the way i always felt about victims of domestic abuse who keep going back to their abusers was "i don't understand why she would but whatever that person has over her has to be something really powerful for her to keep doing this. maybe this is something you can't understand if you haven't been there" and i was very correct actually. what other people hearing domestic violence stories have that the abused person doesn't have is (1) the benefit of hindsight, and (2) no personal connection to the abuser. i'm currently intentionally calling the way she treated me "emotional abuse" despite not believing it in my heart of hearts because the people around me who have the benefit of an emotional distance from my situation and no personal entaglement in it aside from their love for me are telling me that this is what it was no matter how much i try to explain it away in her favor. it's so weird because people close to me who genuinely love me (in a non-destructive way) really hate her and want me to hate her too so i wouldn't go back to her, which is obviously the goal, but that's just not how i feel. they can evaluate the bad things she did from an abstract third party standpoint where whatever they feel doesn't really have a bearing on their own future or how their own love life is going forward. what i'm trying to say they're not emotionally invested, and they trust my version of the events as i've recounted them.
so i can't tell my close friends who know about the situation that i'm really struggling right now with the fact that i miss her!!!!! because it would make them almost mad at me for feeling any sort of positive feeling toward her because they need me to hate her so they don't have to find out later that i've gone back to her. but i do miss her? i still love her and the messages about her hurting herself make me ache in my heart despite KNOWING that they're just attempts at emotional manipulation. i can know full well what has happened, what she has done, and how it all affected me, and everything that has happened has fucked me up so bad that it's still hard for me to add all of that up together and go "this was wrong, she treated me badly, her behavior was abusive, i have to stay away from her". because while my friends trust my version of events, i don't, because she has continuously told me my understanding of the events is false, skewed, incomplete, that i underestimate my part in the events, that i remember wrong, and even if i was correct about the things that happened then i'd still need to give her a chance to make things right for whatever reason.
not only can i not trust myself the way my friends trust me, my friends don't have the context of the good and wonderful things we shared because from their view, she was all bad. from my view, the view of someone who desperately wants to see the best in people and believe people can change when given the chance, she was a person who showed me a lot of love and care and kindness and with whom i had many deep and interesting and thought provoking conversations and who kept encouraging me to talk more about my interests and ideas even when i thought they were silly and who shared my sense of humor and many hobbies and whom i had life changing sex with and who often made my everyday life a little easier by sharing the burden of chores and shopping and finances and cooking. she was someone who kept telling me she loved me, valued me, wanted to marry me, went above and beyond to engage with my family and my friends, supported me in my dreams and my goals, patiently listened to my rambles about the things that interested me in my studies and my professional life and always told me she wished she'd had me as a teacher as a child because of how warm and kind and dedicated and caring and intelligent i am.
so, you know, to my friends, she is the pinnacle of evil, the worst person the world has ever seen. and to me she is someone who gave me infinite hugs and warmth and tenderness and affection and intimacy at a second's notice whenever i needed it, plus, somehow, some way, someone who... i don't know, destroyed my things, insulted me, manipulated me, pressured and threatened and lowkey stalked me, borderline hate crimed me whenever she didn't get her way lol. the process of reconciling these two sides of a person and the process of building a complete picture of what actually objectively physically happened, who was in the wrong or right, and how exactly i should feel about everything and move on from it, the process of that is just so completely, fundamentally different for me and for people on the outside of it that i feel completely alienated and lonely even when they try to tell me they want to be there for me and help me and that they love me. they will find it easy to categorize her and our relationship as completely irredeemable, while my emotional and loving and deeply affected side insists on telling itself any story that is needed to salvage what we had and whatever remainder of sanity there is. it feels psychologically, existentially imperative to me to be able to figure out a way to find a reason and an excuse for her behavior so my psyche doesn't have to confront the fact that someone i loved and trusted and believed in could be so unbelievably cruel to me.
as to my friends and loved ones, all i want is to know that i can share all the feelings i have, not just the anger and sadness and frustration and betrayal but also the love and the longing and the empathy i feel for her, without being dismissed or condescended to. i know it's not rational to keep going back to someone who hurts me so profoundly!!!! i'm not fucking stupid!!!!!!!!!!! but the fact that in my heart somewhere i still want to do it is very difficult for me to deal with. it doesn't help knowing that an emotion that is extremely difficult and complex and confusing for me that causes me to feel anxious and scared is also something that people close to me might consider "wrong" and something that i should be very cautious about sharing with them.
