New.. confused and feeling guilty

I’m really sorry to hear of your struggles. I can relate to so much of what you say here. I was with my ex for a very very long time. In the beginning I believed he knew better than me (he was a bit older/had more experience) so when he said this is the way to do things, I believed him. For more years that I want to remember, I believed there was something wrong with me sexually. I didnt want to have sex with him and he coerced me in to doing things that didn’t feel right – because if I didnt he would either not talk to me for days on end or belittle me and shout at me about it. That kind of followed through into every part of our lives so I stopped having opinions on anything and essentially just let him make choices. if he did include me and we went with my suggestion, i wouldn’t hear the end of how he had been forced to go along with what I wanted or forbade him doing what he wanted. There are a million times when I wondered if we were living in the same reality. I also wondered how other people seemed to navigate their lives together without all this drama.
I can’t tell you what to do – but just want you to know you are not alone and there is support out there, if you want to leave and on here, to let your feelings out. I can’t tell you how much it helped having a place to talk to people who know exactly how I feel without having to justify why I was still there.
I’m out now – been about a year since I decided and I’ve been in my new home for a few months. It was very difficult, I won’t lie but absolutely the very best decision I ever made. I have never been happier.
Keep talking and sharing x

Hi Princess Peaches,

I only joined yesterday and have been reading through others’ posts too. I too went through marital rape, coerced sex and sexual abuse at the hands of my partner. It felt so utterly humiliating. I would be woken up with his **** inside me without consent after an argument. I would be asked to do sexual acts I was not comfortable with and told that if I didn’t do it that he’d find someone else who would. (detail removed by moderator) I didn’t.
I don’t know what to tell you apart from I hope you find a way out as soon as possible. The guilt you are feeling is completely manipulated and engineered by him, on purpose, to make you feel that it’s all your fault. None of this is your fault. He is supposed to love you and what he’s doing is the opposite of love: it’s sexual abuse, rape and coercive control.

I was a people pleaser too. I have a kind, compassionate nature and sadly, I wanted to see the good in my ex. I would do things I wasn’t comfortable with, little by little, until I slowly ended up being trapped as his domestic slave, sex slave, isolated from friends, feeling completely alone and that it was all my fault for trying to be the person he wanted me to be, just so he wouldn’t be cruel to me.

But I understood later that he controlled me into being who he wanted me to be by making me modify my behaviour to try to avoid his silences, temper tantrums, accusations, just to try to have a quiet life. I completely lost my sense of self. I found myself, a highly educated woman with hopes and dreams, just being a man’s sex toy, punch bag, cleaner and cook. We deserve better.

When I met him, I chose my own clothes. Nothing snazzy, just basic jeans or shorts, vest tops or t-shirts in the summer. By the middle of our marriage, I was covering my entire body in loose garments I hated, covering my head/hair and feeling completely unable to dress how I wanted. I agreed with him on things I didn’t agree with just so he wouldn’t fly into a rage.

Understanding why we complied is difficult, it’s a process, but it wasn’t out of choice: it was because we were being controlled, manipulated and abused. We complied because we didn’t have the choice.

Your partner’s entitled way of thinking with regards your body reminds me so much of my ex’s.

It was a huge struggle for me to accept that none of it was my fault.

It sounds to me like you are suffering from sexual violence. Just know that what you describe is completely undeserved, you deserve better and he doesn’t have the right to treat you like that. It’s demeaning, humiliating and it’s illegal. There is support out there, just writing on here is your first step to a life free of abuse. It took me years to be free, but it is another world, finding myself again and learning to trust myself, love myself and even though I still suffer from CPTSD, I have days of complete happiness.

Looking back, it’s still hard to understand why I put up with his abuse for so long, why I didn’t leave sooner, when it felt a little safer to do so perhaps, but we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for what someone cruel inflicted on us.

I hope you feel less alone knowing others have gone through similar experiences.