Am I (M34) in a relationship with an (F30) abusive partner?

The pattern goes something like this:

  • I bring something of a personally vulnerable nature up to her (about my past, my feelings, my beliefs, something that I want our relationship to improve on, something that I fucked up on, etc...)
  • She doesn't respond or says "what do you want to do about it"? I typically don't have anything in mind I'm just exploring something with her as a partner or best friend. This is what our relationship was built on in the beginning, we could be each other's closet confidants and provide amazing insights for each other.
  • She gets angry about something that I said.
  • She begins making large sweeping generalizations about our relationship, typically anchored in one specific time in our past. She starts getting emotional and controls the conversation.

Here's the IF > THEN > ELSE where it can go out of control.

IF, I interject at that point and tell her that we're way off course to where I started the conversation and what I need out of it (especially if it's a vulnerability related to my healing from childhood abuse), she will get extremely angry and tell me to "LEAVE" or "GET OUT NOW". We have an agreement, based on the last few altercations, where if she gets to this point I need to leave (the room). She needs cycle of sleep to reset and will pick it back up the next day at some point. This is always troublesome for me as I rarely sleep if this occurs because it's unresolved and I'm sleeping away from her (and our bed).

THEN, I leave the room and there is no escalation to abuse.

ELSE, I don't leave the room and she launches into a verbal dagger-fest of every soft spot that she knows about with me (my childhood abuse, my poor relationships with my family, things that I've messed up on, etc.) and / or begins to hit me. These hits started as very aggressive pushes that can knock me against a wall or to the floor, turned into a full force slap that left a mark on my face for days, to the last two times being full-fledged punches being thrown at me including my face. With her ring on, she cut my face by my nose and my forehead. I have bruises on my ribs and collarbone.

I know deep in my brain in those moments that if I ever laid a finger on her she would hold it against me forever, or attempt to use it on me as the reason for justifying her abuse, so I don't.

It has been almost a year since she did this the last time. I've held true to my commitment to leave the room when she said to up until earlier this week. I know this is wrong, but she went to an emotional-abuse trigger during the IF anger aspect, I felt like I was being controlled, and I was really tired of being casted out of my own bedroom to the couch AGAIN (this has happened at least 10x over the past year). I'd had enough and told her that I wasn't leaving the room until it was resolved. She followed me out of the room, attempted to push me down the stairs, started hitting me, and then followed me to a corner in the house where I was trying to hide and gave me every verbal lashing that she could think of. I was sobbing uncontrollably the whole time.

Sorry for the long post I had to copy and paste some of this from my notes and try to rationalize it into structure.

/r/domesticviolence Thread Parent