With emotionally abusive people?
Bit of background for you:
I left my ex 3 years ago. He was never physically abusive but held all the characteristics of emotional abuse such as sulking, gaslighting, lying, drank to deal with his emotions, turned all blame on to me for reacting after he would emotionally provoke/torment me.
We have a DD. He’s a reliable dad and sees her consistently.
After we split 3 years ago, he got in to another relationship which I didn’t know much about at the time - they split up after a year.
His abusive sulking and manipulation has continued in cycles the whole time we have separated including various things to do with DD such as, taking her for the weekend when she was 10 months old and withholding any contact with me whatsoever as a form of punishment for not wanting him I suppose.
Recently, he’s been nice as pie to me, trying to get in my good books basically. Tells me he admits to gaslighting me in the past and how awful that was, how sorry he is for lots of different incidents etc.
He said he loves me and always has.
Anyway, in the recent ‘nice/good phase’ he opened up about his relationship with the woman he was seeing after we split.
He says she abused him physically and that she was a narcissist. There are knuckle marks on his fridge in 3 places where he punched in it response to her ‘hitting him in the face’ and a hole in the stud wall which he also punched as he would ‘never turn his hand to a woman as he is not violent.’
Now, he is saying she brought out the worst in him but he has changed now after going to counselling which lasted about a month? And he’s saying he wants to be the best version of himself for our family etc so that we can give it another shot.
For me, there’s red flags all over the place. I have told him I don’t want to commit to trying again as I have mental scars from the past and in response to this he’s being very nice and understanding - to the point where I am anticipating him running out of this perceived understanding and exploding. I feel he’s trying to lure me back in by this ‘good period’ but it’s been about 3 months. Can good periods last that long with abusive people? They used to be much shorter when we were together. Could this be a sign of positive change? Or does he perhaps have better control over his emotions and knows unleashing now would sabotage his attempts to lure me back?
Anyway, the reason for mentioning his other relationship is that, in my opinion, I feel the marks on the fridge and hole in the wall are a sign of his lack of self control in regulating his anger, and him blaming her for provoking him is even more concerning.
How can someone like that apparently change after just a month of counselling? I just don’t buy it but he’s not buckled yet or turned nasty to me despite my repeated rejection. Could he have reached some self awareness or am I right to be anticipating another shit storm?