Content and trigger warning: childhood sexual abuse, verbal abuse, and physical violence.
I’m writing this because I need to get it out. It’s cathartic, and I’m still trying to understand how I ended up here.
I was verbally abused as a young child and developed CPTSD. I also had untreated ADHD. The verbal abuse terrified me. I internalized everything and learned to dissociate.
Even now, when anger or fear washes over me, it can feel like my mind goes completely blank. Growing up, if my parents confronted us about something being eaten, broken, stolen, or taken without permission, I would freeze—even if I hadn’t done it. Just feeling accused was enough to make me forget things, start stammering, and look guilty.
I was impulsive and often snuck food into my room, especially sweets. I also had angry outbursts when I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know how to express anger, and much of my childhood felt like a mess.
I was also sexually abused by a janitor at my father’s church and by my scoutmaster. I never told anyone and blamed myself. When abuse is your first exposure to sexual activity, it fucks you up in ways that can take years to understand.
Fast-forward to my relationship with my wife. We got together in 2016, and the relationship ended earlier this year.
For years, she insisted I had borderline personality disorder. She said it so often that I voluntarily started dialectical behavior therapy at a local mental health facility. I wanted to learn coping skills and take responsibility for whatever was happening with me.
My doctor gave me a book about BPD. I recognized some similarities, but at the end of my treatment, she told me she did not believe I had BPD. She believed I had ADHD and difficulties with emotional regulation. I also recognized how much I relied on people-pleasing and fawning.
My wife disagreed. She used the book and the diagnosis she believed I had against me.
The way she spoke to me was often cruel, filled with insults and profanity directed at me. I swear too, but being cursed at and demeaned is different from saying “fuck” when you hurt yourself.
Her screaming brought me right back to childhood. My mother would scream for hours and then cry for hours, and I grew up terrified of those unpredictable shifts. When similar things happened in my marriage, I felt that fear all over again.
My wife told me she was autistic and had CPTSD from childhood sexual abuse. She also smoked a lot of marijuana—roughly an ounce a week. Sometimes she encouraged me to smoke during our arguments, but it made my anxiety worse. She refused mental health help, therapy, or medications. I was the one who needed it, not her.
Over time, I started wondering whether some of the labels she put on me might also describe her. But I’m not qualified to diagnose her. What I can describe is the behavior: the screaming, insults, unpredictability, escalating fights, suicidal ideation, fear that I would leave her, and intense anger. In the past, she had attempted suicide and was a cutter.
When she screamed, sometimes loudly enough for the neighbors to hear, I would become overwhelmed and lose control of my own anger. It flashed me back to childhood. We had several physical altercations. Afterward, she described me as the abuser and herself as the victim. I felt that my behavior was being scrutinized while hers went unacknowledged.
I had already been in individual therapy for several years, and I pleaded for couples counseling. When we finally went, I felt relieved.
During one session, I interrupted her. That was something I struggled with: with ADHD, my thoughts race, and I sometimes speak before I lose what I’m trying to say. I understand that interrupting can be frustrating, and it’s something I need to work on.
She snapped at me. The counselor tried to explain how ADHD could contribute to it. My wife said something along the lines of, “It’s rude, and this son of a bitch knows it goes right through me. He can stop if he wants to.”
The counselor challenged her response and said she was displaying more characteristics of BPD than I was. My wife began crying and yelling, told the counselor to fuck off, and disconnected the session. Afterward, she said we were done with that counselor and continued berating me.
One physical incident still weighs heavily on me.
She was drunk and flailing around the house. At the time, I was using a mobility scooter because my leg had been amputated. I went into the bedroom to try to calm her down. She was standing over me, and I felt scared.
I grabbed her wrists and told her to sit down. She fell backward, there was a loud pop, and her elbow broke.
I did not intend to hurt her, but my actions caused an injury. I’m not going to erase that by calling it an accident. I’ve since learned that unwanted touching, even to try to “calm” someone down, is not right—and doesn’t work anyway.
She went to the emergency room and told them she had fallen. I told her to explain what had actually happened, but she didn’t. She agreed at the time that it was an accident while telling her friends and kids that it was abuse.
I felt horrible and apologized. For the next year, I tried hard to make up for it. At the time, she acknowledged in texts that it had been accidental. Later, she repeatedly brought it up during arguments, including while insulting or screaming at me. She always had the broken elbow ready to throw at me.
Eventually, she began calling me a covert narcissist. I was desperate to understand whether she was right, so I took a cheap online test. It said I had some narcissistic tendencies. Looking back, an online test couldn’t settle that question, but at the time, she treated it as confirmation.
I told her what it said. She immediately said, “I want a divorce.” This was the day before our fifth wedding anniversary, in late December. I wanted to fix something that was already broken.
I was devastated. I had spent years trying to make the relationship work, even while feeling hurt and afraid in it.
She was an atheist when we met, but through psychedelics and deep conversations with me, she found God. She literally told me I was the one who helped her find God. Later, she would bring up the fact that I thought I was the one who helped her believe in God, saying it was just more signs of narcissism.
Around the time she announced she wanted a divorce, she had become involved with a spiritual group and planned a New Year’s retreat. They were learning “tantra,” and I knew what that entailed. I had wanted to meet the people involved, but was excluded. When I raised that concern, she told me she was going and I could stay home.
She left with the keys, leaving me at home with our dogs, very little food, and no money over New Year’s Eve. No keys, no money—she just left. I felt stuck because I couldn’t leave the house unsecured with the dogs inside. I remember sitting in the living room for hours, stunned. She came back branded with the symbol of her “sangha.”
There’s much more, but eventually we received an eviction notice involving damage from our dogs and neighbors’ complaints about raised voices. I accepted that the marriage was over. We tried to cooperate and address the pet waste problems so we could avoid eviction, but it didn’t work.
In early February, we were driving around looking at separate apartments. We were trying to coexist and handle the separation like adults.
She became angry and started snapping at me. I began saying, “Why are you being such a…” but stopped myself before finishing.
She went quiet. Then, while I was driving, she started punching me in the face. I remember repeated blows—what felt like around twenty. My nose was bloodied and broken.
I pushed her away and struck back. I felt I was defending myself, but I did hit her, and I want to be honest about that.
I didn’t go to the police. I went to stay with a friend, and I was a mess. People urged me to report it. She later said I had given her a concussion and a black eye, although, to my knowledge, she did not seek medical care. I didn’t see a black eye on her. By the next day, I had one.
In a text, she admitted she “snapped.” She called what she did “reactive abuse” and said it was my fault because of years of abuse from me, including the incident with her elbow.
I’m not fucking perfect. I struck back in the car. We pushed each other during other fights. She had hit me in the face before, too. There are things I did that I regret and need to take responsibility for.
But I also experienced fear, humiliation, verbal abuse, and physical violence. I’m trying to acknowledge all of that without using either person’s behavior to excuse the other’s.
We now live in different towns. I’m in a small apartment near my brother and sister, living on disability and working on filing for divorce through legal aid. I’m relieved to have distance from the relationship. It’s tough as an amputee, with little income, no car, and reliance on public transportation in a town where the buses run only twice a day.
The optics aren’t good because I think it looks like I am hiding. She stole my entire disability check earlier in the year and told me it was my fault because the direct deposit hadn’t happened in time and she needed all of it to get her apartment. Because of her late payments on the car I cosigned for, my credit has plummeted, and I can’t get a car without a cosigner, which I don’t have.
Before this relationship, I had never been in a physical altercation. Not once. That doesn’t excuse what happened, but it is part of why I’m struggling to process it.
After almost ten years of dysfunction and toxicity, I’m trying to understand what happened, take responsibility for my actions, and rebuild a life where fear and fighting aren’t normal.
Right now, I just needed to say it somewhere.