Can anyone talk about emotional abuse? Can it make you feel crazy

[thebestveggiesausagesarelindas]

When in the relationship, can the emotional abuse itself make you feel and act crazy?

As a young woman my ex completely love bombed me for 6 months and then changed completely, and then would go back and forth between being extremely loving and then cold and indifferent. I never knew what way he was going to be.

I am deeply ashamed of how I behaved because I would pathetically beg him to love me when he would suddenly change and go from loving to silent.

I would tell him he didn't really love me because love in a functional love didn't look like what we had, and he would get very angry and say he did love me and it was that I couldn't see it.

He'd say nobody else would love me like he did, I would never find someone like him again.

Got really angry at me for letting my mum come to visit. My mum and I did have a tense relationship at that time, not helped by how much he disliked her and kept encouraging me to cut off from her.

My mum and I resolved things once I got away from him a year later.

I have never had a relationship like that again before or since. I have never begged anyone else to love me and I feel so humiliated I did that, I feel it made me very unwell to be in that relationship.

However does it sound like I was just an awful person anyway and now trying shirk responsibility? Or can emotionally abusive relationships make you feel crazy?

I carry a lot of shame around this.

That's exactly what emotionally abusive relationships are meant to do.

Make you feel so insecure, so unsure of your status, make you doubt everything and everyone including yourself. And ultimately make you go bonkers.

It's very very effective.

So don't you feel shame. You were abused, tricked, etc. It is he who should feel shame.

Hopefully you will recognise it for what it was - abusive - and recognise any future relationships if they are abusive.

No - he was the abusive one making him think
you’d never get anyone else and trying to cut you off from your Mum. So glad you’re out of it!

Abusive and your behaviour was normal in those circumstances. Don't be ashamed. He should feel shame for how he treated you, but of course, he won't be feeling any such thing. Abusers don't feel real shame about their actions, it's always the victims who feel it!

Thank you. I hesitate to discuss with anyone in real life. My partner does know what went on back then and thinks it was very wrong but it's hard for me to talk about.