Technicolour

I believed it when I was told, for four years, that I was fundamentally flawed as a person. Now I know I am anything but.

CN: This piece discusses emotional abuse and coercive control, including examples. If that’s something you’ve experienced, this might be a difficult read for you.

Before

Sometime in 2015.

I’m at a Regina Spektor gig with three friends. We’re all very into Netflix at that time and have a shared love of left-wing feminist politics and crafting. We’ve got seats on the balcony.

Before we go in, we go to a buy a drink. I’m in that red wine era you go through in your mid-20s. I order a Pinot Noir. Behind me, my friends sing “Piiiiinooooot Nooooiiiiir”, quoting Titus’ epic song from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, before falling into giggles.

As I’ve written about before, having a solid friendship group has not been a regular feature of my life, so this moment always shines through as that time I really, truly, had friends who got me. At that time, I was about a year out of my first proper relationship. I was experiencing adulthood on my own terms for the first time. I was cycling, I was sewing, I was living by the sea. I had plans to move to Bristol. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, but I felt like I was coming into my own.

Then

Sometime in 2017

It’s stiflingly hot in our flat, but he won’t let me open the windows, because they open onto the street. But it’s true we don’t live in the best area, and so I get it. It’s also stiflingly hot because I’m under the duvet, trying to regulate myself. We’ve got a flat inspection the next day, and we’re in the middle of making the flat look like nobody lives there. Evidently, the way I have been cleaning for the past 26 years is completely wrong. I’m not cleaning the taps correctly, I’ve missed a bit of dust on the skirting board, I’m sitting down when I should be cleaning, and that’s not fair, because I’m not pulling my weight. I’ve tried to defend myself; I’ve tried to clean the way he wants me to, but somehow this has turned into a moratorium on my character, as it always does. I’m hard work, I’m destroying his mental health, I really embarrassed him in front of his friends the other day. One of the young people he works with saw me crying in a coffee shop with him six months ago, and I’ve not ever shown enough sorrow about that.

I try to say I’m sorry, I try to argue back, I try to take myself to calm down. I’m not allowed to do any of those things, or I’m doing them wrong. I’m shouting, apparently, and he’d “never shout at me”. I’m crying, I’m hitting myself, I open my mouth and all that comes out is a scream. He clamps his hand over my mouth and hisses that I’d better stop or somebody would call the police, and we couldn’t have that. I’m not in my body any more, I have no control. I get under the duvet. I start to calm down.

Five minutes later, he rips the duvet off from me.

“You’ve wasted…” he looks at his watch “two and a half hours on this stupid meltdown when we’re supposed to be cleaning.”

The next day he’ll tell me what a good person I am, despite all my flaws.

Sometime in the future, I’ll make a mistake when meeting somebody he knows that I am genuinely sorry about. He’ll refuse to believe that I’m sorry, he’ll tell me I’m lying when I’m telling the truth. He’ll tell me that he always knows when I’m lying, because he can read me like a book. That he knows me better than I know myself. I am telling the truth, but he says I’m not, so I guess, therefore, I am not.

Later, he’ll cheat on me with his best friend and deny it, even when he throws her an elaborate lockdown birthday party, stays at hers until 4am, and on Christmas Day cuddles her on the sofa because she’s crying over a film. I’m paranoid, I’m mentally unwell. I’ve ruined his life. I’m also, somehow, his fiancée.

It’s difficult to talk about those four years of my life, because I still feel a lot of shame. Shame that I let somebody like that into my life, shame that I am vulnerable in a way which means people can manipulate me the way he did. Shame that I even got as far as being engaged to someone who systematically broke down my self-worth.

The thing with emotional abuse and coercive control is that it’s insidious and it’s clever. It plays on your insecurities in such a way that you start to disbelieve your own reality, and others are encouraged to build a narrative about you which backs up this altered reality. Controlling people are excellent at PR, mostly their own. The worst possible crime was to show anyone that anything was amiss, that my ex was anything other than the pillar of the community everybody thought he was. And you believe the PR too. You must be this awful person, because this guy who everybody likes, who has awards for his community work, is telling you so. And because his friends seem to back up his opinion. They don’t seem to like you very much; they seem to think you’re holding him back. Every time you see his friends, you’re submitted to a long post-mortem of all the ways you offended them, made them feel awkward, or otherwise didn’t act in a way that would make them like you.

My neurodivergent identity was used against me at all times. He was insistent that I was autistic, but berated me for every autistic trait I showed. Later, when I didn’t get an autism diagnosis, he insisted I had BPD. He insisted so hard that I almost ended up with a diagnosis of BPD¹. I had a care co-ordinator to whom I described what happened when we tried to clean our flat. She told me that I should probably just do more cleaning.

Later, a therapist would suggest to me that perhaps I was acting completely normally around his friends, but he was the one who was rolling his eyes behind my back, pulling faces, or generally making whatever I did out to be embarrassing. I still wonder what his friends think about me.

Of course, during all this, my own friendship group melted away. I was told they were toxic and unhelpful. And then I was told I needed to make more of an effort to make friends, or to be friends with his friends.

And I melted away as well. Before I met him, the colours of my adult self were almost fully developed. After I met him, I slowly became more greyscale until the only colours I had were the black and white “facts” of my fundamentally flawed character.

It’s terrifying to write about this publicly. I often think of the Depp Vs Heard trial, and how people can spin stories that others believe until nobody has any idea of the truth. And in particular, how the way that you act in response to the abuse can be used as proof that not only did you deserve the way you were treated, but that you were, yourself, the abusive one.

When the coercive control laws came in, I felt personally ambivalent. What happened to me put a grenade into my life, but it didn’t follow the traditional patterns. I wasn’t scared for my safety, in fact part of the genius of it all was the avoidance of anything that could be seen as traditionally abusive. I wasn’t told I couldn’t wear things in case other men looked at me (but there were items of clothing I owned which I avoided wearing because I wouldn’t hear the end of how much he hated them). I could go where I wanted (but if I was anxious on a night out, I wasn’t allowed to get a taxi home by myself, because that wasn’t safe. I had to stay out). I could basically do what I wanted (but I wasn’t allowed an electric bike, he would be “too scared for my safety”). I couldn’t report any of this, and I doubt anybody who knows my ex would change their opinion of him if they read it. They’d believe him over me.

However, I want my story to be heard. I want people to know that if somebody wants to change everything about you, if they pride themselves on never even shouting at you whilst making you feel awful, if they make you feel fundamentally flawed, then it could be emotional abuse.

It’s not normal for someone to keep a list of all the things you’ve “done wrong”. It’s not normal for someone who loves you to constantly make you feel bad. You are not fundamentally flawed. You are being controlled.

There’s so much more I could write here, so much of this story I’ve left out. A lot of context which I can’t publicly share for one reason or another. Part of me wonders if I’m still being controlled even now, in being so petrified to post this, and in worrying that I will be made out to be a liar. It has taken several attempts to write this. I still worry that doing so is a bad idea.

Now

July, 2024

I’m on a beach in Pembrokeshire, bending down to look at the pebbles. Occasionally, I put one in my pocket. My hair is salty and damp from swimming in the Blue Lagoon, my dry robe flaps around my legs in the wind. My partner is standing at the top of the beach waiting for me. Beaches aren’t really his thing, but he insists he doesn’t mind waiting for me to swim, or endlessly rake through the pebbles. I believe him.

I feel alive, I feel loved, I feel technicolour. I am in my body, my strong and sturdy body. I am myself. I am free.

1. I should point out that I am extremely against the stigmatisation of Cluster B personality disorders, although I have concerns that they are largely socially constructed as a means to control women/AFAB people who have experienced trauma. My rejection of the diagnosis for myself comes from the simple fact that outside of an abusive relationship, I do not personally meet the criteria. I send all my love and support to those who have BPD diagnoses. I see you.