It always varied. But I'd say the most comprehensive and encompassing answer I can give as to what triggered and underlay all of my abuse is this: my own distorted sense of ego. Every time I hurt her I was prioritizing my own feelings and emotions over hers and felt that I was justified in doing so, that my feelings and emotions were more important than her suffering. At the time, however, I didn't know this was why I acted like I did.

Sometimes learning a single fact is enough to make an entire series of corroborating details, previously unrecognized, fall into place. And for me it was reading a sentence from an article about The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky. The sentence was this: 'Everywhere Dostoevsky stresses the egocentric disposition of the criminal.' And it's true. Reading this framed Dostoevsky's writing in an entirely different way for me and also made me realize where my own criminality stemmed from - it stemmed from my entitled and egocentric ways.

More often than not, people commit a crime in order to satisfy their own feelings or needs, and they feel as though they are justified in breaking the law in order to satisfy these feelings or needs. They break the law because, for some reason or another, they feel that in that moment they have a right to be breaking the law, their ego makes them believe they are justified in going against the social contract. And this same reasoning applied to me: I was hurting her because I falsely felt as though I had a right to be hurting her.

Sorry for quite a long answer. But, yeah, in short the thing that triggered all of my abuse was this: my own distorted sense of ego.