“That Wasn’t Self-Love. That Was Abuse.”
“This is me loving myself.”
“This is me standing up for myself.”
Those words still ring through my mind for the cruel hipocrisy they really were.
That’s what he said to me after the most explosive blow up he’d ever had at me, on what was already one of the most emotionally fragile nights of my life. But what actually happened that night wasn’t self-love. It wasn’t empowerment. It was abuse—plain and simple… to someone he had claimed to “love” hours prior.
Let’s talk about what really happened though.
I was already on the ground… he wasn’t punching up, he was punching down.
In January, I was emotionally overwhelmed, energetically flooded. I didn’t even know why, at least not cognitively. I was carrying so much heaviness—some of it personal, some of it spiritual, and a lot of it tied to him, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. That’s how connected we were. I could feel the shifts in him before he ever said a word.
He was the only one who knew how low I was. The only one I let see it.
And when he called that night—while I was already crying in the bathtub—I asked one simple question:
“When will I see you again?”
I told him that I missed him.
That’s all it took for him to unleash the worst fury and rage I had ever experienced from him.
He said I ruined his life.
He basically told me I was the worst person he had ever met. That I destroyed him. That he wanted nothing else to do with me. And he didn’t say it once—he said it over and over, louder, harsher, while I sat there sobbing, begging him to stop.
I tried to calm him down.
I fawned.
I apologized.
I said I would fix it—whatever “it” was—just to make it stop.
But he didn’t stop.
He kept going.
And then, in the middle of all of that cruelty, he looked at me—still sobbing, still apologizing, still begging him to stop—and he said,
“This is me loving myself. This is me standing up for myself.”
But… No. It wasn’t.
Standing up for yourself doesn’t look like attacking someone who’s already on the ground.
That’s not empowerment. That’s bullying.
Self-love doesn’t require the destruction of another person.
It doesn’t mock someone’s mental health.
It doesn’t target someone at their most vulnerable moment and call that “growth.”
That’s not self-love. That’s self-righteousness wrapped in ego.
He called it healing.
But it was harm.
Intentional harm. Psychological harm. Emotional harm.
The part that still breaks me is this:
Back in November, I had been the one who was triggered. Deeply. Old wounds flared, CPTSD symptoms erupted. I was dissociating, having constant flashbacks, anxious, reactive. And even in the middle of that, I knew he wasn’t the one causing it… in that moment—but I also knew I might project it onto him if I wasn’t careful.
So I pulled back.
I told him I needed space.
That I didn’t want to take it out on him.
That I didn’t want to damage something sacred.
I paused to protect him from my pain.
He never once tried to protect me from his.
What followed that night made it worse.
After the verbal assault, after the emotional destruction, I was shattered. And yet… I still offered grace to him. I still couldn’t quite give up on him… that’s the insanity of a trauma bond. You’ll literally beg your abuser to forgive YOU, because you’ve spent years being conditioned to try to soley hold this whole thing together.
Just days later, I stood in his living room, and he looked me in the eye and held my hands while he made so promises he would never keep.
He said he knew I didn’t deserve the way he treated me.
He said he was going to fix it.
He said he needed a few weeks of “no contact” to get sorted—just like I had offered him in November—so he could work on himself.
He said when it was over, we’d start over fresh and correctly.
We’d court.
We’d rebuild.
He acted like he finally understood.
He even requested one last night of intimacy even after all of that—and I let him.
Not because I didn’t know better,
but because I was so desperate for any scraps of love I could get from the man I had loved so desperately through all his darkness. I really didn’t know how to let go of the hope.
And then…
Ten days later, with no warning, he blocked me.
Not because I was hateful.
But because I had publicly expressed love and gratitude for the man I had spent the last 5 years of my life with. And that clearly exposed the deception he was trying to hide.
Hard to paint me as the monster when that was my offense… and the greater risk—what would the new supply think?
I’ve learned a lot since then.
I’ve learned that abusers love to call boundaries what are actually punishments.
I’ve learned that you can be fawning on the floor, sobbing for mercy, completely defenseless and still be told you’re the problem.
But most of all, I’ve learned this:
Self-love does not destroy other people.
And real strength never looks like cruelty.
You can’t “stand up for yourself” by stepping on someone who’s already collapsed.
That wasn’t self-love.
That was emotional abuse.
And I see it clearly now, and we’re going set the record straight and finally call it what it is.
