I’m not naming him, because this story is no longer about him.
I’m choosing to write this for those who have recently reached out to me with similar experiences of emotional and mental abuse, many of them other young Indigenous femmes and Two-Spirit folks. I’ve had my fill of content demanding the forgiveness of femmes; demands that we let those who have harmed us proceed on their “healing journeys” while we suffer with wounds – visible and invisible – that last for years.
It’s been over two years and I still have recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, and strong physical reactions related to the emotional abuse I lived with in a serious romantic relationship.
A friend told me that dreams are a safer space to process things we have been through in our lives that our conscious minds might not be quite ready to handle.
I had another terrifying dream last night. Not terrifying in the traditional sense of being chased by a monster or being trapped in an elevator when the cables snap, but the kind of terrifying that abruptly throws you back into a space of profound grief.
In the dream, we were together again. I woke up in tears and ordered poutine (it helped). Unable to avoid the intrusive thoughts, I confronted them and read another article that points out how those living with the after-effects of emotional abuse experience many similar symptoms to those living with PTSD.
I’m a junior Indigenous academic who recently completed my master’s degree at the University of Toronto. Since I was small, I have learned that when I feel disempowered, I can read and research to regain some power and learn new skills for surviving entire worlds that are violent to my people and people like me.
It is a frequent struggle to remind myself that what I went through in this relationship was indeed abusive and that I didn’t deserve the abuse.
I have written tens of thousands of words on this topic in my private journals, but I have not publicly named the person. The reason for this is multi-layered. The most obvious reason being that people don’t believe women, femmes, Trans and Two-Spirit folks who tell truths about how we’re treated, and many will find ways to justify any instance of abuse against us, anyway. Another reason is that I care about other people involved against their will and the harm they have endured.
Let’s get this one out of the way: they were married. Against all better judgment, we fell in love, and this person insisted they were going to be divorced soon. I believed them.
I was a graduate student living on scholarship at the time of this relationship, and they were a salaried professor. They were ten years my senior.
At the beginning and throughout the relationship, this person made me believe – through grand gestures of love, time, affection, and vulnerability – that we were soulmates and we desperately needed each other. Everything was amplified, at once extraordinarily intimate, poetic, gentle, and intense. I felt like I had found the answer to life, and the way they looked at me and spoke to me made me feel invincible. I wanted nothing more than to be the person I saw reflected in their eyes and heard about in their words. I found a lot of beauty there that I promised I would not regret.
But when they left every morning, I cried. I cried every day for about two years. It was an unspoken agreement that I was unable to say a word about this great, magical love to anyone in public. I knew in my gut that this wasn’t right, but I ignored it because I didn’t believe that someone could devote themselves so fully and completely to what turned out to be a massive lie.
And as the time passed, and passed, and passed, my self-esteem and confidence were eroded. I began to believe that this painful, fucked-up love was all I deserved and no one else would treat me any better.
These are things I have learned from my therapeutic/academic research (because sometimes they are the same) are signposts of emotional abuse and forms of control:
- telling me that the reason they hurt me was because they loved me; that I had to put up with being “treated like garbage” sometimes in order to receive love; that they knew they were being cruel but “just couldn’t help it” because of how I made them feel
- excluding me from decision-making in our relationship – making sweeping claims that we’d “be together forever” and “build a life” while lying about major life decisions and events.
- lack of respect for my boundaries – closely monitoring me and my friends via social media and if I tried to leave, pursuing me intensely until I gave in, time after time.
- the hot/cold treatment – whenever I felt comfortable and safe, stable, and confident, they would remove affection and become distant or sometimes mean, ghosting me entirely on multiple occasions.
- putting me on a pedestal - their affection and care were extravagant and life-affirming when present, to the point where I believed I had done something wrong and had to make up for it when I didn’t receive the typical over-the-top, showy love.
- at the same time, not being present for my achievements and downplaying my contributions
- acting in extremes by a) blowing up my phone with texts, requiring I focus my attention on the relationship as a priority over anything else in my life (friends, responsibilities, dreams and goals), and b) ghosting, depriving me of affection, stability, and self-confidence when I needed it the most.
- passive aggression – when I came to them with reasonable questions, concerns, or complaints, they would shut me out for hours or days, often subtly turning things around on me. My every action had a consequence, because I was constantly being judged for my worthiness.
- doing these things at the worst possible times in my life – on weeks when I had grad school papers due, when I had scholarship applications due, when I had a guest lecture to deliver or a class to teach, when I was travelling, and worst of all, when my mom or I were sick.
- invalidation of my feelings – near constant remarks that I was hypersensitive and “felt everything so intensely” or “to an extent that they could not feel”. This, an implication that my feelings of grief, despair, and disorientation weren’t a completely valid reaction to the situation.
- and most of all, how I began to believe I wasn’t deserving of being truly, fully loved and this was the best I could ever get.
My emotional and physical health deteriorated. I developed what I now recognize was an eating disorder and became obsessed with maintaining a perfect physical appearance at all times, literally shrinking myself as though it would make me easier to hold, more loveable. This was also related to my feelings that as a brown-skinned Indigenous woman, I could simply never measure up to earn the type of relationship I knew I really wanted. My depression and anxiety intensified. I spent all my energy on begging this person to treat me with empathy and love that I simply would never receive, or if I did, it was given to me conditionally and then yanked away like a carpet from beneath my feet.
When things were bad between us, I felt unstable, shaky, exhausted, and sick. I had been lucky enough to get into my dream program with my dream supervisor in a big, beautiful city, but I now walked through the world like a ghost. I stayed with friends who took care of me in Toronto when I couldn’t get out of bed or make food for myself, sleeping most of the time and entirely numb or incapacitated by depression the rest. I owe much of my recovery to these friends.
And yes, I could’ve left this person’s cheating ass at any point. And I did leave many times; ten or more. Each time, I came back to the promise that things would be different. As a writer, I prided myself on a strong intuition. If they were lying to me the whole time, I have never heard a more convincing liar.
By the time I realized things were not going to change, I had almost completely bought into the idea that my own perception of reality wasn’t accurate, and that my feelings were simply a result of my supposed oversensitivity or stubborn refusal to accept I wasn’t worth more.
The end of it all was when I caught them in a huge lie. When I confronted them about it, the person’s response was to immediately deflect the blame back to me in words I will probably never forget: “maybe I’m not the person you remember, but you know, you aren’t the same person I remember either”.
I left.
The next day, I found out that this person had gone to our mutual friends and acquaintances and “confessed” to all their mistakes – me and our three-year relationship listed as one of those “mistakes” – effectively controlling the narrative in the minds of outsiders to the dynamics of our relationship. Not all of them believed him, but some did. When I tried to reach out to others and tell them what had happened, I was sometimes told I deserved the treatment I got because I should’ve known better.
“It’s difficult to explain over text, but he reached out and issued sort of an apology to everyone…”
After this, I finally understood how intensely I had been manipulated, consciously or not, by someone older than me with significantly more social and economic capital.
When I looked back, the warning signs seemed so clear and I am rendered a cliché.
I kept records for a while but eventually stopped counting the times I was talked about or called a slut who deserved whatever happened to me, directly and indirectly.
I left.
I remain the foolish young girl who “fell for it” and deserved what she got.
But I left.
A ghostly term later, I went home to the prairies, had a simple surgery that went wrong and ruptured my insides, requiring me to be hospitalized.
I remember eating bannock with misaskwatomina (saskatoon berry) jam in the hospital on the day I could finally eat solid foods again, and asking the nurse for seconds. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.
Despite all the therapeutic/academic research and despite what my rational brain knows – that I survived emotional abuse, that I did not deserve the abuse, and that I am safe now – I still have nightmares. I have no magic arrow to offer you for speedy healing.
Still, I do not regret loving. I do mourn for the collective lifetimes we lose as femmes and Two-Spirits held down by restraints shaped like love.
Things are good now. I chopped my hair off short and it’s growing back stronger and thicker. I got a lot of crazy piercings and then I took most of them out. I remembered that I love music and discovered that I love painting. I am eating again. I am regaining my life, writing again, flirting with some real cuties, feeling feelings, reconnecting with old friends and making new and wonderful ones who teach me what it’s like to be loved in the ways I deserve. It is a phenomenal thing when you choose not to settle for less than you know, deep down, that you are worth.
I’m not naming him because this story is no longer about him.
Excerpt from ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
