Never Enough

In the days after the yelling incident, I analyzed my thinking process from the solo trip that lead to my anger outbreak. I identified that I had felt offended from the cinema incident and the cultural rants, and concluded that I fell for a cognitive distortion: if I feel it, I believed that it must be true. This lead to my unhealthy coping to fight back in order to stop the unpleasant emotion. The Bible quote gave me justification. Speaking from today, it was not a cognitive distortion, but it was actually true: I felt that my Ex was devaluating me and invalidating my needs, which was a form of emotional abuse.

When I shared my thought process with my Ex, she wasn’t interested much in the causes that I had identified, but was bothered by the Bible quote with the accusation of being a quarrelsome person. She argued that I don’t respect her, whereas I tried to reassure her that this is not the case. She asked about other occasions where I had yelled at someone, concluding that in these cases I was disrespecting the other person, and that I disrespect her.

The constant repetition that I have an anger problem and that she feels intimidated by me, combined with the threat of leaving our relationship, lead me to accept her viewpoint. She commented on one of my behaviors with: “this is abuse!” Me yelling at her was the confirmation that she must have been right and I started believing that I mistreated her. Her gaslighting worked.

Apart from starting therapy, I asked three friends independently of each other about their perspective on my personality: do I have a temper? Am I aggressive? All three said that I’m stubborn, but disagreed about me being short-tempered or aggressive. Two friends suspected that there may be an oversensitivity on my Ex’s side and suggested that we approach the problem from both ends. In retrospect, I should have asked my friends (or a therapist, if I had one) much earlier for their opinion on our relationship. This would have given me an outside perspective to assess our relationship troubles and may have helped me to not get this deep into a trauma bond. If you are in a similar situation, talk with someone–friends, family, a therapist, whoever you are comfortable with to talk about relationship topics.