My past with men has been a patchwork quilt of trauma, disappointment, and loss. It’s not as if I had one horrible boyfriend who treated me poorly and took advantage of me. I’ve never been in a healthy relationship before and I’m 6 months away from my 34th birthday. In terms of how I’ve been treated in the past, it runs the gamut of rape and sexual assault to using me for money to emotional abuse so constant I even now start to panic whenever someone raises their voice.
Starting Over Yet Again
But ever optimistic, something pushed me on to find a relationship that doesn’t leave me crying in my therapist’s office during an emergency appointment. Now I’ve found someone I adore, who isn’t a horrible person, and thoughts and feelings from past relationships are still plaguing me.
When you think about it, it’s not as if you can expect a great person to enter your life and poof! All of your former problems are gone and your PTSD dries up and disappears. That’s just not how the world works.
But I was definitely not expecting some of the side effects of being in these abusive relationships.
No One Ran This By Me First
You doubt yourself, you doubt him, you doubt it all
When you’ve been lied to and manipulated, you can get a bit paranoid. As much as you want to trust someone and trust your own instincts, it can be difficult when you’ve been shown that there are people out there who will use your trust to hurt you.
You’re easily impressed. By anything.
The first time my boyfriend made me dinner I wanted to scream it from the rooftop. He made me dinner and he wasn’t even in trouble for something! But a friend pointed out that being that impressed was setting an incredibly low bar for the relationship and for myself. It’s great that he made dinner. It’s wonderful, even! She reminded me that I can’t hang onto this for years, claiming despite everything that’s not working, he once made me dinner.
Others are a lot more skeptical of your choices in boyfriends
Just as I was accustomed to certain behaviors, other people are accustomed to them as well. Suddenly, it’s hard for anyone to get excited about this new person, even if they seem decent, because has everyone in the past just been a terrible person who was occasionally able to go out in public like a human being?
You feel strange when abuse doesn’t happen
You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Something completely innocuous will happen and you’ll think, this is it. This is the beginning of the end. And then it doesn’t happen. Nothing bad happens.
You keep up behaviors to minimize abuse
When you’ve been trained to be the mediator, the person who is never put out, no matter how ridiculous the behavior, you sometimes just keep doing what you’ve been doing like it’s still going on. Something inconvenient will happen and you’ll immediately start laughing it off like it doesn’t matter at all and when he apologizes to you, you don’t know how to react because, what is that exactly?
You realize you’re in your first relationship
Being in a healthy relationship after so much abuse can be weird. What you expect doesn’t happen, what you don’t expect does. Old behaviors don’t make sense anymore and your ideas about what a relationship is are changed. It’s like being in a relationship for the very first time.
The Good News & The Bad News
The good news is that you’ve found someone who isn’t a terrible person, and you’re starting to build a life with them. The bad news is that all the baggage from your past is still floating around and it can be incredibly difficult to deal with that underneath all of your new feelings of hopefulness and joy.
It’s important to talk with your partner about your previous relationships when they have informed your current behavior so much. If nothing else, just so they can learn your triggers and avoid them in the future. Also so you can warn them a little bit if you start acting strangely and they don’t understand why, that you could be reacting to something in your past, instead of what’s currently happening.
It can also be helpful to talk to a therapist. A professional can help you sort out the conflicting feelings and emotions you’re encountering regarding a new relationship and also help you make sure you picked someone who is treating you right. It’s a common idea that once you get out of one bad relationship you could never get back into another one. That idea is wrong.
Ukulove
Last night I went to ukulele class at the local writer’s center. My boyfriend had told me he was coming over to pick up some items he needed and when I came home, let left me a message on my whiteboard. It said “Ukulove You” with a drawing of a heart with a ukulele in front of it. Although no one knows where this ridiculous world will take us, I’m glad I’m going to figure it out with him.
All photos: @melnocetti
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