My relationship with him began quickly. In my mind, it was a fairytale. He had been my knight in shining armour saving me from a toxic relationship. Truth be told, I had had a crush on him as a kid so to have him be interested in me nearly 15 years later was a dream come true.  He promised me the world, made me feel like this was meant to be, all along and forever. And that was all I ever really wanted...to be loved in the same way I knew I could love another. It all moved so fast, but I told myself that must be how true love is, because like Harry told Sally, “...when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” 

There were bad days though that summer... There were red flags, even early on, that I wish I had given more attention to, but it was impossible to not fall for that charm. He was sincere and kind when he wanted to be, yet when that darkness creeped in, his words cut like knives. 

It started out with small things that when isolated didn’t seem so bad. Like all the times he didn’t come to a family dinner, or became annoyed with me when I wanted to talk to him on the phone for longer than a couple minutes. Other things hurt long after they were said, like when he told me I didn’t know how to give a decent blow job and he was seemingly very angry about it. It was humiliating, he made me feel terrible. Later on, (and I mean years later) he told me he was only kidding despite how upset I was over the things he had said.

He told me he loved me within two weeks of dating...I was flattered and I truly thought he meant it. And just four months later, we had packed our bags and moved to Montana. Now, a lot of people questioned this decision and the woman I am today would too. What I want, rather what I need, people to understand is that this man and his family already had their hooks in me and I was completely unaware of it. They made me feel welcome and good, as if I was a godsend to their precious boy. I felt needed and I can’t pretend that wasn’t a good feeling to have. I felt like they were rooting for us and our love story just as much as I was. 

Montana was a crapshoot, to say the least. Things had not gone the way he had promised they would. The truck he bought specifically for MT, he told me it was for us. But as soon as I drove it, he was livid. You would think I had committed a murder the way he flipped out on me. As horrific as this will sound, the only thing that saved me that night was my grandma passing away. He couldn’t possibly be mad at me anymore after I got that phone call. But I would end up spending the rest of that winter walking to work because I was not allowed to drive the truck and he didn’t want to give me a ride.  

March 17, 2014 was the first time I truly wanted to and considered leaving him. I caught him in a lie and realized he had a serious drinking problem. I had so much clarity that night; it was certainly a mistake to have moved there without really knowing each other. I had nothing, no one out there. Which made it so much easier for him to convince me to stay. 

A month later he put his hands on me for the first time. We had gone to a concert that night. We both had a lot to drink, too much to be safe driving but we did anyway. I can’t remember why we started arguing once we were home, I just remember being pushed. He had pushed me. He pushed me so hard that I fell and my head hit the outlet plate on the wall and broke it. That would soon become a daily reminder of what he was capable of. Not being the wallowing type, I got up and headed towards him. I put my hand on the door frame and he slammed the door on my fingers. Not hard enough to break any, just hard enough to send a message. 

I found out I was pregnant just barely 9 months into our relationship. He was overjoyed and I was terrified. He made me feel like it would be okay though. We spent a year in Montana and it’s safe to say that was the worst year of my life. I spent many nights sleeping in the spare bedroom where there wasn’t even a bed. I just wanted to be away from him. We had several arguments that had turned physical, even when I was pregnant. I can’t count the amount of times I googled the domestic violence hotline number, or the Bozeman police only to backtrack and worry about what that would do to him. I knew in my gut he was lying to me constantly, and probably cheating on me in some way but any confrontation would lead to an argument which always ran the risk of getting hurt. 

Over the next few months, we moved back to Portland and had the baby. I had hopes that the baby would bring us closer together. And for a while it did. But eventually we became a second choice to him. We did our best to love each other, and had some really great days, quite a lot of them actually. But here’s the thing about abuse...no matter how hard you try, it doesn’t just go away. That person doesn’t just stop. Instead, he got smarter; more calculated, more creative. He spaced out the physical abuse enough to where it was believable when he said he wouldn’t do it again. Or the times it was really bad-like the time he hit me so hard I nearly passed out, or the time I woke up with a black eye-he made sure that happened when I had had too much to drink. That way I couldn’t recall the whole situation and he could convince me I provoked it. He would slip up here and there though. There’s a good handful of times where he was violent when I was completely sober. But thanks to a track record of blacking out during hypoglycemic episodes, he always had something he could blame it on. It’s quite brilliant actually. I mean, what are the odds that a type 1 diabetic is also a narcissistic sociopath? It was the perfect defense. Lies though...they are a burden to carry. And when you are diabetic and an alcoholic, you often find yourself saying things that you were not supposed to, things like “I wasn’t blacked out, I was just mad.”

I tried again to leave him in 2016. He had flipped a couch over on top of me. To be honest, the fact that this incident wasn’t talked about more bothers me. I mean, the man literally flipped a fucking couch over with my body sitting on it. I don’t think I have ever felt that scared in my life. He did have the decency to pick the couch up off of me but then proceeded to ask me why I was still on the floor... I locked myself in the bathroom as soon as I found the strength to get up. All I knew was I had to get my son and myself out of that house. He started banging on the door, harder and harder. It was like I was trapped in a horror movie. He finally broke it open, the door frame coming off with it. Then, he just started kicking me, and again asking why I was on the floor. I had no words, couldn’t even scream if I wanted to. It was like my vocal chords were paralyzed. It’s strange how our bodies decide whether we freeze, fight or flight depending on the situation. Once he stopped, he just went to bed. So I grabbed a bag, my kid and left as fast as I could. I spent nearly a week away from him fully prepared to call it quits, but I still believed him when he said he didn’t remember what happened. 

I didn’t end up leaving him after that. I didn’t leave after any of the countless times he physically hurt me. I didn’t even tell anyone about all the times he had hit me. I never told anyone about all the times he called me horrible names, slammed cabinets, spoke poorly about me to our son. I protected him because I thought I was protecting myself in doing so. He was good at making me believe everything was my fault. He made me feel as if all the bad things he had ever done to me were somehow justified. He made me think I had a drinking problem, made me believe I was the abusive one. 

To add to the verbal and physical abuse, I finally can accept that there was a good amount of sexual abuse happening as well. People hear that and our minds will go to rape. It wasn’t really that though. It was being given the silent treatment or a bad attitude because he was sexually frustrated. It was the strange feeling I’d have after a night of one too many drinks, remembering bits a pieces but knowing I wasn’t  fully coherent during sex. It was being shamed and called weird for not wanting to talk about sex the way he did. It was being asked over and over and over again to have sex, no matter how many times I said no. And when I refused too many times, he resorted to insults. He’d tell me what a terrible girlfriend I was because I didn’t do what he asked. He told me I should want to make him happy, that “there’s no point in having a girlfriend if you can’t even ask for a blow job.” Many times, I would just give in. I figured it was better to pretend to be somewhere else for a few minutes than listen to him call me a bitch all night. He made me hate sex. I remember tears rolling down my face on several occasions, he didn’t even notice. It didn’t bother him that I didn’t want to be doing it. Sex was almost transactional. He’d make promises contingent on receiving sexual favors in return, even going as far to say he wouldn’t marry me unless I did certain things in bed with him.  

Most people who hear my story feel that being hit or having your body violated is the worst thing a person could do to another. And believe me, the list of incidents goes on and on. For me though, the worst part was the psychological torment that went on even when the physical abuse wasn’t happening. The way he manipulated every situation, the way he convinced me that I was the problem...he made me hate myself more than anything. I tried everything to find a way to like myself again. New clothes, new hair, lose weight, workout, self help books, yoga, new diet, running, quit drinking, smoke more weed, smoke less weed, drink more, go on antidepressants, go off the antidepressants. Nothing worked because no matter what I did, he found something to hate about me. But it was never what I looked like that was the problem, it was me; my character, my values and beliefs. It was everything that made me who I am...that was what he hated. He took my spirit, my soul, the last part of me that I had left, and killed it. 

I have come to understand how hard it is to admit to yourself that you don’t want to be alive. I can only imagine how hard it is to tell that to someone else. It took me years to admit just how bad the situation was and even longer to realize that I was slowly dying in it. I used to go to bed just to escape my reality. My dreams were filled with love, life and laughter and then I would wake up. I would wake up full of dread and fear. I’d go through the motions of each day. I would do the things I needed to and I would play my part as the dutiful girlfriend when needed. But I was empty inside. I spent days dreaming of what it would be like if I ran away. I fantasized about what it would be like to go to sleep and not wake up. It would be over, I would be free. It was never that I wanted to die, I just didn’t want to live the life I had. Because it wasn’t living at all, it was surviving. I just wanted to live life on my terms, the way I had always imagined it would be. But I had no idea how to escape it. On my darkest days when I would have those thoughts, I would look at my son and be reminded of all the good things in life. I was reminded that my life is not only mine, but it is his life too. To leave him in this world alone would be worse than any pain and suffering I had endured. So I kept on, knowing someday I would get us out of there. 

I left him in June of 2020. I had a moment after a heated argument where it finally dawned on me, “I could stay and be miserable forever, likely end up dead. Or...I could get out now, start over and live my own damn life.” And for the first time in 7 years, I actually believed myself when I said I was done. I knew this was what I absolutely needed to do. 

It’s been 10 months, and it’s been rough, at times awful. I have been diagnosed with chronic PTSD and seem to discover a new trigger all the time. I’ve been co-parenting with the narc and as expected, it can be pure hell. It’s become clear that he will do anything to make my life harder without realizing it’s himself and his son who will suffer the most. It breaks my heart knowing that one day my son will see his father for what he is. Some days, the weight of it all feels unbearable. It’s so hard trying to explain to others why I feel the way I do. Some days, I feel like everyone is tired of hearing about it and maybe I should just move on too. But I have to remind myself that what I went through was not one event that needs healing and processing. This is 7 years of abuse and psychological damage that will take a long time to work through. 

It’s interesting though to observe how others view and react to something like this. I’ve become so desensitized to my own experience in many ways, that I forget how far from normal any of this is. There is still so much of me that doubts my own narrative, so much of me that often wonders if I was the crazy one all along. Sometimes I feel like I have to list every terrible thing he ever did just to prove it was actually that bad. He still puts on his charm and goes about life as if he is just like the rest of us and that makes my process of healing so much harder. 

It all feels so unfair, and so unjust to be the one suffering in silence all those years to protect him, and fighting so hard for him to just love me the way I had loved him, only to end up breaking my own heart in order to protect myself and my son. I used to envy him and his ignorance. I imagined it must be nice to go through life without worrying or caring about anyone else.  I am angry at him for the things he did, angry at him for continuing to make my life and my son’s life more difficult. But anymore, I just feel sorry for him. He’ll never know what it feels like to love someone unconditionally, or experience pure joy or to just be authentically happy. 

I am still in the early stages of healing, and  just now finding myself experiencing grief for what once was. I’ve come to understand though that the grief I feel is not for a relationship lost but rather a loss of myself. I can see so clearly now how the person I was before him was nearly erased because of him. My heart aches for the girl I once was, the girl who so desperately wanted a love story and truly believed he could change. It’s hard to imagine that one day, I will feel whole again. I often feel as if I am living two separate lives, simultaneously. One is my liberated and triumphant self, happier than I have ever been because I have reclaimed my life and see the endless possibilities that lie ahead of me. The other is a fragile, lost soul who fears more than she’d like to admit; anything could trigger a panic attack and send her right back into depression’s tight hold. But each day, the fragile soul gets a little stronger. Her liberated counterpart lends a hand and leads the way, until one day they will be one. 

It took me 7 years to see what was happening and to finally leave, but I did make it out. I truly believe I made it out so that I can use my story to help others find their strength to get out too. The road is long and bumpy and not a straight path at all, but it is the most necessary road to go down because nobody deserves anything less than a life of freedom and happiness. 

-Elizabeth Jones