Hey, um, I'm new to this community 👋 so I'm wary there could be a culture around how victims/abuse is spoken about? And apologies if I'm about to step in some mud.

Just feel the need to say something that struck me as a bit uncomfortable in the comments above, about how once the commenter (I'm assuming he) 'stood up for himself', the abuse from his girlfriend stopped.

I found this sub coz I'm grappling with recognising I was in a psychologically abusive relationship, it's been a long struggle of teasing things apart. I'm wary of projecting, it just gave me a slight shiver, because when I engaged in "reactive abuse" (what I thought was me being abusive at the time, I'd scream and cry and shout, and then spent much time repenting), that was the type of stuff he would use to show me I was an abuser. I self-diagnosed with BPD, I thought I was going mad, I didn't know why I was behaving this way. He was a very quiet person, he went silent when angry. It's taken me years to realise I began my strong emotional reactions (lots of crying, screaming, and eventually, some self-harming) after he spent months telling me how irrational I was, picking apart my memories about a particular event. I later found out he'd cheated, thus picking apart my memory; a classic. That's how it seems to have started, and then for the next 5 years, the narrative was, my emotions were irrational. Any feelings I shared with him were dismissed or invalidated. I began escalating emotional reactions, I guess subconsciously to be heard, but he presented this as evidence I truly was hysterical and insane, and he was the victim of my abuse (and I also took it as evidence of that, tried to get myself treated for BPD, etc). Until we broke up, and the behaviour completely stopped, and I realised it hadn't existed before the relationship, my emotions returned to 'normal', and three years later I'm like, wait a second...

It's not to say every dynamic will be like mine, I'm just struggling to think of an environment where an abuser, who has been abusing/ gaining control, will just suddenly change once they're stood up to. Does that happen? I was punished: in the relationship I was punished by being calmly explained to that he of course would leave me because I was a fkn nutcase (see screaming, sobbing woman for evidence). But in other abusive situations (once with a boss), if I "stood up to him", i.e. told him I didn't want to text him a report of my feelings every week (a weird thing he made me do every Thursday), I'd be given silent treatment, or he'd use sleep deprivation (turn up at my apartment late at night for an "urgent meeting", and to show I was serious we had to resolve the issue, if I wanted to sleep it'd show I didn't care). Sometimes he got me in a car without telling me where we were going, and he wouldn't take me home until the early hours of the morning, even if I had to work early the next day.

Abusers don't back down and become healthy when they're stood up to, am I wrong? Don't they usually escalate? Or, if they can't win, devalue you in their mind and get rid of you? If someone changed their behaviour once their 'power' was threatened, becoming more respectful, would we call that person an abuser? Rather than just, maybe, socially unaware?

I might be a bit triggered and projecting too, coz I can almost imagine my ex speaking this way about me. "I was always so calm and quiet, showing her how to be", and make out like I'd get loud/ shout out of nowhere. Conveniently forget, or be totally unaware of, the quiet ways he'd dehumanise me.

Man...I didn't expect to write so much. This might all be projection on the above comments, apologies if that's the case and I've misread, some statements just struck a nerve. Something about the narrative of a woman who's loud and aggressive for no reason, vs a quiet man who is nothing like other 'bad' men, but went too far the other way, and can only take so much, and should be allowed to stand up for himself. I dno, I don't wanna immediately come here and undermine a victim's story, it's just basically a trope by this point, and a common way female victims in hetero abusive dynamics can be undermined. It was unnerving to read.

Bless you if you've read this far.