Antlers....yes I was a victim of emotional abuse. I remember my slow realization regarding the emotional abuse. Then I went to talk to a good friend about it. She is in a masters program to become a therapist. I said rather tentatively that X may have been emotionally abusive. She looked at me and said DUH! She had known both of us for about 10 years, and was one of the people X used to complain about me too, until she finally told him to stop, that I was her friend too and she didn't want to hear it anymore. We've discussedd it at length, and it was in talking to her as well as seeing a therapist through the separation/divorce process that I finally stopped letting him do that to me. It took many episodes of me hanging up on him and telling him that if he started yelling, name-calling, being derogatory, etc that I was done with the conversation. One time he actually called back later and apologized. (Just once! LOL)
"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." Jon Kabat-Zinn
