writing this down in a list like this was both horrifying and a validating experience. i can’t guarantee i won’t delete it in the future because they still put a lot of fear into me, especially because of their popularity, but this is what happened. i couldn’t write it linearly and hopped around a lot because most of my memories of him and what happened are all in one big clump and i have a very hard time discerning when any specific event happened a lot of the time.
edit: i ended up miscategorizing a lot of stuff because one thing would make me remember another thing that was related. sorry for the lack of formatting and cohesive arrangement sometimes
>abuse because i’m transgender
verbal abuse (saying it creeped him out, lots of transphobic statements in the same vein of ‘I won’t touch you if you’re packing/binding, it’s gross, i don’t want to be in the same room when you are’, etc)
manipulation (withholding any kind of physical contact when i did present as male. it ended up with me not being able to bind or pack at all b/c of the overwhelming feelings of guilt that this ‘punishment’ saddled me with)
physical abuse (when i was presenting, he was more inclined to be rough with me and go after my pain trigger points)
he would also bring a lot of attention to my breasts and would tell me how much he liked them. he also consistantly used stereotypically feminine compliments on me even though i told him multiple times that i did not want to be called 'beautiful’ or 'pretty’.
he also threatened to withhold transportation from me when i mentioned talking to the doctor about going on HRT. in the end he forced me to stop my transition cold for 2 years because 'we weren’t ready for that’. something i remember very vividly is when i tried to bring it up again after over 2 years. i had a friend who was very supportive of my wanting to transition and i had brought up going to the doctor to ask about HRT and eventually top surgery because my dysphoria was getting pretty unmanageable and binding, physically, is very painful for me. my ex stopped talking and involving himself in the conversation immediately the moment i started talking about it (something he did frequently if he didn’t like something i said to let me know he was angry with me) and when we got home, he stormed into the house and slammed the door on both of us. he confronted me afterwards and accused me of trying to ruin the relationship because i wanted to transition. it was actually what prompted me to break up with him later in that conversation
later on, after the breakup, he started to say that he was transgender too and that i would 'constantly put him down and undermine his masculinity’. it ended up being another form of gaslighting - i asked the friend we were living with if i did that, as well as other people, and they said that it wasn’t true and it was exactly what he was doing.
one of the earliest incidents was when i cut my hair short for the first time (before I had moved in with him) and he called both it and me ugly.
he would refuse to allow me to cut my hair shorter than a specific length that he was 'okay with’. he wouldn’t let me see a barber or stylist and insisted on doing it himself, but he would do it so that it looked ugly and uneven to discourage me from keeping it short.
>abuse because of my mental illnesses
kept telling me i was lazy when i couldn’t work as much as he wanted all throughout my depressive episodes even though he was aware of them
pressed me consistantly to get a job and got angry when my social anxiety, depression, adhd prevented me from doing it. on the flipside, it was 100% okay that his social anxiety and depression led to him quitting his job after 2 weeks. would get angry if i tried to bring the unfairness of that up to him.
got angry when i couldn’t concentrate on things he wanted me to
forced me into dating again despite telling him i needed some time for myself to work on my mental stuff after a bad relationship ended
constantly dismissed my depression and anxiety as being in my head or me trying to get out of working.
>abuse because of my physical disabilities
got livid to the point of screaming if i couldn’t do a majority of the chores. this hit a peak when he had a screaming meltdown because i couldn’t stand to do the dishes when my back problems were at their most visibly severe
>would use my trigger points against me and would prey on them and actively threaten to use them against me (i remember one incident in particular really vividly where he said he would 'jab my hips to set off my fibro’ if i didn’t stop passively touching his arm - we were together in bed sitting next to each other; when i got upset at him for saying something, he told me it was my fault and then wouldn’t speak to me until i apologized to him)
>would frequently use his strength to overpower me and hurt me (gripping too tight, bending me when he knew it would hurt) when he would initiate 'play fights’
around the time i had started to pull away from him, near the end, he started to get more violent. i made the mistake of trying to comfort him when he was crying once and he ended up pinning me to the headboard of the bed by my neck. afterwards he started crying and saying sorry, he didn’t mean to and begging me to not tell anybody until i said i wouldn’t.
>sexual abuse
when we initially started our relationship, i had mentioned to him that i thought it was a hot concept to be fingered in one’s sleep (consensually). later on, he used this as a power-move almost immediately after i had put out the idea of breaking up with him once, telling me that he had fingered me in my sleep. he would also frequently grab my chest and bring a lot of attention to it even though i told him it triggered my dysphoria very badly.
when i was growing up (i think tht i was around 14/15), he introduced me to an older man who talked about very sexual things with myself and others. it ended up in some long-distance sexual encounters (phonesex) while i was still underage. he encouraged this.
he encouraged me to look at extremely unhealthy, violent pornography either by myself or together with him, and would praise and reward me with attention if i actively seeked out and then gave him the kinds of extreme content he was interested in. i was 14 when this started, maybe younger.
he told me that he had humped his 10 year old cousin when she sat on his lap in the past. he was proud of this. i couldn’t go to anybody with this information because he had socially and literally isolated me at that point and i was afraid to do anything against him.
he bragged to me about the sexual abuse of his animals in the past, including trying to force a parakeet inside of himself as a living sex-toy and hitting his chihuahua when it eventually bit him when he tried to make it give him ‘oral sex’. he was very proud of these things and it set the stage for me believing that he was capable of sexual violence.
during many sexual encounters it was very obvious that i was uncomfortable and not okay with sexual contact with him but it never got mentioned or brought up. he coerced me into having sex with him well over 20 times even though it was obviously not full and enthusiastic consent, but situational consent - as in, i was afraid of threats, or violence against myself or self-inflicted against himself if i didn’t have sexual contact with him.
he would constantly accuse me of touching him in unwanted sexual ways when i tried to not touch him at all because it made me feel physically sick to do so. this one in particular has been a hard cliff to climb and has made it hard for me to initiate sexual contact at all, either verbally or through touching, because he made me believe that i was actually the one who was misconducting myself sexually.
>general abuse
he refused to clean his house or allow me to clean it. this lead to my eventual phobia (?) of food scraps and food crumbs - his bed was consistantly littered with trash and food.
he expected me to sleep in the trash. i couldn’t do it and ended up sleeping on a three inch thick piece of foam on the floor for two or three years. this lead to some serious spine degeneration and shoulder problems that have stuck with me to this day. he did not want to buy a bed and didn’t want me to buy one, either, because he wanted my money to all go back into his finances.
he would tell me that going to the doctors was something i shouldn’t do very often because it was too far out of the way for his parents to drive.
he would not drive me places himself - i think this in part truly was to his anxiety, but also because he did not want me to have much contact outside of himself.
he wouldn’t let me practice driving his car without him in it and would constantly criticize my performance the small handful of times that he did.
when we would go out to social groups, he would discourage me from mingling and would keep me by his side consistantly. if i interacted with other people, he would get jealous and angry and would confront me about afterwards or would visibly and audibly show his displeasure through expressions, actions, and tone.
he would tell me that i was constantly flirting with people when i was not. to this day i have a hard time being friendly with people because he gaslit me so much on it that i believed it for years, and i get afraid that they might think the same thing.
he would gaslight me about things including my memory and how bad it was. he exaggerated how poor my memory was to the point that he was telling me that conversations we had earlier that day happened in a completely different way than i recalled them, and he would tell me that things that had happened in the past had either not happened (e.g. me telling him to not use traditionally feminine compliements with him) or that i had told him the opposite of what i had actually said. he would also tell me that i said insulting things about him, but they were always the things he had said to me. i have severe, permanent problems believing my own perception of things, and issues with reality and what is real because of this.
he’d isolate me from my friends and monitor my computer screen or read my conversations while i was away from the computer. coupled with that, he would tell our that i would do the things he was doing to me, to him. a couple people came forwards to me with this from our mutual friend group and it’s how i found out.
he would get angry if i had private one-on-one conversations with our mutual friends, even though he would also do the same thing.
he accused me of cheating on him or wanting to cheat on him multiple times because, at the time, i had told him that i was okay with polyamorous relationships. this turned into a recurring accusation over multiple years.
he did not want to leave the house and did not want me to leave the house without him. this got especially bad in later years when i had made a friend. another one of my vivid memories is when my friend and i were walking back to their house, and i saw him looking out the window. he came out when we got closer and started yelling at me and my friend for not waking him up to invite him along. 'what the hell is wrong with you, i could have used that walk’.
he would get suspicious if i left the house without him, and the longer i was gone, the worse he would respond when i returned. it would oftentimes turn into a fight or an argument about why i was gone so long and what i was doing.
he would demean my intelligence and call me stupid or otherwise make me look very bad, especially in front of people. he told two people we knew that without him i would be a danger to society if i didn’t have him as a moral compass, something he had said so often and gaslit me so much about that i believed it was true for a while.
he would lick me even though i explicitly told him not to. it set me off into panic attacks sometimes and others would end up with me scrubbing my skin til it was raw. he always refused to brush his teeth (and bragged about not doing so) and the smell would often linger on my skin even after washing it and it would make me sick because i would keep remembering how the spit felt and it would make me feel like it was still there. i have fairly significant germophobia about specific things now (crumbs/spit most prominently) and i think that the root of these links back to the environment i had to live in and him refusing to listen to my boundaries.
all of this was exacerbated by the fact that he refused to see a therapist, go on medication, or seek any kind of help for his abusive tendencies (or for his depression/self harm/anger issues which all fed into the abuse loop). i knew from the start that he had mental illnesses but i was not aware that he would use them to excuse his behaviour or that he would react with both screaming and violence (throwing things, putting a hole in his door, breaking his electronics or my things and then blaming me, hitting himself with things) whenever i would beg him to get help. he used his illnesses to excuse his abuse and mistreatment of me and has continued to use them long after we broke up to tell people that i was the one who had abused him, and that i had done many of the things he had done to me.
this isn’t all of it. this isn’t anywhere near all of what he did to me during the 13-15 (my memory is hazy on just how long i knew him) years we knew each other, it’s just what i can remember right now. i know there’s a lot more but there’s a lot that i **can’t** remember. i know he said horrible things to me when we broke up but i can’t remember any of them, and
from an outsider’s point of view, he composes himself very well. he is friendly, he is charming, and he knows what to do to make people like him. he is popular and always has been. it’s what sucked me in. if anybody else is having experiences like this with people who go from prinx charming to the exact opposite of that, just know that it’s real, you’re not faking it, they are hurting you, it’s okay to leave.
