Emotional manipulation, and learning to trust your own judgement once again.
Hi, this is my first post and I've read over the guidelines but forgive me if I break any etiquette or rules.
I broke up with my 2 year girlfriend last November. Since then, my life has been exceptionally turbulent, and I recently discovered I suffer from Anxiety and Depression, which I started treatment for about a week ago. Ill try to keep this as short as I can while still addressing everything, so I appreciate anyone with the patience to read this. My ex's name was Ozlem, or Oz for short. Oz was intelligent, strong, and fierce. She was also a control freak, ridiculously argumentative, and had deep seated anger issues she often took out on me. I was a strong person so I could always handle it, until other things in my life spun out of control and things got so unbearable between us we decided to call it a day. Since then I've had a lot of time to reflect on everything that happened, and I struggle with realising that I put up with way too much, and allowed her to get away with a lot more than I should have.
She would always take her anger out on me, either by saying horrible things, shouting for no reason, or when she was really mad, punching and kicking me. I've been in plenty of fights in my time, so the strikes never hurt physically. For most of our relationship, I was fine with her venting on me in that way. My hero complex must have been at play, because I knew how dependant she was on me and was almost happy to test my patience with her. I realise now that the way I handled the situation was a mistake. Whether it hurts or not isn't an issue, because hitting someone you're supposed to love just is just wrong. Almost a year later, i've realised that I couldn't see the things she was doing, because I was blinded by love. She ostracized me from a wonderful group of friends, that I neglected due to her own lack of social confidence and jealousy (I was always more socially confident than her, and she was extremely jealous of that). She would be impatient with my shortcomings of character (my forgetfulness, carelessness, my sense of humour) and then become extremely distressed and angry when I afforded her the same impatience, claiming that I 'needed to understand' why she was behaving in whatever particular way she was at the time.
And I did understand, I've always been competent at taking a balanced view on things, but we argued for so long and she was so unwavering in her own argument that I buried my better judgement and believed her, just for peace. What bothers me the most is that she most likely knew exactly what she was doing, and how I would react. Would this be considered emotional manipulation? That she exploited my hatred of conflict just to keep me in check and her in control? My heart, which I distrusted for so long, says yes. Everything that I have come to terms with about the relationship hurts like hell, but the feelings come from an honest place, and I'm tired of uncertainty. I'm just glad now that we're over. She lives in London and I in Glasgow so there isn't much chance of an accidental meeting.
I wanted to post here so that I could hear other people's experiences of situations like this, and how they dealt with them. As well as any and all opinions about it. Peace and love!