Thank you for all of your replies, I am so grateful. I am okay, I’m not quite sure how I feel about what happened the other day, I’ve felt quite emotionless since. I have taken pictures of what I can in case I do decide to take it further. I only have a scratch on my neck and a faint bruise by my collar bone and on the back of my shoulder.
By rocky relationship I mean we’ve been on and off in the past we’ve had a lot of people make it difficult for us to be together, my dad kicked me out when I was 15 because I refused to break up with him because he was very strict over the whole “boyfriend” thing. I’m 21 and he’s 22 we have 3 children together (3,2&6 months) we’ve been together since we were 15. It’s always been that we’ve been good together and things will go really well for ages and then something happens and things will just blow up. We both have our own mental health struggles so that does play a part in it as well, which causes the arguments to sometimes escalate, but we’ve been good for 2 years now and things have been going extremely well. We’ve put in so much effort to make our relationship work for the kids. We still have a way to go, but things have been really looking up.
The other day we were just having a normal argument about something stupid, it turned into bringing other things into it and it just kept going. I started to feel really overwhelmed and I went to leave the bedroom. He shut the door and stood in front of it and told me we needed to talk about it. I was in too much of a state to talk it out at that point in time and I told him I needed to go to the bathroom and calm myself down first. He refused and said he didn’t trust me because he thought I was going to self harm. I promised him I wouldn’t and I said he can even stand at the bedroom door and watch me make sure I go in the bathroom or i told him I’d sit in the kids room (they were at nursery at the time). I just needed a few minutes to myself to calm down. I even suggested he go in the kitchen and leave me to calm down in the bedroom. He still refused, so I kept trying to go round him and grab the door handle and he pushed me on the bed and strangled me. I didn’t back down once he got off me I said to him, that him keeping me in the room was stressing me out and the longer he kept me in there the more I was going to think about self harming. He still refused so I tried to go to the door again and he repeated what he did again. I still got back up and I don’t remember much of what was said but I believe he pushed me again so I spat on him (I don’t know why I did it🤦🏼♀️ this is completely out of character for me but I know it’s a big hate of his and in the moment I thought it would’ve helped me get him out of my way somehow) he then slapped me across my face and knocked me off my feet. He grabbed me as I fell to the floor and shouted in my face. It then stopped shortly after this and I went to the bathroom. Then I came out and he had his panic attack.
I feel like I have no right to be upset over what he did because we’ve had bad arguments in the past where I’ve tried to hit/push him because he’s refused to let me leave a room or refused to get out of the house. Every time I’ve lashed out at him he’s just accepted it because he said it doesn’t hurt and I feel like he’s now finally hit me back, even though I could never have the strength to actually hurt him, but this time I didn’t do anything.
He grew up watching his dad beat up his mum regularly and I’ve always assumed from what he’s told me and how he speaks about it that it’s really affected him and made him want to be completely different. He’s always told me that he’s proud he never grew up to become “that man”. When he had his panic attack all he kept saying was “I’m so sorry, I’m just like my dad. I’m nothing but a scumbag” and that he had flashbacks of when it used to happen to his mum straight after. I’d like to genuinely believe he isn’t that person as he’s always supported me through everything like my dad being emotionally abusive and I’ve been raped in the past. He’s reacted to those things as you’d find any man would. However when it comes to my mental health struggles I always feel like he always shuts me down. He doesn’t understand how I can want to cause harm to myself when I have children to think about etc. And always makes me feel bad if I self harm by telling me things like “well if you didn’t do that you wouldn’t be in pain a few days later”.
Its taken until this morning for him to finally tell me that it won’t happen again. It’s been 3 days. I don’t know if I believe him or not. I was having doubts about the relationship before this happened as I’m just finding it hard to keep this relationship going. I’m always stressed, I feel like I’m doing 80% but he thinks he’s doing his fair share. I’m in debt with a few bills and I’m never going to be able to pay them off if I leave him as my money just doesn’t cover it. Our relationship seems to have gone back to normal since if anything better than how it’s been the past few weeks building up to the incident. I don’t know if he’s trying to prove his love for me and earn my trust back or if he’s just trying to play with my mind. He’s been really affectionate, he’s been checking in. Everytime I mention the incident or when I showed him what he’d done to me now the bruises have come up he will just apologise again and again. He’s instigated sex twice since and I stupidly went along with it. We haven’t had sex in about 2 weeks and before that it was more once every month his choice not mine (this is also a new thing in the relationship that’s started in the past year). He’s a great dad and it would break the children’s hearts if we weren’t together😔