Dove & The Violating Jealous Abuser

Brandon Chadwick (0:00): On this episode of narcissist apocalypse, we talk with an abuse survivor named dove, and dove was in a relationship with a violent coercive abuser. It's a story of jealousy, isolation, minimization, sexual pressure, and interrogation. Welcome to Narcissist Apocalypse everyone. I am Brandon Chadwick and with me today we have Dove. How are you?

Unknown Speaker (0:51): I'm doing well Brandon thanks. How are you doing?

Brandon Chadwick (0:53): I'm doing well thank you for asking and if you want to be a guest like Dove is today please do go to our website at narcissistapocalypse.com click on the guest form button fill it out and we'll go from there. Also at our website, we have a support group with Zoom meetings every Wednesday nights, Thursday afternoons, and Saturday nights, and if you need support, join our support group at narcissistapocalypse.com, And we also have a newsletter at our website where you can sign up there, get a free workbook from every new survivor story if you sign up to our newsletter. All of that is at narcissistapocalypse.com. And today we have a big content warning as we do discuss sexual coercion in many spots in this episode, as well as the abuser's sex addiction too. We also graphically discuss physical abuse and strangulation and suicide threats as well in this episode.

Brandon Chadwick (1:48): That is your big content warning for today. And today you're going to hear Dove's story. And Dove went through a lot. Her needs were constantly minimized throughout this relationship. The abuser was just dominating in every way and the abuser made her feel bad for needing anything and just flip things around as if she was the bad person and she got interrogations, accusations, jealousy, there was sexual coercion, sleep deprivation, rages, suicide threats, isolation tactics, physical abuse, strangulation.

Brandon Chadwick (2:21): Dove's story here touches on so many different things that you may be dealing with or have dealt with, and she's going to validate so many of you today. So a big thank you to Dove for being here with us today, and now I'm going to get it my way and your way. Dove, the floor is now yours.

Dove (2:39): So I grew up in a healthy and loving home. Like my early life was supported by awesome parents and you know I had some like angsty and rebellious teenage years, but there wasn't any big trauma like in my childhood. And on his end, it sounds that his life was more volatile as he was raised, and I know there were two separate events with each of his parents that heavily broke his trust, and I think that he has a mother wound that continued to fester and definitely affects his relationship in adulthood, and has turned into like a distrust into women. So I knew my abuser for four and a half years prior to our relationship. We met in summer of twenty nineteen on a property where we were both living, we both had separate partners at the time, and we were in separate dwellings, but we struck up a very easy friendship from the get go.

Dove (3:42): Think he is a very extroverted individual, charming, and fun to be around, definitely a people person, and he felt very familiar to me. And so I got to know him pretty well over those first nine months of living together, and then I had moved away, and we continued a friendship. We stayed in contact over the years, and I would see him for maybe two or three times a year during that time, and our communication wasn't always constant, but we have them. We kept in touch, and so throughout the friendship, we learned a lot about each other. I felt safe just sharing what was going on in my life and past events, and so we were very open with one another, and he would share with me about his relationship, and something that stood out to me was the dynamics of the relationships that he had.

Dove (4:40): He would be in mostly monogamous relationships, but then would want some kind of openness, and so this was a common point of tension with different partners that I knew he was with over the years, because he wanted some, like he wanted the main relationship, but then also the freedom to flirt or even share sexual experiences with people outside of the relationship, and he felt very misunderstood in this desire. And so on his end, he explained this attention and this this openness desire, and I remember thinking to myself, That sounds like kind of difficult to like be in like that kind of partnership, but he also prided himself on being a very loyal and trustworthy and solid partner, and so yeah, there was some cognitive dissonance that I felt in that aspect. So after four and a half years of our friendship, he came to visit me for the first time, and he stayed with me for ten days, and halfway into that visit, I began to feel open to leaning into a more romantic connection with him. I felt that it could be a really good thing. We have this solid foundation of friendship behind us, and also at this time, neither of us were in serious relationships, and that hadn't happened before, and so it just felt like this open door for us to explore our connection in a romantic way, and so that was the very start of us leaning in to a partnership together, and we also knew that this would be a long distance thing because I was living seven hours away from him, and so he invited me to come live and work with him.

Dove (6:36): I made the drive down, and he was very welcoming. I was excited to be there. He was excited to have me. He bought all the groceries, which was super sweet, and it was a really lovely start. And we were working together doing bathroom remodels, which I really love learning and doing that work, and he was living in a fifth wheel, about three foot long at least, and so it was very close quarters, and we were together 20 fourseven, and that first visit turned into three months, and things slowly began to shift in that time.

Dove (7:19): The first thing that started coming up was I began to feel blindsided by certain either needs or requests, and then if I didn't do whatever it was in his mind, then I would get a talking to later. And so I I consistently would have this feeling of being in trouble throughout the relationship, and that started off very slowly, and so the walking on eggshells began to creep in. I would get up in the morning and just start doing my thing, and then, like, I'd walk past him in the kitchen, and then all of a sudden things would just feel off, and then I would learn that because I didn't stop and give him a hug at a certain time that he was very upset about that, and I was not trying to avoid giving him a hug. I was genuinely just doing my own thing, but he would be upset, and then that would throw off the whole day. And so it turned into me creating issues without my knowing and then being expected to fix them, or I would be punished by him by just him sulking or being in a very sour mood.

Dove (8:43): So I'm going to go into our sex life. There's a lot of sexual coercion throughout the entire relationship. In these early months, he was on these apps where he would be talking with other men or sexting with other men. My abuser, he's a bisexual male, and he would share with me these conversations, which were mainly sexting or sending pics, and then he would also be online with these men. And this was something that he very much enjoyed, and he'd expressed to me that this was his safe way of being able to explore sexual desires with other people, with males in particular, because he was aware that I wasn't open or fond of being in an open relationship, and so this was like a loophole that he he found.

Dove (9:42): And I learned that he would share nude photos of me with these guys, like, without my consent, and he was just constantly in these conversations. He was also on an app that was for couples looking for third, like a third person to share, you know, sexy time with, So he made us a profile, and I told him that I wasn't interested in participating with this. I've never been on the dating apps before, and I felt that, you know, if we were gonna meet a third person to explore with, that would happen organically, but he persisted on first engaging with other males, and then it turned into couples and then just females, and so I felt this hidden agenda of him engaging with people on these apps, because I think his ultimate goal was for him to be able to have sexual experiences with other women while also being in a relationship with me, but he was doing this very slowly. And so throughout the relationship, he would be in these conversations with strangers on the app, and they would be very sexually explicit, and he'd send photos of me, and then he would set up the conversation to be like, well, now I'm going to, you know, have my girl talk to you, and he would hand the phone over to me.

Dove (11:14): And at this point, it was easier for me to just engage and send some kind of message back to these guys on the app rather than to keep pushing it off, and he would consistently ask me, Do you have these conversations that were very sexual? And it just felt off for me. I would lay awake at night thinking about this particular thing and questioning myself if I was like, how I felt about it, because this wasn't something I had ever explored before, and so I would think, well, maybe it's just unfamiliar and maybe I will find something that I like about it, but, yeah, I never did. And outside of the act, he was constantly on porn, and so if we had or when we had sex, he would, majority of the time, leave after, and then instead of going to bed, he would stay awake and would be conversing with people on the app and often with porn, and that began to weigh on me. Just, yeah, it just felt it just wasn't something that I was into, and I did feel neglected, like my needs were neglected.

Dove (12:36): And also in the bedroom, like when I would share with him, like, my likes or dislikes, they were disregarded, and he would impose his fantasies onto me and then act as if they were mine. Like, it was a very twisted then after imposing his fantasies on me, he would turn it around and tell me essentially how much he's doing for me by trying to fulfill my fantasies, which were actually his. It was quite twisted, and so I'm, at this point, I am feeling pretty that my emotions and needs are either minimized or disregarded, and if our relationship had any issues, it was constantly my issue to fix, and her communication began to really struggle, especially when I would be up at my home, you know, seven hours away, he would want constant access to me, and throughout the relationship, he would become more and more agitated if I didn't respond at a certain time or even in a certain way, and it got to the point where if I didn't respond to him, like, within the minute, then he would be extremely upset at me. And so I'm, yeah, just my phone became a very big point of stress for me.

Brandon Chadwick (14:08): Hi everyone. If you've been listening to Narcissist Apocalypse for a long time, you probably know I haven't done host read ads in years. And that's because all I really have with you is trust. So as time has gone on, I become more careful about what I bring to the show, especially because survivors deserve care from people who understand trauma and aren't treating it like some side issue. That's why I wanted to tell you about Rebound Therapy.

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Brandon Chadwick (15:08): I'll also put the link in the episode description. So, so far we're hearing about everything that he wants, and we're not hearing what your needs are. Did you express at all what your needs were? And if you did, how did those get quieted quickly? And once it did get quieted, if that's what happens, do you fight back for it?

Brandon Chadwick (15:40): Like how do you feel when you're being minimized for the things you need when then you're also being asked for everything the other direction? You know, when it comes to that minimization, are you letting it go? Like, how are you feeling about everything within that realm of things?

Dove (16:02): So, I had a need of being able to communicate clearly with one another and a need to be heard, because he would very much dominate the conversation, and I'd asked him if he could, if we could take turns sharing, talking to one another, and then also listening, because a lot of it was just me listening to him, and when I would start to speak, I would be interrupted within the first sentence, and when I brought this up to him, he would belittle that request and call it therapy talk. And then he also told me to that I needed to speak louder and to just interject and talk over him, which just felt like a losing game because he was very loud and big in conversation. And so, yeah, that need for clear communication just felt completely shut down, and that also led to me silencing myself because it felt clear to me that he actually wasn't interested in hearing my thoughts or needs. So I have another thing that I want to say just about the needs that were ignored. About four, five months in, I've been spending majority of my time living and working with him, and I had a need for some space for some me time, and I shared this with him.

Dove (17:35): I put out the idea of getting a bell tent, which is a little canvas tent that I could just set up outside of the fifth wheel somewhere and just be able to have my own little zone. And he took that extremely personally and made up the story of how he wouldn't be allowed in the tent and how I would just spend all of my time in there. And so, yeah, this became one of the many things that were just held against me throughout the rest of the relationship. I never ended up getting the tent, but this was also the beginning of him creating stories in his head and then holding them against me. Like, if he had this whole story of how me getting a tent would be me completely avoiding him and when it was just me asking for some me time and a little bit of space, because I very much love my solitude, and that is something that he's very aware of.

Dove (18:41): And so his solution to this was to set up a folding table middle of the living room area, you know, which is very small, so not even a full size folding table, took up, like, a third of that space, and there's absolutely no privacy there. And he, used that against me in a way to show me what he's doing to support me, act, this generous act of him setting up a place for me in his home, a thing that I did not ask for. I didn't want a table in the middle of his house, and so, yeah, I never used it. So, six months in, things really took a turn. The communication was really struggling, and I was beginning to feel, like, quite small, and the first big blowout was one afternoon.

Dove (19:40): We were getting ready for work, and I had asked him if he had packed us lunch. And because it was after 1PM, in his head, whatever he packed wasn't for lunch, and so he had this huge blow up from that very simple question, and he punched a hole in the cabinet. He threw his coffee mug outside. He ripped his shirt off. At this point, he's also this was the first, like, huge rage that he went into where he's yelling and screaming at me.

Dove (20:14): He runs outside, punching himself in the head, hitting his head on his truck. He flips his table saw and goes on the whole rampage outside. I am just watching him, and then he comes back inside, sit at the table, and it's just a complete sobbing mess, and he looks at me and asks, like, why are you making me do this? And in that moment, like, felt my stomach drop because I was like, well, like, I'm not making you do any of this, and the fact that, like, you believe that feels quite concerning. And so this was the start of a pattern that I recognized a month later, and the pattern turned into two and a half quote unquote good days and then five or more terrible days, because, yeah, at this point, all of the issues that were in our relationship were mine to fix.

Dove (21:16): Anytime I would try to share what was going on in my world was either minimized or disregarded, it also took a turn in the way where even just day to day things that I would share would be used against me. And so, for example, he started with accusations of me cheating on him, and I went to the grocery store by myself one day, and I saw one of our mutual friends outside of the store, and I said hi to him and chatted with my friend, and I felt so anxious about running into this mutual friend because I felt that my ex would blow that very normal interaction just out of proportion, and so I didn't tell him that I saw this friend for a day, and I was stressing about it because I felt, you know, if I didn't tell him that I saw this friend and he somehow found out that he would think there was something going on, and then also if I do tell him that he's gonna suspect me of doing something behind his back. And so I told him I saw this mutual friend and that I talked to him and he was visibly upset.

Dove (22:30): He didn't have a blow up in that moment, but that was an incident that was brought up many times throughout the remainder of our relationship, of me cheating on him, another one of the stories he created and held against me. And so now I'm in a place of going to bed, feeling stressed out, often going to bed with him being very angry at me, and that was also another need. Like, I don't like going to bed in partnership angry, and there was often fights started before going to bed, then he would just be all of a, you know, go right to sleep and I would just stay awake. And the sleep deprivation was very real. He, outside of starting a fight, he would, you know, like aggressively, like, yank the blanket off of me or, like, elbow or knee me throughout the night.

Dove (23:23): And then in the morning when I woke up, I didn't know, like, what kind of mood he was in or, at this point, pretty much anything I did or didn't do could just be held against me. And so it was almost like this ticking time bomb of what is the next thing that's gonna come up because there were all of these issues and not one of them had been resolved in our relationship. And that is something that conflict resolution is really important to me, and I've had various other relationships before being with this abusive ex, and I know that I'm a good communicator in relationships, and I know how to have hard conversations and to work through them, and so this, I just felt so out of sorts within myself because that being able to get have resolution was just nonexistent in this relationship, and what it was was all the issues were put on my shoulders, and I was constantly berated for them for the second half of the relationship. So, yeah, the six month mark, he has a huge blow up about the packed lunch, and about a week after that, we're having an argument, and he, at this point, is yelling at me way more often than not, and he grabs my biceps and violently shakes me, and he leaves bruises on both my arms, and I didn't bring up that incident to him.

Dove (24:52): I just thought it wouldn't really be worth the fight in that moment, but then a month later, in another argument, he's, nose to nose with me, like, yelling me at me in my face, and he shoved me into the corner of the kitchen and was holding me there as he's screaming at me. And at this point, there was many times where he would block doorways or hold my wrist to try to keep me from leaving the room. And because a lot of the times when he would be yelling at me, I would just walk outside and need to take a breather, just lay on the ground and just get away from him for a moment. I would tell him that I would come back, but yeah, he didn't like that if I ever, when I would leave the room. And so, after he shoved me into the kitchen corner, I brought that up to him the next day.

Dove (25:46): That behavior was completely unacceptable, and his initial reaction was to scoff at me, and he just belittled me and did not take what I was saying seriously at all. He gave me a very sarcastic apology and then told me, you know, it'll never happen again. So, at this point, physical violence is beginning. I mean, the mental and emotional abuse is going on, like, full force, also psychologically. He played a lot of mind games with me.

Dove (26:21): It was like this constant setting me up for failure, and I was beginning to just feel hollow in the relationship and isolating myself also because he became very obsessed overall if he witnessed me having a conversation with somebody or if someone reached out to me on my phone, he would question me about it, and so the interrogations started, and that persisted. And so in the fall, we went on a trip, we went down to see my family, and he began to sabotage the time with my family by starting fights that would become just circular arguments, and there were certain events that he was fully aware of and the timing of them where I'd be hanging out with my family, and he would keep me from participating in them because he felt that if I went to go hang out with my family that that would be abandoning him. So in the fall, we did a job in a little touristy mountain town, me mentioning how a hike would be fun, and then he held that against me. He we didn't actually end up having time to, like, make it on that hike during that trip, but somehow that was my fault, and I wasn't attached to going on this hike, but it was just another experience of creating an issue out of a non issue.

Dove (27:52): And then at this point, we're in the fall, and it is constant circular arguments. In these arguments, he takes this stance of being like a you versus me dynamic, which when I would push up against that and say, Hey, we're in a partnership, like, I'm not your opponent, we're on the same team. He wouldn't accept that, and I would also bring up how in situations, two people can have a different experience of the same thing, and so we each have our own individual perspective, but from him, there was only his perspective, and he full on claimed to know the big T truth of the situation while whatever my experience was completely squashed and disregarded. And so, I am isolating myself by now because there's just so much chaos going on in this relationship, and I'm in this mind frame that we still have the capacity to get through it with one another, and that we can still create this life that we wanted to share with each other. So I'm not being open to, you know, my friends and family, my support team about the reality of what is going on within me right now.

Dove (29:19): I'm being very selective around what I share with them because I know if I am honest with them about how he's actually behaving, that would paint a really terrible picture of him, and so I'm just protecting my abuser at this point and feeling just more and more alone. And we had a trip to go see my family, and during this trip, like my parents were throwing a party the first night that we would get there, and we missed majority of the party because he took a very long time getting out the door, and it was a four hour drive to get to my parents from his. And so I missed most of, like, all my extended family time. And then the following day, he was fully aware that my sister was having an open house that morning and that I wanted to attend that. And so that morning, I got up and let him sleep in, but I made him breakfast and went and woke him up, and he was so upset that I woke him up and told him or asked him, like, if we could go in, like, about thirty minutes, and he fought me on it, and he told me that, like, if I, you know, went over to my sister's house to hang out with my family, that would be me abandoning him because he would just be at my parents' house, and so we just ended up it was more so like him just yelling at me, and I completely missed that event with my family also, and when I saw them later, like, just felt so guilty and shameful.

Dove (30:56): That's not how I roll. Like, my family is very important to me, and outside of that, like, his, verbal and emotional blowup began to be more public. He would scream at me in parking lots, and he would drive erratically, and if I was ever driving, he would be yelling at me at some point, and I also found within myself that majority of the time when I would be yelled at, like, I would be able to maintain some like, level of calmness, or it was more so just a freeze kind of mode, and I would often, like, disassociate and visualize a protective bubble going over me, because if I had got to the point where if I tried to say anything, if I even got a sentence out of my mouth, that it would just be used against me. But there was this, these times where I began to shit talk myself, where I would just kind of collapse and just, you know, just talk about how terrible I was, but it was like his words about me were, like, coming out of my mouth. So it was like this very strange, parasitic thing where I feel like he's almost like poisoning the well of my mind just by being exposed to this abuse for so long, where like I noticed that like these aren't my words, this isn't what I think about myself, but they were coming out of my mouth and I knew that they were his, and so that, yeah, felt terrible.

Dove (32:36): And so, Thanksgiving time is when things went really south. I came down to spend Thanksgiving with him, and we actually went together to go see his sister who lives an hour drive away, and we were planning to stay the night there. And on the drive there, the feelings were very tense. I don't remember exactly what he was upset about, but he asked me if he could look at my phone once we got back to his house, and I agreed, and that made me really anxious because at this point, like any interactions I had with anybody, you know, would be used against me, and I knew that any conversation in my phone, specifically with male friends of mine, would just be blown out of proportion, and so I went through my phone and deleted some messages with friends, and these were just regular friends sharing and checking in with one another conversation, and we go to his sister's. He's in an extremely sour mood the entire time.

Dove (33:44): At one point, he goes to bed and then gets out of bed at one in the morning, in which I was up sitting at the table talking to his sister, and he, you know, comes down in a huff and just says, we're leaving, like, immediately, which I was surprised. He was upset that I hadn't gone to bed, and so we say goodbye to his sister and drive home. Things are very tense, and then when we get back to his house, you know, the middle of the night, he goes to bed again, and I'm staying up, and then all the lights were off in the house, and at one point he pretended he was going to bed and then he was like spying on me behind the bathroom door, which opened up into the living room and like pooped me. And so, I get maybe a little bit of sleep that night, and then the next morning, we sit down at the table and he's going to go through my phone. And so, I give it to him.

Dove (34:45): He starts going through it. He asked me messages. I lied to him and told him no. And then he asked me again if I deleted anything. I lied again and told him no.

Dove (34:55): And then he brings up his phone, and he has screenshots of messages that I had deleted, and, you know, he catches me in this this lie, and he completely loses his shit, yelling obscene terrible things at me and about how much I betrayed him. He was telling me that in his words, this is the worst thing that ever happened to him. And this became, you know, days of being berated, which was very common at this point in the relationship. But because I had, you know, lied to him, now he had more fuel to his fire of, like, how much wrong I am doing to him. And he asked me at one point why.

Dove (35:45): I deleted messages, and I told him that I was afraid of how he was gonna react to me just having conversations with friends. And he told me that he had heard that same thing from previous partners, that they were afraid of how he was going to react. And he went on and on, like, with his interrogation of my phone and my conversations, and he was, like, comparing the times of when I would talk to other people and then, you know, when I would have sent messages to him, and so he just had a huge list of reasons of all kinds of things of how I had wronged him. And so there's a few days of the constant berating, and then he turned us around to wanting to forgive me and gave me all of these rules of, like, what I needed to do to regain his trust. I don't remember exactly what all the rules were, but it was essentially, like, me not having any privacy.

Dove (36:55): And so then he went into hero mode of how much he forgave me, and then that lasted for a day or so. And then he got set off again about me talking to people and whatever he thought I was talking to them about behind his back. And so then the berating started up again, and there was a night when he went to bed very angry. I went into bed shortly after him and I laid as far as I could away from him, and we laid there in silence for about ten minutes, and then he started just verbally attacking me. And this voice that was just it was just teasing and, like, really I didn't even know how else to describe it other than the word like demonic.

Dove (37:46): Like, it was just very disturbing, the sound of his voice as he's telling me what he thinks of me in the worst of ways, attacking my character. He's just going off, and like in this week of abuse after the initial lie, yeah, when we're in the bed, he's starting to just verbally attack me. I'm laying there silently, and he's asking me questions, trying to get me to answer them, and I'm not answering him. And then he starts to tell me he was really caught up on one of my previous exes who I've known over a decade. He's a dear friend of mine, and he was really suspicious about this ex, and he was telling me that he had already reached out to this previous ex of mine and that he knows everything that's going on, everything that's happened between us, and that I just need to tell him.

Dove (38:43): And I didn't respond to that because there wasn't anything going on or to tell him. And I also learned that that was a lie. He had never reached out to this previous ex. He was just trying to catch me again doing something that he thought was wrong. And so, you know, he's yelling at me again for about fifteen, twenty minutes, and then he jumps on me and he wraps his hands around my throat and begins to strangle me, and my body, you know, my legs, torso are under the blanket.

Dove (39:16): I'm able to get my arms out, and I can push on his chest and eventually gets off of me and I walk out into the living room and I sit on the couch next to my dog and my mind is just going like a million miles a minute and I watched him come out into the living room. He is still screaming his head off, and I'm wondering if I can, like, grab, you know, some kind of weapon or something to defend myself, but I also don't want to escalate things, so I'm just sitting next to my dog because I know that this guy is, like, physically stronger than me, and I also have the thought of leaving. This is at 01:30 or so in the morning at the end of November. It's very cold outside, and so I made the choice to stay there and just to not react anything that he was doing, but being hyper aware of everything that he was doing. And he comes over and he shoves me while I'm sitting on the couch.

Dove (40:21): There was also a point where he had raised his arm like he was going to strike me across the face and then cocked a looty like he was going to spit at me, but then bit to the side and then lunged like he was going to bite my throat and then stopped like an inch away from my throat. And, yeah, so he's just losing his shit, and I am once again just visualizing my protective bubble and eventually lay back down, and he goes silent and lays down for about forty five minutes, and then his alarm goes off. He gets up. He whispers that he's sorry to me, gives me a kiss, and then he leaves for work. And that day I ended up staying, I felt in shock, and when he got home that night, we talked about it, and he apologized for it, but then he would go back into how I had betrayed him.

Dove (41:25): And later into the evening, he told me that he had fixed everything, and I wasn't sure what he meant by that, and he just kept saying strangely, like sweetly, like, don't worry. Like, I've fixed everything. Everything's okay now. And I asked him, what are you talking about? And he told me that he had talked to one of my friends from my phone.

Dove (41:51): At this point, he was on my phone nonstop. And so he reached out my friend pretending to be me and was texting this friend as me and also sent him news of me, and he needed to do that in his mind to figure out what kind of friendship I had or how this friend would respond, and he realized with the way my friend responded that there wasn't anything sexual going on between us, and so that, you know, soothed my abuser's curiosity, and he had also deleted all of these messages. And so, yeah, I still don't know exactly everything that was said or sent. But when he told me this and just hearing this weird, like, satisfaction in his voice and him thinking that that was okay, and it felt extremely violating to me, like my body just went cold. I didn't say anything to him.

Dove (42:56): I just went to bed, and he was trying to get me to say something and acting very sweet. And yeah, that next day I had left. He did some things to try to like trap me from leaving and but I was able to leave at that point, and I went home. My body was in shock after all of that, and once I got back to my home and inside of it, I just fell to my knees and just broke down. And so this is very beginning of December now, and him and I had planned to go be with my family for Christmas and to spend New Year's together.

Dove (43:38): And so I had ten days at my house, and I did make the trip down to go spend Christmas with him, and I knew that I couldn't stay in this relationship very much longer. I also felt like a complete shell of myself. I was curious to how and if he was going to do anything about the fact that he had strangled me, and so I was just observing him. I didn't ask for anything during this time in the relationship and in these final two weeks that we spent together. It was the same cycle of abuse, maybe two and a half days of goodness, and then five or more terrible days.

Dove (44:26): And after that trip, we left on a really terrible note, but when I came home, like we were still in a relationship together. Over the next month, we were still together, and the communication was absolutely terrible. He would just blame and shame and guilt me, and it was constantly about how much I betrayed him, and he would apologize a little bit about the strangulation, but it never felt like sincere. After a month from the last time that I saw him, I spent time with a friend, and I didn't intend to, but I just shared a lot of what I was going through, and my friend just listened and looked at me and just had this shocked look on their face and like, what the fuck? And seeing their face, just, something clicked in me around, like, how I had found myself in a place of accepting this abuse as a state of normalcy.

Dove (45:36): This friend of mine was also able to see real time these texting games that my abuser would send and just the unhinged way that he would talk to me. And so that was really helpful to receive, like, confirmation from a dear friend that, like, this behavior, like, is not okay. And so it was the following day I sent my ex a voice memo because he was not able to have a phone conversation. So a month after I had last saw my ex at New Year's, I had a friend visit me, and without intending to, like, my experience of what had been going on in my relationship all just all came out of my mouth, and the look on my friend's face was just absolute shock, and they gave me a really solid reality check that how my abuser was treating me was not okay, and this friend was also able to witness real time the text that my ex would send me and mind games that he would play, and so that was really helpful to have a friend witness that. And so the following day, I sent my ex a voice memo, and I broke up with him, and he, you know, responded with a lot of shame and blame and asking me, How could I do this?

Dove (47:06): To him, and we never had a closure conversation, and so for that first month, after me sending in a breakup message, he would send me videos of him crying, of him breaking down, and then there would be voice memos of him berating me and then circling back to how he would never hurt me again as far as putting his hands on me, and then it turned into suicide threats, and I would hear from him about once a week had these suicide threats, and it got to the point where I reached out to a couple of mutual friends in his community and let them know that I needed to go no contact with my ex and that I was concerned for his emotional and mental well-being and that he was sending suicide threats and they were understanding and then at that point I went no contact with him and I haven't heard from or reached out to him since.

Brandon Chadwick (48:13): And how has your healing process been in this time?

Dove (48:17): Well, I spent the next year mainly in solitude. I'm, you know, have a strong community where I'm at, and so, I certainly have the support of friends, but it took me some time to start sharing my story with anybody, like, or even just little parts of it. This is still the first time that I've actually shared it at length, and there's so much more that happened. But yeah, I just began to recover by being with myself and reflecting on how I found myself in this relationship, like what had actually happened, and then thinking back on it, being able to see the warning signs and how these things escalated and how I lost myself, and also listening to survivor stories has been extremely helpful. The first one that I listened to was on strangulation, and I didn't realize how dangerous experiencing that was and the likelihood of it leading to becoming fatal.

Dove (49:28): So, yeah, that was a big wake up call for me also, and yeah, I feel very selective about who I share my time and energy with. I am very happy just spending time with myself and my dog, and I feel also very protective of my peace. I've felt a shift from myself out of that, out of a people pleasing phase into just choosing myself.

Brandon Chadwick (49:58): And if you had any words of wisdom for others, what would it be?

Dove (50:03): So, for words of wisdom, if you're able to share honestly what's going on in your world with a trusted friend and allow them to be a sounding board for you, that I found that to be extremely helpful. Also, making changes to my physical experience. I think you can do this inside or out of the relationship, but once I got out, I made some changes to my hair and just started going into more self care in ways where I could externally be it, and that felt like a reclamation of myself and also empowering in the way of just feeling beautiful. And the last thing that was very helpful for me, I think I did this when I got out of the relationship. You could certainly start doing it while you're in one, but I felt the need to write out every single bad experience that I had with my abuser, and it took me a few weeks to write everything out, sitting down for ten, fifteen minutes at a time, and that turned into 13 pages of experiences.

Dove (51:18): Those are just ones that I could remember, and that was very helpful because it allowed me to get those moments out of my system because a lot of the recovery for me was just reliving the abuse, and so, yeah, being able to write it out. It's nice just to put it somewhere outside of me.

Brandon Chadwick (51:41): Well Dove, I really want to thank you for being here with us today, sharing your story and really getting into the little details of the tactics that were being used on you and we're happy that you're here because you were dealing with strangulation and on a lot of these cases, you're lucky to be alive. So we're happy that you're here, that you're alive and sharing your story and validating others experiences and hopefully for you, this is the final little piece here for you to have closure and move through this and I'm just happy you're here to share your story with everyone today.

Unknown Speaker (52:18): Thank you Brandon. Yeah, I'm happy to be here too.

Brandon Chadwick (52:21): Well, thank you once again Dove for being here and if you want to be a guest like Dove was today, please do go to our website at narcissistapocalypse.com, click on the guest form button, fill out the form, and we will go from there. And we also have a support group at our website with Zoom meetings every Wednesday nights, Thursday afternoons, and Saturday nights. And we have forum boards for you to post on to get the validation that you need from survivors just like you. Join our support group today. And we also have a newsletter with a free workbook attached for every new survivor story.

Brandon Chadwick (52:53): All of this you can sign up for at narcissistapocalypse.com. And that is it for today's survivor story for today's episode. So for myself and Dove, we hope you have a good night.