As young people, many of us aren't aware of what a healthy relationship should look like. I grew up with a single mother who showed me nothing short of unconditional love, but I never got the chance to witness a healthy male role model to shape my expectations for a boyfriend. When I began dating, I was looking for love anywhere I could get it. I found someone who I believed was thoughtful, caring, and truly appreciative of who I was as a person. He was amazing for the first year. We went on dates, met each others parents, and fell into what I thought to be love.
After things started to become serious on an emotional level, I started to see red flags. My boyfriend was starting to become less and less emotionally available, and anytime I would try to have a conversation with him about it he would turn it around on me. He would promise me that we would spend time together or that he would show up for me in some way, and then fail to do so. Subsequently, he would lie to me and tell me he never made said promises, causing me to begin to question my own sanity. These were warning signs that I failed to pick up on. He was beginning to gaslight me, which is a tactic in which a person, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality.
Eventually, I started to notice that he was drinking and using drugs. He had stopped going to his therapist, which I believed he was seeing just to talk about his everyday problems. I confronted him about the drug usage and ending his therapy, and he exploded in anger. He pushed me against a wall and began to choke me, then immediately stopped and began to sob. I was so confused and hurt; I had never seen someone switch from one emotion to another in such little time, and this was a man who I thought loved me. All I had wanted was to help him and get him back into therapy, and he managed to flip the argument around into telling me that his drug usage was in result of me not being a "good enough girlfriend".
I began to believe the things he told me. I spiraled into such a dark place that I had constant negative thoughts about myself and this lingering feeling of hopelessness. These emotionally and physically taxing arguments went on for about 3 years. I was at one of the lowest points of my life, and the one person who was in my life was emotionally tearing me down every day. I knew deep down that this wasn't how relationships were supposed to be, but I was scared to leave him. He would threaten to kill himself anytime I told him that our relationship was unhealthy, and he had me believing that it was my fault. I was scared that no one else would want to be with me, because that is what he drilled into my mind. He continued using drugs, and eventually I started to use them right alongside him. The emotional and physical abuse became unbearable. I began having suicidal thoughts, but most days I felt apathetic. I became addicted to drugs because it was the only way I knew how to escape the way he made me feel.
My addiction became a blessing in disguise.
After years of enduring his abuse, and about a year of drug addiction, I had finally had enough. The drugs had stopped working to numb my pain, and I saw no way out. I reached a new level of desperation and called my mom. I finally told her everything that had been going on behind closed doors, and told her I needed help. She sent me to treatment for my addiction, which included extensive trauma therapy that helped me let go of the hell that my ex put me through. I learned that without the abuse and addiction that I had been through, I wouldn't be the woman I am today. I wouldn't have acquired the coping mechanisms and tools that I now have, and am able to pass on to friends and family in need. A lot of people ask me if I would change my past in order to take away all of the pain that I endured, and my answer is no. I am grateful for the tough lessons that I learned throughout those three years of psychological torture, because in result I have had the privilege of helping many people recover from similar situations and nothing compares to the feeling of being able to help someone else in need.
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