Things Abusers Say and Do to Gain Power Over You

well, my abusive father a chain smoker told me on one of my asthma attacks to take poison and die. ( I was only 8 or 9 years old)….. my father lives in Latin America and he had a stroke not long ago, he was recovering and feeling better and i said to him why dont you just take poison and die, he cried when i said that, I left him and did not help at all with his expenses at the hospital. to be honest i had closure on my own way.

Thank you all for sharing your stories; this helps every one of us to see the undeniable truth after years and years of denial. This site is a priceless stepping stone and resource.

I recently made the decision to leave him for good; my love for him had been fading gradually for years. We have two daughters and a son who is just five months old. I kept hoping he would change as he is an intelligent man and in his Nice Guy role he pretends to be aware of his priorities and duty, but words never turn into actions. Our life has been a roller coaster, he left me once (when our first daughter was 2), planning to go back to his ex, we lived in 3 different countries (we had a baby in each of them) and everything just got worse in terms of his attitude and behaviour. He has said and done 95-99% of what is listed above; the accuracy is amazing.

For a long time I could not accept that his verbal cruelty was premeditated – we come from different countries and cultures and he is 12 years my senior, so I often blamed our difficult communication or his peculiar sense of humour on these differences. At worst I thought he was using damaging behavioural patterns he’d picked up as a child but that it wasn’t his fault and I needed to tolerate his flaws. Boy, was I wrong. This guy enjoyed himself while playing the game of cat and mouse with me, he drew some sort of sick pleasure from my pain.

He has a sadistic streak I’ve tried very hard not to notice. Once he got stoned and spent about three hours outside, watching some ants overwhelm and slowly dismantle a larger insect while it fought for its life. I know that’s nature, I wouldn’t interfere with the process, but it would be horrible to watch that poor thing being torn apart bit by bit, I just can’t understand how someone can enjoy it. In many cases he shows nothing but kindness to animals, especially dogs, so I found this very strange. He also kills cockroaches by setting them on fire. He told me he used to hunt rabbits when he was young, it always kind of bothered me, but then again lots of people do that, I figured I was being too sensitive.

He loves mind games, you can see his eyes shine with demonic enjoyment. He used to threaten to take my kids away and have me locked up in a mental institution. He would tell me he was dying or that he would die in two years’ time because of his smoking, then he would refuse to quit or see a doctor, which caused extreme anxiety; when I told his family, urging them to take action, he reassured them I wasn’t well in the head. They still think he’s a wonderful, down-to-earth, normal guy.

Sexually, I have sometimes felt like an object, although in 7 years we hardly had any physical intimacy; he went cold just after I got pregnant and rejected me for a year and a half. From there on, we would maybe sleep together twice a year (maybe three or four, can’t remember) and I would get pregnant immediately. Not that I mind; I love my kids. He wouldn’t use condoms as he couldn’t stand them and was demanding that I do something (I refused hormone pills as they can cause abortions and lots of problems and I would rather be abstinent for life than risk a single abortion or miscarriage). So if we’d had sex more often we would have seven kids now instead of three. After he told me he was dumping me and I had no choice but to leave the country with my daughter and resettle, he slept with me all of a sudden, to then tell me that didn’t change anything and I would still have to leave. I felt used. Other times he would come into the room and ask for sex (just like that), as if I could be turned on like a light switch. ”No” wasn’t taken well at all; he would usually rage. After I had my son the doctor told me my body could not go through another pregnancy after 2 C-sections and I would very likely die; I don’t have the money for sterilisation just now so I hoped he would understand. At first he said he wouldn’t mind waiting, but after a short while started complaining about our ”sexless” relationship, knowing full well he was making me feel guilty about something I could not change. Also, over the years he has repeatedly called me fat and disgusting, so that never helped my drive to go to bed with him.

He would often refer to women as ”fanny” in front of me. He would discuss the porn he liked and celebrities he found attractive (sometimes days after having put me down about my appearance). We would have a beer together and I would become his drinking buddy, listening to stories of his sexual exploits and women he fancied. He would say he had got fat (he’s very skinny as he is a chain smoker) and I suspected he would do it to tease me about my own weight; he would buy me Diet Coke when I’d asked for Coke and stuff like that, and always, always denied any innuendo, aside from the times he was drunk and calling me a fat cow no one would ever want to f*ck. Also, he was aware I had issues about being slightly overweight as a teenager; he would use my weaknesses against me. Other times he would say I was attractive, that he liked curvy women etc, so I would go into my comfort zone again, just for him to strike days or weeks later with the same comments. It was maddening as I wanted to believe I wasn’t hideous (people around me always complimented me) so I kept excusing his words, but most of the time I felt horrible and worthless, unlovable. Recently he told me 5 years ago, when we came to my country to visit my family, women would look at him in the street as if to ask what the hell he was doing with me, as in he was good looking and I was so inferior. He appeared to mean it as a benevolent comment. He kept very unflattering pictures of me (we all get those at some point) ostentatiously, even though I’d asked him to delete them; he has probably shown them to others. He showed my emails to his son to turn him against me (I had made comments about my partner’s ex, his mother). Also, on a business forum we both found customers on, someone posted a cartoon of a fat woman who couldn’t find a puppy and had smothered it between her butt cheeks. He replied ”Is that a picture of my missus?”… Those people we were both working with knew we were together.

He would give me things just to take them away as punishment. He set up a forum for me as I was interested in various issues to raise awareness about; when he’d get pissed of he would threaten to take it off-line. It needed improvements and he could never be bothered, so everyone who registered eventually left. Then he got it going again, a year and a half later, and I started looking for members. It worked for two weeks, then f*ked up again and he couldn’t be bothered working on it anymore so I was left looking like an idiot in front of those people. I’d put hundreds of hours into developing it. He also set up a blog for me and took it off-line various times as punishment for disagreeing with him.

I could write all day about all the instances of mean, sick, manipulative, cruel behaviour. And like most manipulators, in his community he is very popular.