Not Me Too Pt 5 ( I guess)- I Feel It All. I Feel It All

I remember being in my room at 13 and hearing this song "I Feel It All" appear on the rotating queue of Music Choice Alternative station songs. Fiest wrote this song about leaving a relationship that she previously fought to maintain (I didn't rest, I didn't stop). And not because she feels numb or because she just doesn't care anymore. She"feels it all"...she loves the one she's leaving as much now as she ever did "I love you more".

Lyrically it's one of her best and it has been playing on my mind often. One thing my therapist told me about CPTSD is that sometimes it's not just places or songs or foods, sometimes time itself is a trigger. For me, this is the time when it all started, 6 weeks into official partnership after a year of dating, this is when it began. And my body is reminding me. I feel it all. I wish I could've done what Fiest talks about in this song. This is undoubtedly a weekend I should've walked away.

It was this time two years ago, where he told me "I didn't know myself" after having ignored me at a zoom happy hour. I cringe thinking how he'd ignored me that entire time and then reached for my body that night only to tell me 24 hours later that I didn't know I knew myself. And one year ago, he had treated me so poorly that I can't retype the story for fear of causing my own spiral or panic attack, so I'll copy and paste the section from Not Me Too Part 1.

1/28

1. I go to the improv class he wants me to go to for his birthday, a situation I avoided previously out of fear of embarrassment. Imagine you’re me - you’re nervous about embarrassing yourself in front of everyone and your partner. After class ends, you’re waxing poetic about how it’s good to just go out there and go for it, knowing you didn’t quite sparkle that day. And unprompted, without constructive criticism, your partner tells you, you were mediocre. That is the conversation (criticism to destroy self-esteem).

2. Later that night, you take them to the bar. You’re with a few strangers, and low and behold the person closest to you basically treats you like a stranger too. You buy them drinks, have the bar play them a song. But they stop interacting with you. You flashback to a Christmas party a few weeks before where he spent the entire night talking to the girl beside him, back to the Happy Hour. But even on his birthday, even though you were a girlfriend now, it was happening again. The two people you are with, not even the one in your partner’s class, have any clue you’re even together.

3. 1/29 Next night, you plan this great dinner. You’re a little late but you have a reservation and so you’re excited to share this great meal with the other person. You know they’re health-conscious and can feel good about the food here. And then while you’re not paying attention, a group of people cut in front of you and your person snaps at you, hurling the accusation that you’re not assertive once again, while they do nothing to address the situation. You joke about how you’ll fight those people. They shut you down flatly declaring – "No you won’t". (belittling, criticism to destroy self-esteem, aggression, humiliation). You're just not assertive. And then you sit down to eat the $300 dinner het lets you pay for.

4. 1/29 You go back home trying not to be deflated from the events and as you’re sleeping, the ceiling begins to leak. You contain the leak with the recycling bin and sit down as the other person continues to fortify the leak. You remain calm as you’re not one to panic in crisis, but once again are jabbed at for remaining seated or not asserting enough dominance against the water flowing from the ceiling. (aggression, belittling) When I write it, it feels very misogynistic, like a man punching down at a woman and accusing her of being weak.

5. 1/30 And to top it all off, the next day, after a weekend of being kicked in the teeth, your partner , after a month and change of being official, confesses that what you thought was a perfectly platonic dinner between him and a friend had led to a sudden realization that they were “romantically curious” about the friend. A poorly timed admission, as I had to leave to take my friend to the hospital following a brain injury. I sat that night in the hospital scrambling to keep her symptoms straight and advocate to her doctor, watching her brain function rapidly decline, not knowing whether my friend would live or die that night, all while having to think about how my boyfriend discovered for feelings for a friend while we were together, wondering what else was happening behind my back.

This was all in the span of three days. Imagine a month.

I think with space, I've been able to reflect on myself and I can see how I navigated this. I think the problem-solver in me sees every problem as a thing to be addressed and solved but not walked away from. I think "Ok this thing happened. How do I solve it? How do I get back on track? How do we move forward ?" But it didn't occur to me that another solution to this problem, not for us, but for me, would've been to leave. I shouldn't have advocated for better treatment, to be treated with decency and humanity. I should've left.

Abuse as defined by Wesbter's Dictionary is treating (a person or an animal) with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly. Emotional abuse involves "nonphysical behavior that belittles another person and can include insults, put downs, verbal threats or other tactics that make the victim feel threatened, inferior, ashamed or degraded". This one weekend was enough to meet the bar. But emotional abuse is fuzzy; definitions and standards are evasive. As I've seen so many times in group, many people who've endured narcissistic abuse especially will say that we wished our partners had hit us so we'd at least have some clear external indicator of the harm they were doing. (Nitehawk did hit me once, at my behest and sometimes I wonder if he'd liked it) Because the line is easier to draw with physical abuse. That's why many of us gaslight ourselves or get stuck in endless loops of cognitive dissonance and confusion ( see trauma bond and cycle of abuse) But If he punched you on Thursday, and threw you a party on Friday, does it make Thursday's punch not abuse? No, of course not. But what it does do, is make it easier to minimize the punch, liken it to a momentary blip on the radar instead of the recurring alarm. If it's small, you can address it, talk about it and move forward. And that's what kept happening.

But emotional abuse is a physical abuse. The impact and trauma can be just as detrimental to your brain as physical abuse. Emotional abuse is embedded in the physical abuse.. Long term narcissistic abuse causes brain damage. It can lead to huge spikes cortisol which can enlarge the amygdala, which houses primitive emotions such as fear, grief, guilt, envy, and shame. It also can damage and reduce the function of the hippocampus, which is associated with learning and memory. Moreover, in the case of physical abuse, people are often left dealing with the psychological impact, long after bones have healed and bruises have faded. While physical abuse creates an immediate threat to one's life, it is the psychological damage, that is the slow killer - as shown by rates of severe anxiety, panic disorders, and depression, which is a contributor in more than 50% of suicides. And according to a study by the University of TN, this emotional abuse can be most detrimental women. This study demonstrated that emotional abuse most strongly associated with suicidal ideation among women. Personally, I will say that the man who puts his hands on you because he thinks that you are weaker and lower than him is not that much worse than the man who will say that freely to your face. At core they are both men who feel free to take out their transgressions and anger in ways that harmful to their partners.

To be honest, I still gaslight myself daily about what happened. Most times I'm in a state of disbelief thinking this must've been a dream or must be an exaggeration of my own mind. There were reasons to stay, good, mostly decent moments, things I liked about our time together, hope of a real future together. And so maybe the bad things, weren't as horrible and cruel as they were. I know that line of thinking comes from my own resistance to wanting to be labeled as a victim of abuse. I, of all people, should be able to know better, to see better. Sometimes I swap out abusive relationship, for the term relationship with an abusive element or say "sometimes/often he was bad to me", maybe out of fairness to the whole thing. It's not completely bad, right? But it doesn't have to be and most times, it isn't and that's what keeps us stuck in cycles of any form of abuse. I'm hesitant to take accountability for not recognizing the emotional abuse. I'm hesitant to say this person abused me at all when I cared for them so deeply. I winced when my therapists said it, when friends said it, when strangers in support group said it, and worst of all when my mother said it. And so, I try to minimize it all, find a new word that feels small enough for my brain can process. But that's the bad habit that kept me unable to recognize it in the first place.

I've got to stand in that, unfavorable ugly truth and reaffirm that many things can be true at once. He can be "nice" sometimes, funny usually, but sometimes he is cruel and his behavior is emotionally abusive. If he's nice to you the next day, it's still abuse. If he cuddles with you after, it's still abuse. If he goes with you to the concerts, but he's cold and snaps at you at them, it's still abuse. His ability to sit beside you or touch your body, does not cancel out what are the regular bouts of cruelty and mistreatment he shows. If he can bring you to meet his family and then be intimate with you and dump you ten minutes later, wait a 1.5 years to tell you for the first time "I don't love you", while you lie naked in his bed, you can't ignore it anymore. The cruelty is innate. And while you learned to lightly walk on eggshells, push but not too hard, even found some comfort in a situation designed to put you on constant alert and discomfort, your body has already internalized your fear of being harmed. You are uncharacteristically tentative. You stumble and mix up words only around this person. You fall asleep when you should be awake. You awake in the middle of the night multiple times only when you sleep next to him. Your body is telling you this person is hurting you. It's subtle, but it's there. But there's still good, things are fine. But they are not, not totally.

It's confusing as the frequency of the good/ or mostly neutral often outnumbers the frequency of the bad, abusive, cruel, and painful. But in reality, the frequency is only just a little bit higher. The volume of the cruelty is greater than the frequency of the good. And here in between those seams, is where the abuse gets lost in the mind. It becomes easy to minimize and get over little things. But when you dig through the cushions, dig into the seams and collect what's been lost there, you find what is undoubtedly, abusive behavior. The magnitude, the heftiness of the mistreatment is unbelievable, like a heavy boulder ever-present. How could you have endured so much mistreatment? How could this person have done so much harm? It can't be true, but it is.

And boom, the mind breaks. With one of his last gestures of cruelty, the one that broke my relationship with my body being the heaviest, my mind could not process it all. Enter CPTSD. Your mind is unable to process the magnitude of the trauma and so the depression, dissociation, the emotional numbness, the daily panic attacks, all come in to safeguard you as your body still thinks you're in danger. And after so much deception, manipulation, bullying, disrespect, my brain just packed it up and said we've had enough. I can see why. People who grow up in abusive households are 6x more likely to end up in abusive relationships. As someone who grew up in a household where verbal physical and emotional abuse were staples of Haitian childrearing, I learned to move through pain too quickly. I've learned to continually try to be the better or bigger person in order to reestablish some peace or contentment because that would keep me safe. And in doing so, I learned to manage difficult dysfunctional and abusive relationships and not leave them. When love and abuse come from the same source, we learn to contort ourselves into every configuration so that we can receive more love and less abuse. And all of this fails us in relationship, inevitably enforcing a dynamic where we will ultimately continue to be hurt.

I spent time reading to that person the subtitles of foreign movies, putting up movies on a projector in my bedroom, so that they could see movies, taking them to my favorite places, making them playlists, helping them get new jobs, pushing them to do things that are good for them, relationship check-ins and deep questions to help them tackle their emotional issues. I did all of this because it's who I am and perhaps mistakenly thought pure love and kindness could never be met with cruelty and deception. This frankly is a delusion for empathetic people, women in particular. Indigo De Souza talks about it in her song "You can be Mean" . In talking about her inspiration for the source she recounts how her last partner was "literally a demon, and I knew that while I was with him, but I still had some idea that maybe he wouldn’t be a demon if I gave him love and affection and kind of tried to pull him out of whatever made him that way. I realized that there was nothing I could do for him." And that's really the rub of it. Some people are going to harm no matter what. You will be stuck in that cycle until you have the courage to free yourself from it . It took too long to understand this. Who I was or what I did could never be important to someone who, could continue to harm me without remorse and cared little for me. He knew virtually nothing about me, didn't ask me questions about myself, who wouldn't make regular conversation with me, or hold my hand in the daytime, who'd scowl at me everywhere for nothing. Someone who saw me after almost two years as nothing more than "a guest at his sisters house". Barely human, barely anything. You don't cookies for loving troubled people. And you can not pretzel yourself in the hope that they can provide you with healthy love.

I've been trying my best to keep composure these past few weeks. I found myself sitting by the Manhattan Bridge (to be clear, not on the bridge , just closeby as its near my apartment) on the phone with my mother trying to breathe. My body has yet to forget what happened this time last year, wishing that this had been the end of the current of cruelty. I sometimes wonder what about me brought it out in him. Why behind closed doors this had happened to me, and not anyone else he'd known? He must've seen me as any easy target- age, gender etc It wouldn't have been the first older man to take advantage of young doting woman. In some ways his treatment of me helped solidify the closure. This person had done so much harm that it is not possible that they truly cared for me. That I know, both from the volume of mistreatment, from having him had sex with me and telling me he didn't love me immediately after, numerous lies of ommission/deceptions, and from his own diary admissions "I could be doing this with anybody" "I tolerated being with her and I think I knew it the whole time. I just didn't want to admit it". Therapy admissions : "Taking her to meet my family was an experiment ... isn't it all an experiment" "I didn't see her as my guest. I saw her as a guest at my sister's house" "I push her away so she didn't fall in love with me more". It's horrifically and abundantly clear now.

As much as he'd like to excuse and still victimize himself for his "lack of emotional intelligence /self-love", I can't imagine in the two months post separation that those things had changed. I also can recognize he had enough intelligence to not do this in front of anyone else. In his sister's house, he snapped at me in the pool, in the grocery store, and even in the shower. I could never stop him from harming me. But never once did he do this in front of her. He wouldn't have called me unassertive if his friends had joined the dinner I planned for him or told me he'd fuck his ex if we weren't together, which he did, if other people were around. He knew what he was doing and he knew it was wrong. But he did it anyways. I don't think you get to spend a decade garnering empathy and victimizing yourself for harming other people and feeling kindof bad about it later. Emotional intelligence was not required to know not to tell someone that they're unassertive, have no power, and are mediocre unprompted, especially someone who cares about you. Not needed to know not to make plans behind your partner's back with the ex girlfriend who you fooled around with while you were dating her. To have sex with her, fake an intimate moment, and turn around and tell her you don't love her 8 minutes later while she's still naked in your bed. Basic human decency and a modicum of empathy perhaps. But I know now sadly what it was. It's sad letting those realities sink in.

There's a certain pain here, that only girls of color will know. We fight our whole lives for visibility and credibility, to be seen, to be heard, to be understood, to have our lives matter. We live in a society that ranks us at the bottom and reminds constantly that we are less than , particularly of less value than our fairer skinned counterparts, who seem to be deserving of basic human decency and consideration. We fight be seen as human , and so recreating a dynamic where my basic humanity was an afterthought is doubly painful. To have been used for a white man's sexual gratification and emotional support, as his experiment, given a long history of all of these on black women by white men, is deeply dehumanizing. It hurts here in the racial place, knowing that someone societally held power and relationally and used it to consistently make me feel smaller and less than.

All of our actions are reflective of who we are, what we think is permissible, what we think we can get away with, what things we feel comfortable repeating. This goes for me too. I'm not perfect. I can be self-righteous and moralistic. But I don't think I could ever find it in me to hurt anyone really, not even him. I'm not kind of person and I've learned that the things that were done to me can only be done by a certain kind of person. And that kind of person is simply one that isn't compatible with me. At the end of the day, trauma no trauma, people make choices. I'm making choices not to hurt others because of how I feel on a daily basis. It's not that hard. Each day is a struggle and is more painful than I could imagine, but I'm making a choice to take deep breaths, show kindness, and protect the people I care about from anything broken within me that could cause them harm. And maybe that's real love, protecting people you love even from yourself. They don't need to feel it all.