For as long as I can remember from being a child there were words in my ears. Every day I was told exactly what I was. As time passed it became all I knew. There was nobody to tell me any different. I could cope with the physical violence but it’s the words that stuck. After a few years they became ingrained in me. I believed them. I spent my school life thinking of ways to get detention so I didn’t have to go home.
In my head I was screaming that I knew the lessons but the reality was I pretended to be stupid to stay in the bottom classes where it heightened her chants of me being nothing. I grew up knowing i shouldn’t have been born.
By the time I was a teenager I got my first boyfriend but I couldn’t let him near me. So deep ran her words that I thought he was tricking me. He gave up on me. I got out and forged a life but my head still rang with what I was taught. It led to me thinking the man who went on to rape me was only what I deserved, and my subsequent suicide attempts and incarceration on a psychiatric ward. Those words had literally driven me nuts.
It was only after 4 years and moving 100+ miles away I met someone who slowly made me believe it wasn’t me, I wasn’t those things. He took time and patience with me.
I let my abuser back into my life after a long time but it was hard. It turned out to be a mistake. A big one. She is still able to cut me to the quick with one sentence. She used that power to take me to the brink of what i could bear and the damage was done again. It hurts, it hurts a lot.
It’s always in my head what she thinks and said.
It affects my parenting of my own children, my confidence is zero, I believe these things and it’s a daily struggle for me to fight against them.
She makes me want to self-harm, her words incite me to do something physical to equal the mental pain. I very rarely give in but it’s a really difficult thing.
Thinking of her words hits myself loathe, self-destruction button.
Because of whom she is, because of what she said the damage is done.
I won’t ever be free of her.
Please please anyone if you read Emma’s article on verbal abuse exposed and something rings home and you know it’s you, please get out. Get out before you end up like me.
Every day is hell.
Once the damage is done it can’t be undone and I wouldn’t wish how I feel on anyone.
