When you first enter a relationship with an emotional psychopath, you have no idea you are dealing with a sick and dangerous man. Even when you realize you are not living the life you are supposed to live and which you deserve, you hope against hope you can ‘fix’ him and turn him into something he’s not.
That often leads to you getting even more hurt that you already are. It leads you to waste your time and your youth on someone who uses and drains you emotionally.
At first, you don’t get that you are in an abusive relationship. Only when you escape, you realize you’ve been emotionally abused.
Throughout your relationship with a psycho, you start to accept his destructive behavior towards you as standard—as something completely normal. You think it’s your fault he treats you like that. You think you have to change yourself.
This can seriously damage you. This can seriously damage and have a bad influence on your personality. This can change you after everything if you don’t escape in time.
If he succeeded in messing with your head, don’t feel lost. Once you were a strong woman. There’s no doubt that you will get that confidence and independence back.
He chose you for a reason. He could easily have chosen someone who was weak, someone who was an easy prey. But that wasn’t challenging. He needed you, a strong woman, to hurt and try to destroy. Only then was he going to feel like he achieved something—like he won. But you fucked up his plans.
You broke free from his cold chains that left bruises on your neck. You took control of your life and you left him. But that doesn’t mean being with him didn’t leave any consequences. It did. You needed to go through hell and back to be able to heal and trust someone all over again.
1. You learn to love yourself again
It’s the first and most important step of healing. If you want to move on with your life and not to be crippled with the pain he caused you, you have to discard all he has done to you and start afresh. You slowly start to realize you are the most important person to yourself right now.
You’re slowly starting to see that you deserve the best. You deserve everything he’s not. You realize that you need to show yourself some respect because you are first spending the rest of your life with yourself, and then with someone else.
2. You get stuck in front of an emotional wall
You reach the point of total emptiness. You don’t know how to handle all these new feelings that are taking over you. If you meet someone who is interested in you and treats you the way you deserve, you get lost.
You are not used to not being manipulated with. You are not used to your voice being heard. You are not used to being the one who matters.
3. You look into every little detail
You cannot relax. It’s hard. You expect bad things to happen. You expect another jerk to walk into your life with the intention of destroying it. That’s why you start to overanalyze people and their actions.
You break situations into small fragments and examine them one by one until you are sure it’s safe to move on. Because of this fear, you keep your distance from everybody, because you are scared of going through the same thing all over again.
4. You have trust issues
Of course, this one goes without saying. How can you trust anyone after you’ve been used and almost destroyed? You played with fire, you know it, and you got burned. It’s true that you could have left him the moment you realized something was wrong, but you hoped you could fix him.
You didn’t. You got burned. But sometimes you need to get burned to learn your lesson. The thing is, you paid for this life lesson much more than you could have ever imagined.
5. You see life with no boundaries
No more threats, no more mind games, no more apologizing for everything, no more lying. All that is gone now. You are finally allowed to live your life the way you want it.
You get to live a life with no boundaries, no red signs and no dead-end streets. You are the one who calls all the shots now. And even if you screw up, you’ll know it’s because of something you did and not someone else.
See Also: This is How Manipulative Narcissists, Psychopaths And Other Toxic People Harm You