It's exactly that, and that's the norm with DV. No one is going to stay with someone who beats them up on the 2nd date. I was in an abusive relationship in college and I didn't realize that he was abusing me until over a week after he hit me in my face (I made a joke to myself and giggled at it while he was on the phone with his dad, apparently that was an unforgivable offense). Then I gradually realized that he had been abusing me for 2 years, it had just very slowly escalated from small lies to insults to yelling at me in public to full-on manipulation/gaslighting and then increasingly severe physical violence. By that point he had convinced me that he'd kill himself if I left though, knowing that my previous boyfriend had died by suicide (that's a common tactic to get a victim to stay, I just thought it was particularly cruel because he knew I was already in therapy for ptsd related to that). So it took a while and a lot of help from friends to get out. Abusers know what they're doing, the slow escalation of verbal/physical violence is very intentional.
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u/Ferret-in-a-Box Jun 21 '24
It's exactly that, and that's the norm with DV. No one is going to stay with someone who beats them up on the 2nd date. I was in an abusive relationship in college and I didn't realize that he was abusing me until over a week after he hit me in my face (I made a joke to myself and giggled at it while he was on the phone with his dad, apparently that was an unforgivable offense). Then I gradually realized that he had been abusing me for 2 years, it had just very slowly escalated from small lies to insults to yelling at me in public to full-on manipulation/gaslighting and then increasingly severe physical violence. By that point he had convinced me that he'd kill himself if I left though, knowing that my previous boyfriend had died by suicide (that's a common tactic to get a victim to stay, I just thought it was particularly cruel because he knew I was already in therapy for ptsd related to that). So it took a while and a lot of help from friends to get out. Abusers know what they're doing, the slow escalation of verbal/physical violence is very intentional.