Relationship Trauma: What Does Being With An Abusive Partner Feel Like?

Abusive relationships can be deeply distressing as they can do a lot of damage to your emotional and mental well-being. Learn more about Relationship trauma and being with an abusive partner.

Falling in love is not a voluntary action. Though you have a list of qualities in your mind for how you would like your partner to be when the time comes no checklist is ever checked. You fall in love anyway and while some fall in love others fall prey! Yes, prey to the Narcissist.

Being in a relationship with someone who has NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) you are subjected to various emotional, physical, and mental abuses.

Relationship Trauma From A Past Relationship

Living in terror and walking on eggshells in fear of triggering them, you are trapped in the 7th circle of hell. Now you might wonder why anyone would choose to live in such pain and fear. That’s the trick of a narcissist, they just don’t let you realize that you’re being abused, and by the time you realize this you’re too broken and emotionally drained.

Related: The Effects of Gaslighting in Narcissistic Victim Syndrome

You won’t even know you are being abused because the abuses are covert, slowly numbing you to a point where you lose all the self-confidence and ability to judge what’s better for you. You won’t be able to take important life decisions and you’re rendered incapable to look for help or escape.

It takes a lot of effort and a lot of time to pull yourself out of this abyss and by the time you think you’re finally at the shore away from the depths of hell, the real nightmare begins.

Related: Identifying Emotional Abuse before it Happens.

Shivering even to touch of wind, such terrified and weak you’ve become. The flashback of tortures and torments almost pushes you to blackout.

When you live with trauma and stress, it leads you to depression, more precisely C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). C-PTSD is a result of persistent psychological trauma in an environment where the victim believes they are powerless and that there is no escape.

Even after leaving the relationship, for many months the flashback of the events haunts you. You struggle to sleep at night which adds to your depression and even at the times when you can sleep you’re woken up trembling by the experience of some haunting recurring dream.

Every time you wake up you feel tired, you don’t want to sleep but you don’t to wake either. You’re tired of lying on the bed yet you don’t want to leave the bed.

When you live with trauma, you are so terrified that even the slightest change in surroundings would scare you. On the occurrence of any event or object that reminds you of the trauma and torture you feel dizzy and fatigued, your fists clutch and your heart starts racing.

Your concentration abilities and memory power are severely affected when you live with trauma. You get a hard time trying to memories long phrases and focus on certain tasks.

When you live with trauma, you’re in constant anxiety and even small things start to upset you. Appetite is lost and you have no motivation, this is the time when suicidal thoughts start flooding in.

You lose your faith in friendship, romance, and relationships. When you live with trauma, it gets very difficult to trust people and you’re always insecure about their hidden motives behind their actions.

You reach a point where you fear none but the man in the mirror- you! You shutdown yourself. The confidence and will to face the world is gone, you don’t want to step outside the house, you’re too scared to open up and connect with people. You fear they might see the pain in your eyes.

Though you muster enough courage and strength to walk away from the relationship for your sound mental and physical health deep down the pain remains the same. You are far from okay, you are emaciated and numb trying to suppress all the emotions and feelings inside you.

Even after the end of a tragic chapter of your life (the relationship), the new leaf is no green, the new chapter is equally if not more haunting and terrifying. You have lost the sense of existence and trying to ignore and numb down the feelings is doing you more harm than good.

Related: Lingering Effects of Emotional Abuse and Ways to Heal

The charm of narcissists makes you believe that whatever you’re going through is normal and slowly you adapt to this and you endure it for so long that when you finally return to normal the world seems alienated and so does your feelings, it feels like a whole new world and you’ve no idea how to live in it.

Healing From Abusive Relationship

It’s about time you realize that you can either lie their tattered feeling pity on your own condition or stand upon the focus on your healing for the injuries that you have in your heart may soon become fatal.

It’s time you don’t let the past hold you captive anymore. It is up to you to stand bank up and gain your composure before the damage gets bigger and you end up falling in much deeper hell.

The first step towards your healing is acceptance, you need to accept what you’ve through and what you’re feeling is real. You need to accept that you have broken emotionally and mentally.

You have been cheated, lied, used, abused, and manipulated for far too long. The past relationship was an illusion and you were merely prey. The torment was real and now you have lost your faith and conscience, you get a hard time trusting people and often even yourself

You need to allow yourself to heal. The damage is deep and you should let it have the time it needs to do healing, the pieces will be put back together with time and there is no need to hurry. Slowly everything will fall back in place if you take a leap of faith and allow it.

Though the relationship was abusive and you hate to love that person or love to hate that person but still the most difficult part is there are few aspects that you still miss and this stops you from talking to anyone about the relationship. You don’t have an answer to how could you miss someone who abused and tortured you for so long.

The main reason for having difficulty in getting over this type of relationship is the charm of a narcissist. At one moment they take you on cloud 9 and the next moment drag you to hell. You fall in love so deeply with one side of the person that you completely miss to see the other dark side but when you do you lose yourself whirlpool of emotions.

You miss the person for all the qualities you loved and then at the same time fear and hate the dark side. You hate him so much that just the mention of his name trembles you. This crazy dilemma of loving and hating a person at the same time feels so natural yet is your reality now.

To heal, you must focus on building yourself. The process is not easy and cannot be achieved in a hurry. Once you have accepted it you’ve taken the first step to heal. You need to build new friendships, open your mind and eyes for different views, and forgive the past.

There is no point holding on to something that hurts you to the core.

Another important step when you live with trauma is finding someone you can open up to without being judged. It can be a friend or a counselor understanding the C-PTSD post abusive relationship.

Slowly the light within you will shine again. If you are determined nothing can stop you, you will rise again. Remember, let it take it’s time there is no hurry. Healing comes slowly, have faith in yourself.

Related: What is Narcissistic Abuse: 16 Signs To Identify And How To Protect

And how odd is it to be haunted by someone that is still alive?

You wake up to a different feeling this morning, something feels missing. You come outside through this scrambled page of your life and find nothing has changed, the songbirds are still singing, the old man is again there at the park bench with his newspaper, the kid who is always late for school is still rushing to catch his school bus.

Your bottle of milk and newspaper is there at your doorstep and as you walk barefoot on the roads pondering upon what has changed, a gust of wind kisses you, you stand still- frozen! Now you realize what is missing, something inside of you! You’ve carried away in a different world again, a world where she is holding your hands, looking into your eyes and smiles on your faces, the moments of heavenly bliss!

*peeep peep* “

Go die somewhere else stupid!” Screamed the driver of black Honda honking behind you.

Another wind of realization hits you and you realize the dreams are shattered- to never be dreamt again. You move aside, fists clutched and moist eyes, you know you’re strong, you’ve always been. That cute lil girl from neighborhood waves and smiles at you, a smile beautiful than ever before but you see a phantom behind her, it was the one that is gone.

You turn blue but you don’t lose your composer because you’re strong, always have been. You feel a vibration in your pocket, it’s your phone. The usual time to receive the morning greetings, today it’s not, the screen reads some offer from the service provider. A little bit of hope and a little bit of you dies inside.

The girl in blacktop, light brown hair crosses the road, it’s her, you know it’s her. You scream her name..she doesn’t respond or maybe she didn’t hear. You scream louder-

“Hey!! Wait!”

She turns around

“Yes” with a perplexed look.

You turn numb, your throat dries and you want to apologize but words don’t escape your mouth, you turn around and run, run as fast as you could but your legs don’t seem to be owned by you today, your mind and heart races faster than your leg and gravity seem to be playing its cruelest game on you.

Every day you pray to be normal again but deep down you know this was a one-way journey and there is no going back, this is the new normal. You learn to hide the fears and pain inside. You stick a permanent smile on your face.

Now you’re the happiest person in this world they say, if only they could see the shadow that stands behind them while they talk to you, the face you see in every face that appears before you, everywhere you go. The whispering of the walls and her voices in the wind. You can’t even mourn for the undead and how odd is it to be haunted by someone that is still alive?

That’s how it feels like to live with trauma after abusive relationship. If you could relate to the article leave a comment below.