Judging from the sheer volume of comments, you’re not alone.

YESYESYES. And the abuser sees *himself* as the victim, and has a thousand horror stories of how he’s been mistreated and how that mistreatment has led to the “baggage” that occasionally comes out hurting you. And you internalize all that, and you take on the job of making excuses for him, and explaining away and…

I had a burner a while back that I used to come clean on Jez about my ex, although I still couched it in terms of how sick he was and how he couldn’t help himself. I had a lot of encouragement to stay strong, but one person said to me something like “You know what you have to do. Deep down, you know you can’t do this…

You’ve got this! You are already past the worst of it, and everything from this point on is downhill.

During the first few years of my marriage, I slowly acquired the realization that:

“No one asked me if I was being abused, either, because they all assumed that a person with my personality wouldn’t “put up with” abuse.” This. So much this. When I was in it I was being gaslit so badly I really couldn’t fully see it. It took a good ten months of back and forth before I finally managed to break all…

A lot of women here are talking about how they assumed it couldn’t happen to them because they were so strong. It’s just not as simple as “not putting up with it.” It’s vastly more complicated than sheer force of will. I think that’s what most people are getting at when they say it can “happen to anyone.”

You guys who I feel like I “know” through here are really helping. Never in a million years would I have suspected y’all of being in my position, but I guess that’s what the article’s all about, huh? It’s strangely so comforting.

I thought that if I was such a strong person, I would be able to fix him single handedly, and make him into the person he needed and seemed to want to be. I got myself into the mess, I figured, so I had to get myself out.

Your comment really resonates with me. It was humiliating to tell my loved ones and when I did, I worried I had ruined THEIR lives by making them worry and disappointing them (they so wanted their wacky daughter to settle down and here was some guy willing to take her off their hands harharhar) and asking for help…

“You’re being ridiculous.” - Yep, that’s the dialogue between us in a nutshell. Therapy is helpful, for sure, but he won’t go — sort of a “physician heal thyself” situation because he’s a shrink. Ha.

“Never even hit me.” I’m SO struggling with this. I wish he’d hit me — it would be so much less painful than emotional and sexual abuse.

Are you out now or are you trying to get out?

I’m not a comic, but I’m what most people would refer to as an assertive, strong woman with a fierce sense of humor. Part of the reason I stayed with my abuser for so long was that I bought into my own mythos as a “strong woman”, and believed that anything he did that was hurtful wasn’t abuse because I wasn’t capable…

There is nobody so charming as an abusive man. They have to cultivate those skills to entrap their partners.

Maybe they also tend to date male comedians, who everybody loves, which makes it easier to believe the problem is with you and not with them. My only emotionally/verbally abusive relationship was with a man who everybody thought was HYSTERICAL and the life of the party. No one could even believe when I described what…