You're Not His Girlfriend. You're His Emotional Punching Bag.

Julie Akacha

19 minutes ago

11 min read

I've been with that guy since January. And starting in February, the disrespect began: his ex coming back, the lies, the humiliation and the constant stress. By March, I had to quit my part-time job, which I blamed entirely on a severe depression that I felt coming on all of a sudden. I was on sick leave until July, with that guy still in my life.

In July, we broke up, and we didn't stay in touch like we used to. My job was going well; in fact, I quickly found a better one, right near my home. I went on holiday alone, and I finally felt myself starting to feel reborn. Right away, I knew it was because of his physical and emotional absence from my life. I no longer had his toxic energy around me.

At the end of July, I fell back into the trap of emotional dependence when he contacted me again.

This week, I've been caught up in a legal case, going back and forth to the police station for the past three days. He went too far by trying to push me to my limits. I haven't slept properly for two weeks now, and I've missed two days of the job I've had for the past three weeks because my physical and mental health wouldn't let me get out of bed.

Today, I'm going to fight to make this guy pay so that this never happens to other girls again. I feel so much hatred towards him, his actions and especially his lack of remorse. I'd like to channel this anger here to address all of our readers currently trapped in a toxic relationship. I wish that no woman in this world would ever have to go through what we go through all too often.

For months, I've been forcing myself to accept everything and stay with him because I'd convinced myself he was the one. Today, I'm forcing myself to stop pressing the “call” button and to convince myself that my life without him is possible, and that it's going to be a thousand times better.

Admittedly, I didn't have the strength to leave until after that one night too many, the one that will leave me with lifelong scars, but I left. I'm neither a psychologist nor a mother; I don't know you personally, and I'm not your best friend. But if I can open even the tiniest crack in your mind to start the process of making things click for you, then I'll do it with this essay. I've been repeating these words to myself for days now, and I hope they bring you the peace they bring me.

Do you remember the girl you were before him?

The one who'd send a text without rereading it twelve times, who'd spend an evening with the girls without secretly checking her phone under the table every five minutes. The one who'd make a decision on her own without asking six people for their opinion because she was afraid of messing up.

That strong, independent woman who was building her life in exactly the way she wanted. You didn't notice the exact day it all changed; none of us do. That's the most insidious part of it. One day, your whole life started revolving around one single person, and it's not yourself anymore.

Take two seconds to imagine what your life would be like today if you'd walked away the very first time he disrespected you (and I know you remember it perfectly).

You'd still have that job, those friends, those safe places, those moments to yourself when you enjoyed your own company. You would have spent the last few months actually sleeping through the night, or the only sleepless nights you'd have had would have been due to a Netflix movie marathon, not litres of tears shed or hours of arguments in which you're humiliated.

You wouldn't have spent entire days when your mental state kept you from going out, seeing your friends, partying or shopping. You would have gone on that holiday, you would have gone on that hiking trip, you would have got back into reading, you would have kept up with the gym, and you would already be the best version of yourself. Today, you're just his version of yourself.

Everyone's asking you, “Why are you getting worked up over nothing right now? Why are you jealous? Why are you crying over a text message?” You're looking for the flaw in yourself because you're convinced it's there. You haven't become unstable. You've become someone trying to survive in a game where the rules change every day, set by a guy who needs you to be thrown off balance so he can feel important.

Because when someone alternates between doting on you and ghosting you, between promising you the moon on Monday and doing the opposite on Thursday, between loving you to death at the weekend and treating you like a stranger on Wednesday, your brain never gets a break.

It goes round and round in circles, looking for clues everywhere. You're not “paranoid”. Your brain is trying to protect you from a danger you shouldn't even have to deal with. But you're not just afraid he'll leave; you're afraid of what he'll do if you dare to disagree.

He threatens to leave you, to cheat on you, to go back to his ex, to never speak to you again... And even if he doesn't say it outright, he's already planted those fears in your mind.

You start holding yourself back, thinking that he's going to go back to that girl, that he's going to tell everyone you're crazy, that he's going to lie about you…

A guy is never insecure because of a woman except when he knows deep down that she deserves ten thousand times better than him. And that's why he creates all this fear. Because without it, he knows, just like everyone else, that you'd realise in a split second just how crazy what he's doing is.

So you start filtering what you tell your girlfriends. You leave out the worst parts because if you really told everything, you'd have to hear their reaction. And deep down, you're not ready to hear it yet.

So you make excuses: “He was tired, he's going through a rough patch, he had a tough childhood.”

That damn tough childhood. It's EVERYWHERE. Understanding why a guy is broken can help you feel empathy, but it never erases what he's putting YOU through.

Both truths exist at the same time: yes, he may have suffered, and yes, that same person is still eating you alive. These two realities don't cancel each other out. Meanwhile, you're becoming an expert on him: his childhood, his exes, his traumas, his patterns...

Do you think he spends his nights trying to figure out what he's doing to you? Do you think he keeps dwelling on the day you told him what your ex did to you, what your father did to you, what your mother did to you, things that supposedly caused your traumas and explain some of your behaviour?

Absolutely not, and you should know that, even if he tells you so five times a year when he's trying to win you back by crying. Because a man who is fully aware of that wouldn't put you through EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS, or even worse. So the real question isn't “Why is he like this?” It's “Why do I accept a life where I spend more time trying to understand him than feeling safe with him?”

Control doesn't start the day you can no longer leave. It starts the day you stop asking yourself, “Am I happy?” and start asking, “How can I make him happy? How can I convince him not to leave, not to cheat? What can I do?” He didn't change you overnight. He taught you to stop trusting yourself so he could fool you even better.

Those kinds of men don't love; they derive a sadistic pleasure from waking up every morning knowing that a soul is entirely devoted to them, no matter what they do. We think control is about controlling what you do. In reality, it starts with controlling what you believe, your reality. The day someone makes you doubt yourself, he no longer needs to control you. You do it yourself for him.

That's why so many women who get out of this kind of relationship say exactly the same thing: “I didn't know what was real anymore.” It always starts small: “That's not what happened. You're misremembering. You're overreacting. You're too sensitive. I'm not showing you those messages. You saw my DMs, they're empty. What are you talking about? She's my childhood friend.” “You're crazy.”

And that's where it leads: no matter what you do, you'll always be the crazy one in his story. He's already made up his mind; he's already told everyone who'd listen. Fine. So you're crazy, then.

Let the world think whatever it wants. Let his friends nod along, let his mum think you're “complicated”, let everyone buy into his version of the story. A guy who needs to tell everyone that you're crazy is a guy who's already laying the groundwork for the next one and the one after that. Because he's not going to change.

He's too comfortable in his little bubble, surrounded by people who approve of him without ever questioning him, to feel the slightest need to take a hard look at himself. So he'll replay that exact same scenario with someone else. And one day, the truth always comes out. Patterns repeat themselves, and the people around him always end up noticing them. All guys like him give themselves away over time.

Except that the best part of the story is that, on that day, you won't give a damn anymore. You'll already be far away, you'll already be at peace, and you'll watch that truth come out without even feeling the need to say, “I told you so”, because you'll have already won long before the world understands anything.

You can walk away in peace even if you're “the crazy one” in his eyes. His version of you doesn't belong to you anymore. Meanwhile, he keeps up his act. And let's talk about his little acts of attention, the ones that made you “crazy”. The ones where he compliments all the other girls, where he likes all their posts, where he “hangs out” with “just a friend” he talks to more than he talks to you.

And you end up not being able to feel pretty or confident anymore because you're in a relationship with a guy who's literally addicted to the attention of every girl EXCEPT yours.

Nobody talks about this enough. That wear and tear, that silent erosion of your self-confidence.

It's real. He's the one who created it, and the day you finally leave, because yes, it's going to happen, he'll go straight to those girls he used to talk to for comfort.

Don't feel disgusted. Feel PITY. Because what he's looking for there is an ego boost, not them. He knows full well that what he's doing is terrible, and that little bit of unhealthy excitement he feels when he does it is exactly the proof that he knows it.

He just wants to feel like he can still get what he wants, that someone still finds him interesting. And these girls, 90% of the time, couldn't care less about him; they're probably saying the same things to three other guys who are bugging them on a Friday night. It's PATHETIC, and the funny thing is that when that thrill wears off (it always will), he'll wake up thinking, “What the hell did I do?”

See? There's no reason to cry over this. Remember that the man of your life would never let another woman think she has free rein with him. He'll never let any woman think she can come before you, and he'll shout the opposite from the rooftops of the world.

This guy isn't capable of being obsessed with you the way the man of your life should be, but he is, on the other hand, fully capable of fixating on your every little mistake so he can constantly shift the blame back onto you whenever you have something to hold against him.

Does the irony stem from this situation, or from the fact that it is all the more obvious because he doesn't even try to hide it? You confront him because he lied to you, and five minutes later you're defending how you found out the truth. You confront him because he was flirting, and later you're apologising for your tone.

Trying to explain your feelings to a man who doesn't care and only loves himself is like trying to fix your hair with the windows down on the motorway. You can try as hard as you want; it'll never stick, because the problem isn't your technique, it's the headwind.

Stop searching for the right words. They don't exist in his reality. Respect isn't something you unlock through better communication; it's either there or it isn't. People always ask you the same unfair question: “Why don't you just leave?” As if leaving were a single decision when it's the last of them.

The first one happened the day you stopped asking yourself, “Am I happy?” and started asking, “Maybe I'm expecting too much.”

That's where it starts, lowering your standards without even realising it. You need to start telling yourself, “This isn't how I want to be loved for the rest of my life,” and leave. You know, deep down, it's never going to change. Even if sometimes, for a few days, it's the honeymoon, it always comes back to chaos. In his mind, you belong to him because he takes you for granted. You're not his pretty girl anymore, not his baby, not his treasure. You're his thing.

And if that evidence doesn't work, imagine yourself at your wedding, saying “I do” to a man whose phone you'll have checked just two minutes before walking down the aisle.

Standing in front of him and his groomsmen, who'll all know that just a few weeks ago, he cheated on you during their weekend getaway. That just last night, they might have called you crazy and told him, “To think you ended up marrying that b*,” without him standing up for you.

Behind you, your bridesmaids, your best friends, are rehashing all the nights you cried, threw up from the pain or let yourself go for weeks on end; all the opportunities for a happy life you gave up because of him, and the fact that they completely disapprove of your marriage.

Saying “I do” to the man who will surely hit on a guest's cousin behind your back. Love isn't measured by how much suffering you're willing to endure. If your best friend told you, “He lies to me, he humiliates me, he disappears for days, he cries and promises to change every time I try to leave,” what would you tell her? “Stay, love heals”? Never. So why is your own life the exception?

Love can go hand in hand with change; it can't replace it. No amount of love makes up for someone's refusal to take a hard look at themselves. Of course, the first three months or weeks were great because he had to be that way to win you over. Because winning you over isn't supposed to be easy, and keeping you is even harder.

Remember the standards you had back then and how he met them. If one man was able to meet them, it means you deserve it and that others will be able to as well. Stop trying to get back the version of him he used to be, and get back the version of yourself you used to be, the one who would never have put up with a quarter of what he's doing to you today.

One day, you'll walk down the aisle or towards any other moment that truly matters to you, and the man standing there will NEVER, not even once, have succeeded in making you doubt your worth.

That's what revenge is: simply your peace of mind without him in it.

Let this heartbreak be the LAST one. The last time you beg for the bare minimum, for love and respect.

You'll never again have to beg to be treated right. It was supposed to be given, not negotiated.

Think of all the times you wished he would have done this or that, or said certain things to you, and do those things for yourself. Give yourself everything he didn't give you, and boost your energy to the maximum. You can be whoever you want and have whoever you want, and you do NOT want to choose that loser. Seriously.

What added value does he actually bring you right now? Emotionally? Look at him objectively for two seconds, setting aside the story you've told yourself about him: he's a guy who was lucky to have you and chose to play it safe. That's it. One day, your stomach won't knot up anymore, you won't check his profile anymore, and on that day, you'll realise it's not sad at all. It's gonna be the richest day of your life.

So here's what I want to leave you with. Your desire to be free must always be stronger than your desire to be loved because the right love will allow you to be free.

You've spent enough time fighting for someone else's potential. Now you're fighting for your own. The love of your life will never force you to give up the love of your own life.

P.S. And the love of your own life has always been you.