It honestly depends on their mood, but most of the time they do a complete 180 within seconds - become cool calm and collected and make it seem like you’re the crazy one and they’re the victim. I honestly think mine used to push me to my breaking point so I would react in anger and therefore he could make it seem like I was the awful one in his sick, twisted reality.
“Why are you acting crazy? We were just having a conversation.” Conversation meaning him berating me for hours while I sat quietly and took it until I couldn’t anymore.
Look at how you’re acting… I’m the way I am because I have to put up with you.”
“You’re acting insane. Calm down.”
1/10 times my reaction to his actions would just fuel the fire within him. Those times ended in physical abuse situations. One of these “1/10” I actually have on recording, and as messed up as it sounds I go back and listen to it ever couple of months to remind myself where I was and where I am today. It brings me back to reality when I feel like I’m missing him and want to give him another chance(we have a child together so contact will never stop completely, which messes with me constantly but that’s a whole other story). The recording makes me thankful to be alive and proud that I got out… He showed up at my house out of nowhere that day of the recording, screaming mad for no reason other than he was having a bad day and needed someone to project his feelings towards because he can’t handle any kind of emotions at all. In the recording you can here me ask calmly 10-15 times to please leave my house or he was going to wake up our daughter up who was taking a nap. After asking over and over nicely for a couple of minutes and him just screaming back, the baby did wake up. I ended up screaming at him when I heard her crying to “get out now!”. He took my raising my voice as disrespect, which made him go ape. What follows on the recording is a ceramic bowl shattering less than 3 seconds after I yelled, then you can hear a bar stool hit me, and then you hear him stomp across the room while you can hear me scrambling to get my footing from the barstool blow, him grabbing me and slamming me against the wall and proceeding to hit me, all while he’s eerily calm yet breathing heavily and saying “you really wanna do this. You always start shit. You really like to push me to my breaking point don’t you.”
Both scenarios always end the same and to sum it up, it will always be your fault for reacting to their abuse. Coming from someone who has been told(from a licensed therapist along with a few others) to write a book about the abuse I suffered and how I overcame it, don’t let yourself get to the point of snapping, run before it gets to that point. If you’re having to ask on Reddit what happens, you’re still in a situation where you can save yourself a lot of trauma and get out.