there who don’t know how to treat others right.
They were abused or traumatized by life to the point where they thought that that was the norm. They think that love needs to hurt and if relationships don’t involve arguing and fighting then there’s something wrong with it.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t hold people accountable for the things they’ve done to us. We can’t just tell someone that it’s fine that they’re hurting us, simply because they don’t know better.
I didn’t know how to hold him accountable. I only saw a hurt child underneath his hard exterior.
When I looked at him, I saw a broken man who needed support. He needed me to fix him or he at least needed to fix himself.
To me, it didn’t matter that he broke me in the process.
At the very beginning of our journey, I thrived on the fact that he confided in me. I loved the way he’d tell me stories about himself and he trusted me with his deepest and darkest secrets.
Back then, it didn’t occur to me that he only used me to feel validated. He used me as his own free therapist for so long.
I was his rehabilitation center from the beginning of the relationship. He would come to me with his problems and I would help him solve them.
The problem is that he never gave me the same effort back. He never once thought of listening to me and sincerely trying to help me figure things out.
I guess that should have been the first red flag. Even back then, I should have seen that he wasn’t there to love me but to take what he could get from me.
Further down the relationship, those conversations turned into arguments. They turned into full-blown tantrums when I didn’t give him the answers he expected to hear.
I would question him and he’d become so offended to the point where he’d start yelling at me. However, the issue was that I still tried to help him, so I would question him to better understand him.
However, at that time, the only thing that came to mind was that he was sensitive because he had gone through so much while he was growing up.
I actually found excuses for his moods and his words. It didn’t matter that I would cry myself to sleep while thinking of the things he would call me.
I held on to the moments when he would apologize. They were rare but when he did, I would mold my body to his and cuddle with him for hours.
In those moments, I would forgive him and move on. I told myself that he had to love me because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to hold myself back from having a panic attack.
Back then, I didn’t know that he was hurting me. I didn’t know that he shouldn’t be asking things of me just because he thought that he was entitled to them.
He thought that he owned my time and my body. He never once considered that I needed to invest some of my own energy into healing the wounds he created; all he did think of was how much more of myself I could give him.
I mistook those outbursts of affection as actual love. I just didn’t know better myself.
There was a part of me that knew things weren’t going to get better. I just thought that I had to endure it all no matter what.
When you’re in a relationship with someone like that, you start to question how they would ever function without you. You don’t know whether they’re going to do something to harm themselves if you leave.
I was his support system. More often than not, he made me believe that he would be lost without me.
I couldn’t just ignore those words. So I stayed.
The moment I chose myself was the moment when I realized that he was hurting me. I wanted to go out without him and he grabbed my arm.
His grip was so tight that he bruised me right then and there.
This man had never done something like that. Of course, he would yell, he would call me names, but he never hurt me physically.
This was the closest thing to a wake-up call that I had ever gotten.
To say that I left that instant would be a lie. I stayed by his side but I started to contemplate everything that he’d done to me leading up to that situation.
I knew that the relationship was unhealthy, so why was I so surprised by this? He was hurting me.
I thought of everything tthat I wanted from a relationship and I simply knew that abuse wasn’t one of the things on that list. I started seeing things clearly to the point where I was surprised I had ever let it get that far.
I’d love to say that I left him without feeling sorry for him. However, he made me believe that I was his lifeline.
So how do you leave someone who’s hurting you because he, himself, is hurting inside?
Well, ladies, you do that by understanding that you are not obligated to cater to a man. You do that when you realize that you are not a rehabilitation center for badly raised men.
Even though he threatened to follow me and he said that he would find me again, I walked away. A narcissistic abuser like him didn’t deserve my soft heart or my tender love and he didn’t deserve my effort.
I relapsed, believing that he needed me more than anyone else. I would contact him but I would still stay away because even in those moments when I wanted to help him, he would still hurt me.
You, me, every other woman out there – we deserve better than that! We are not there to heal the wounds someone else has created.
People have to heal them themselves. We can only support them and show them the right way.
And however much you may try, you’ll never be able to heal him by yourself. You’ll only let him hurt you more with each passing day.
It took me a long while to realize that he was hurting me, so learn from my mistakes and find yourself someone worthy of your efforts, just like I did.
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