Keywords: abuse, trauma, co-dependency, eating disorder, calling-out.
This is a story about the responses I received to an Instagram post I shared, where I explained my factual experiences of receiving dozens of abusive and harassing emails from a controlling and manipulative jealous partner, despite my efforts to explain and reason with him why he was wrong, and despite my efforts to set my boundary by telling him to stop writing to me. It’s about the support I received from all but one friend, and how that single lack of support can negate all of the supportive messages, and how we find our ground and centre of our Self as separate from the power this one friend yields.
[Hint: You cannot reason with someone who is being abusive; I blocked this person entirely from my life and from all forms of communication, and I encourage you to do the same if you are experiencing abuse from an intimate partner. See the bottom of this post for more information on what abuse and violence consists of.]
All names changed.
TLDR: What happens when we encounter unsupportive friends during a moment of transformative healing and growth? What if we have co-dependency with a friend? We put ourselves first, work through self-hate, toward self-love, so we can find our centre again and be grounded through it all.
Seeking Parental Fulfillment In Friends (do not do)
Of course it had to be this one friend among two dozen friends. One friend did not support me, out of 20+ friends who did. I recall Christine’s comment, her kindness and warmth in reaching out and offering love. I recall Caren’s comment of love and her belief in me, Sarah’s, Ashley’s, everyone’s… but this one friend’s lack of support made all of the loving messages disappear and incited in me a sense of fear, panic, despair, betrayal, and anger. Let’s call her Belladonna, mainly to protect her real name but also because she is beautiful, fascinating, exotic, and poisonous to me. Belladonna: the one friend whose support and friendship is the most complicated for me, and whose love I long for problematically.
My therapist tells me that this friend is not someone who I should be associating with right now, because she did not “respect the perspectives [I] have on many important life and relationship issues” and because I should “give [my]self permission to avoid engaging any human being who does not treat [me] with the love and respect [I] so richly deserve.” My eventual serenity and healing truly came from his wise words and masculine guidance, which I’ve always lacked and sought.
Recognizing Co-dependency
Belladonna draws me in. I seek her acceptance, her love. She guides the community and they follow her. For a while I was her closest friend, or so I thought. I am aware that all of my co-dependency patterns and unhealthy desires for enmeshment pull me toward her, but being close with her only causes me pain and suffering because of my desire to connect with her and because of her way of handling my experience by casting doubt upon it. She told me to remove the Instagram post that called him out, saying that this was not abuse. I deleted the post but my heart sank at her not believing me.
I can’t say that Belladonna’s opinion wasn’t somewhat correct; having the post up did cause my abuser a lot of pain, as I found out because he emailed me yet again and called me a liar in all CAPs as he continued to act out intimate partner violence as characterized by emotional abuse, verbal abuse, intimidation and harassment, and so on. On the one hand I didn’t care that it caused him pain; he had caused me incredible pain and he didn’t care or even see it, I was invisible to him. But on the other hand, all of my study and faith in my spiritual journey and beliefs spoke to me quietly, deep down beneath all of the chaos and noise: you do not want to cause anyone harm. I could feel the tremors of fear and anger and a sense of unsure righteousness, so I knew it was wrong in my heart for me (maybe for others it is the right thing to do, so for the sake of clarity I am always only speaking about myself).
This entire experience has taught me to trust in our inherent wisdom, trust in our inner knowing, because I knew a while ago that this was not the right man for me. Belladonna and her partner John spent weeks or months convincing me that this was the right man for me, and that I shouldn’t trust myself because I was so recently out from a three-year abusive relationship. She told me to soften and to be open to love, that I was in a trauma response and shouldn’t listen to any signals my body or mind give me because they’re off. I fought and fought and fought against that but eventually caved in through her (and her partner’s) repeated push to be with this man. I also caved because he started crying when he believed that I wasn’t going to pursue a relationship, and then I felt guilty. Part of me know then that he might be manipulative, and that my friends didn’t have my best interests at heart. Part of me wanted to get laid, honestly. Trust your inner wisdom.
I had spent several weeks in true grief mode, holed up in my apartment grieving all of the hurt and abuse that I had received over the past years with my ex-partner Alex (all names changed), in the darkest despair of shame, guilt, and self-loathing. One of the triggers that put me there was something that Belladonna said about how eating shitty food and not taking care of ourselves are “low vibration” energies. I collapsed in shame and self-loathing further, and I stayed there deeply for almost two weeks, where I couldn’t show my face. I didn’t return any of Belladonna’s calls or texts until she stopped trying to reach me. I curled up in bed, crying in agony, as if I had been stabbed in key places (right hip, stomach, right ribs, heart, heart, heart, heart), and the pain was truly excruciating. This was:
- emotional processing of abuse and trauma that I had only thought I had processed (a 3 year relationship that ended less than a year ago)
- problematic food relationship and associated narratives
- PMDD
- perfect timing of a dasha period correlating with my natal chart’s angles and drishtis
- a desire for more
- a longing for change
- despair and existential loneliness
Through this I also distanced myself from everyone, including this man I had been seeing, let’s call him Mark. But not for long. I let him in long before I returned to society, partly out of a small sense of obligation and fear of upsetting the male, but also out of a rather beautiful idea that he was a safe person for me to be myself with and he would understand. Of course, I couldn’t have been any more wrong than I was. Not only did he not understand, but he hid it; eventually he mumbled that he didn’t believe that PMS “and those kinds of things” are even real, but later denied saying that.
Reclaiming the self
Anyway, now a few days ago after receiving his 20+ emails of abuse, and experiencing the pain of my friend’s response, I am looking back on this and wondering: how am I here, and how can I come back to my self despite going through so much alienation and disappointed expectations in those closest to me? I abandoned myself by not trusting my instincts, so truly everyone had abandoned and abused me. Let me say this in big font:
There is nothing you can do to prevent not being the right person for someone. You can’t pretend to be right for them, by doing so you will break yourself and will be found out eventually. So all you can do is to be yourself, which means to know and love yourself. That is the practice.
I have no choice, this is the only self I have, and I can’t “come back” to any other self. On one hand then, that makes it much easier. And in a way that’s always the case; we just have to keep pushing on and working with what we’re going through because we’re always with ourselves, no matter what.
So I suffered, and I acknowledged it to myself. “I know baby, I feel your suffering, I know baby, I know you’re hurting really bad, I know, I’m here baby” I said to myself through sobs, envisioning all of the episodes of suffering, neglect, and abuse in my life from a toddler to now. I held myself. I had never talked to myself like that before, never called myself baby. I have to tell you, it really helped. I felt like there was two of me, but we were the same, and the one that was hurting felt validated and seen and cared for, and the one that was seeing was caring and attentive and holding space and mothering, understanding.
Expectations
I voiced my disagreement with Belladonna about what constitutes abuse and my empowerment in writing publicly about Mark, but she stuck firm to her opinion and there didn’t seem to be any argument about the power dynamic: she is telling me what is happening.
So this one person makes me feel unsupported, out of 20+ friends who wrote very supportive messages to me, and I listen to her. But I noticed that there was a voice inside me that said that I didn’t have to tell her everything I was thinking or feeling, that I can retain part of that for myself, and the part I retained was the part that fundamentally disagreed with her and still does. This must mean that enmeshment will not be possible, but neither will honesty. So what kind of friendship is that?
Which leads me to a pretty pivotal question: what does each person expect of the other and what do they presume the other person is thinking and needing? Everyone is different, sure, but in close friendships, there are presumptions and expectations. My unspoken expectation was that she honestly and truly wanted to be my close friend because of how much time we spent together, that seemed clearly voluntary for her and she seemed to enjoy my company and value our conversations. In time I came to believe that this was not true, or rather that it was true for a while but not anymore. She had moved on. Her belief is that we should not trust anyone (think Mulder from the X Files), and I couldn’t agree more. By not trusting in anyone, we aren’t placing any expectations on their behaviours and actions, thereby respecting their autonomy and freedom to make choices that are best for their paths, which we can’t presume to know.
But then what good do friendships serve, if we are always retaining a piece of ourselves? It’s difficult to see the counter arguments against enmeshment. I see the divine in people and want to complete become that, but I acknowledge that a large portion of that comes from an emptiness within me that I think can be filled by another person.
The Question of Fate
It’s hard sometimes not to crumble under the burden of the question of fate. Am I fated to only be paired with partners who are abusive? To only be paired with men who lock me in basements, throw things at me, call me names, stalk me, control and possess me, warp my mind, assault me physically, sexually, and verbally, convince me of their delusions, limit me? Perhaps. I don’t presume to know. But this idea further collapsed me: fuck the gods, fuck time, everything that is saying that all of this has to happen and I have to suffer. Fuck my birth. For giving me this birth chart that has fated me this way.
But if I am fated to experience this from my male partners, or even regardless to be honest, I ask myself: what is the purpose of this pattern? Surely I can learn something from this without necessarily saying it’s all because of my mummy and daddy issues (though in truth, it really is because of the mirroring I received from age 1+). Yes, it is indicating that there is an issue of my self-love that I have to deal with honestly so that I may no longer be a victim to the painful themes in my life that are recurring over and over again. It can be a chance to look at expectations of others and mistrust of intuition, to come to a place of understanding and empowerment, which will help to break the pattern. So when a) a friend doesn’t support you and b) you have a desire to enmesh with this friend, arriving at a place of self-love is the ultimate task before this relationship turns into yet another embodiment of this abuse dynamic. The power is in me, I can give it away again if I am not careful. To to find the ground of self-love even in this less obvious power dynamic of problematic friendship is the key to recentering and recovery.
There is also a spiritual purpose of this suffering, to let it all go and surrender to the power of the unknown, the power of change, the power of dying-to-be-reborn.
Self-Care and Polyvagal Theory
I am not taking care of myself very well, and haven’t for a few years. I used to drink too much and do drugs. I eat junk food as my primary source of nutrients. I stay up too late and wake up early. If I am honest, and that’s the purpose of this blog, I have to admit that I am expecting my partners to fulfil the role of caretaker, because I either cannot or don’t want to. I am seeking more in my friendships and intimate relationships than is probably healthy, because I expect that they will take care of me and do all of the work that I can’t do or won’t do or am unable to do.
The idea of cooking or grocery shopping makes me collapse. I so much as look at a vegetable and I collapse into a state of helplessness, despair, and self-judgement. This is what happens when you live with trauma. Proponents of the Polyvagal theory developed by Stephen Porges refer to this collapsed state as Emotional Shutdown. This is why self-care, which presupposes self-love, is so incredibly hard for many people, or anyway it is for me. I’ll explain further. It’s all connected, I swear.
After a decade of receiving subtle and overt messages of my worthlessness from my intimate partners, my core belief about myself is that I am useless, ugly, and bad. That extends to the kitchen because of a few years of explicitly being told by an otherwise nice but certainly pseudo-gourmet partner, that my cooking is inedible and that I am almost always chopping/cooking/cleaning/etc incorrectly. Most of my loved ones have ridiculed me for my sweet tooth ever since I was a child. Moreover, my absent parents didn’t teach me or demonstrate for me how to care for myself, and my mother repeatedly shamed herself for being a bad cook. Finally, with so many health problems and competing nutritional instructions, every choice seems like a bad choice. So walking into a grocery store and looking at a carrot brings me to this state of collapse, of emotional shutdown; the carrot reminds me of my uselessness,
Self-care presupposes self-love. If I don’t love myself why should I take care of myself? So I don’t care for myself because I hate myself. I was laying in bed a few months ago, all day long, all night long, curled up and sobbing as I felt the sharp agonizing pain of hatred. I felt it in my bones, mainly in my right ribs. In my spine. Below my heart. In my pelvis and hips. In my shoulders and eyes. My body caved inward, and actually had been that way for at least a year after my partial lung collapse, when every muscle in my torso clenched tight and hard as it fought for its life against the invasion in my body (catamenial pneumothorax caused by endometrial blood that went upward).
The body does what you tell it. What you tell it comes from our perceptions of the world and your experiences of it. A simple carrot, in less than a blink of an eye, becomes hundreds of voices, including your own, telling you how worthless and stupid you are. So your body feels that, and caves in more. The shoulders hunch more. The symbolic sword dives further into this bleeding heart. The blood thins more. Slowly, you just… disappear. Into the nothingness that you feel you are.
When we attach ourselves to a friend and that friend doesn’t support us in the time of need, we hope that we have seen enough lessons in our recurring patterns of abuse that we can develop the strength to not allow ourselves to believe in any of the messages being received.
Types of Domestic Violence and Abuse
As a reminder, domestic violence is a pattern of behaviours that intimidate, manipulate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, shame, injure, or wound someone; can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological actions or threats of actions used by one person to gain or maintain power and control over another or others.
Abuse includes harassment, continuing to communicate despite requests not to, toxic jealousy, stalking, “always” and “never” statements, gaslighting, belittling, invalidating, intimidation, objectification, cruelty to animals, false accusations like being accused of cheating, shaming, blaming, name-calling like “liar”, as well as spiritual abuse like using religion or spirituality as a form of control or manipulation.
As a reminder, violence is not limited to physical violence. Violence is defined to include to psychological harm, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, stalking and aggression, among many other actions and behaviours. Defining outcomes solely in terms of physical violence thus limits the understanding of its full impact on individuals, communities and society at large.
- World Health Organization, “Violence, A Global Public Health Problem“
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “What is Intimate Partner Violence
- Community Against Violence, “Different Types of Violence“
- Out of the Fog, “Forms of Emotional Abuse” [an excellent resource]
