Have you been emotionally abused?

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Have you ever been emotionally abused?

I’m thinking that emotional abuse, especially in the form of manipulation, may be difficult for people on the autism spectrum to recognise or understand.
I know it took me a long time, and it still confuses me.

I myself was in a toxic relationship with an emotionally abusive person for 2 years. Well, it ended back in Summer, but we’re talking again. I desperately need to cut them off, but it’s hard. I worry about their reaction and how the action is going to affect me, even though they’re already a stressor in my life, and I’m not willing to compromise my integrity for them anymore.

Has anyone else ever been friends or had a relationship with someone with a cluster B personality disorder? That is narcicists, psycho/sociopaths, and borderline. How did it work out? I know you cannot compare all of these disorders and that not everyone with like borderline for instance is abusive.

“My person” has a borderline diagnosis but I’m quite convinced they’re sociopathic and a covert narcissist too. I used to think they were on the autism spectrum, actually, and used that as an excuse for their low empathy, but I’ve come to think that they’re most definitely not. They show signs I guess, and they agree, but it’s very different.

I’m not sharing this because I want pity. I’m still trying to heal and move on, and feel very alone in this, so I suppose reassurance would be helpful, but I’m just interested in starting a conversation

Yes, but more in a work enviroment or in school. Not the last place I worked, but the place before I had issues due to one man.
In school it was often. Children can be cruel.

Yes, I was bullied as a teenager at an all-girls high school, which involved a lot of emotional abuse by multiple people whom I had previously considered as close friends. I learnt some harsh lessons, namely that there that people can turn on you when you would have never done the same back.

I managed to make great friends when I went to university, who didn’t give me the troubles that people did in high school. I think I became very friendly to many people I met at university as a result, probably because I was delighted that nobody was treating me like s**t. In fact, some new friends started celebrating the more eccentric sides of me, and made me very feel loved and validated.

I had a NT boyfriend for a year and a half, then I broke up with him. He was not emotionally abusive, it was more to do with difficulty on my end and general incompatibility between us.

Afterwards, a male friend started hanging out with me more immediately after the break up. We would hang out at uni a lot, and then he started taking me out for dinner and drinks. I thought he was just doing this because he was a good friend. Then, it turned a lot darker - before I knew it, I was trapped in a sexually and emotionally abusive ‘relationship’ where I had no idea how it all happened, but it did. I wasn’t even attracted to him, but he became obsessed with me and started controlling me - I couldn’t go to lectures at uni even though I was starting to get stressed about my assessments, because he didn’t want me to leave his house.

There were at least 3 times I remember where I said to him “I am feeling weird about this whole thing, I just want to go home/finish up my uni semester. Can we please go back to how we were before, as just a platonic relationship?” This was where he started showing Cluster B symptoms, both narcissism and emotional disturbance. I eventually escaped his house and hung out at home for a bit, but then if I had to come to uni I would avoid my social circles because I didn’t want to deal with him. However, my avoiding of social circles also meant that my uni friends couldn’t support me in the best ways, because I wasn’t around. If they asked how I was going, I would say I was fine, because I had no idea what to make of the abusive relationship. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was textbook abusive. I always knew it was weird and upsetting though, and I started getting headaches and stomach problems that I didn’t have previously.

When I was avoiding the guy, he started blasting messages to my phone, asking me to come back and comfort him and that he just wanted to see me in person one more time. Eventually, I had to block him on Facebook messenger because I really didn’t want to deal with him, the whole situation made me feel sick for reasons I didn’t understand at the time. I was also too scared to meet up with him in real life, and I had the feeling that it wouldn’t help anything.

I blocked him on Facebook and he started blasting my cell phone number. “How dare you block me? You’re a arrogant and nasty b***h. Please show me more respect.” I blocked him there. A few days later, he started messaging my Instagram account, which I barely used. Blocked.

Cue a period of 12 months where he would make online accounts to try to track me, send me voicemails via a private number that I couldn’t block, and talk to my close friends to try to send me messages via them. I filed two police reports, several months in between which made me physically and emotionally exhausted.

I remember people kept telling me that what he was doing was abusive. I didn’t understand how it abusive it was for so incredibly long. I really thought he was at least emotionally troubled, and that translated to behaviour towards me that didn’t make sense. I eventually learnt that he had been planning to have sex with me as soon as I had broken up with my long term boyfriend, and that his ‘platonic’ outings with me were a way to get me into the abusive relationship. Again, this went completely over my head, because I like hanging out with people in a platonic context, where we’d be equals in an interesting intellectual conversation.

My current partner tells me that I often don’t pick up on bad intentions from other people, especially from men who want something sexual or romantic from me. It’s like I have a complete blind spot to the fact that people might be interested in me in me for reasons that aren’t “oh she has really cool knowledge on these unusual topics”. I had been lucky that I avoided romantic relationships for long enough that I hadn’t experienced abuse when I was a teenager, but it meant that by the time I was 21 (I’m almost 23 now) I was probably very naive about how I might be perceived by Cluster B men, and toxic people in general. Again, I think I have naturally a lot of trouble knowing what is normal conflict with someone, and what is genuine abuse.

I am getting better about the blind spot now though, because I am developing an intellectual framework in my head to work with the fact that people might abuse me. I now look for ‘signs of disrespect’ - do they shame me in any way because I am not a ‘typical’ woman? Do they try to change my mind when I want to go home or not hang out with them? There are some signs that are obvious to me now, that weren’t before. It took 12 months of stalking and abuse to make me realise I needed to look out for it, and that I never want to never run into this type of situation ever again.

What is the definition of "emotional abuse"?

The alleged victim has a larger definition than the defendant

The dictionary is too vague

i hadda grow up with an older brother that i am pretty sure was dark triad.

I was in an abusive friendship in my teen that I still have PTSD from till this day

The way I see it now, I have been a link in a multigenerational chain of CPTSD.
That means, well, I have. By my mother. Though I believe she didn't mean it, she just couldn't have processed her own traumas any better back then.

Same here.

My mother was abused by her mother.

And I was abused by my mother.

This sort of thing is really common.

My dad had a very bad temper and was often emotionally abusive. I also went through severe bullying starting about the fourth grade all the way through high school.