What It Feels Like To Survive Emotional Abuse In Your Relationship

It’s the feeling of drowning in the middle of the night. Almost like as if you’ve been thrown into the ocean and can’t find your way to the shore. Suffocating.
The overwhelming fear that everything could crumble around you and there’s nothing in your power that could prevent it.

Loving a manipulator is nothing short of walking through a burning house, trying to breathe through the smoke and find the exit, only to walk into yet another flame-filled room.

No matter how much you cry, the exit doesn’t feel any closer. It doesn’t feel any easier as time goes on. In fact, it gets harder.

They say, “when it rains, it pours,” and boy, have I seen it pour. Loving you made me weak. Unable to open an umbrella and protect myself from your thunderstorms.
One minute everything is sunny, the next minute a tornado is ripping its way through everything I thought I knew.

The mind works in the strangest ways. You put me through hell, and I loved you. I let you in and you tried to change me. Forced me to think everything about me was wrong. I looked in the mirror and only saw faults. You shattered me into a million tiny glass pieces, making it nearly impossible for me to pick it all up and put it back together.

But you weren’t able to keep me in your hell. I walked out- with scars and bruises and cuts from your emotional abuse. But I walked out.

Now I’m alive. I can breathe and the only smoke that remains from that burning house is the memories of you.

I called it love. But true love is not choking someone with your words. Making them feel as if there is no way out.

There is always a way out, and I couldn’t be more thankful that I found mine.