I made it out but I feel like I'm dead

I was in a horrifically abusive relationships for 7 years and I'm out now but I'm still scared all the time that he's going to break into my house and rape and stab me to death. I think about it a lot. For the first six months I thought about it every day, all day, from the moment I woke up until the moment I passed out.


People say you have ptsd if you have nightmares and hypervigilance and constant fear but is it a pathology if you have a very good reason to be afraid and if your "ptsd" is actually making you behave in ways that prevent you getting stabbed by a real person who has verbalized that they intend to stab you?

I met someone who was in the early stages of an abusive relationship and I talked to her for 2 months every day until she saw what I saw and she left him. It was good for me because I needed someone to step up for me that way when I was dying, but nobody did.


I discovered at a very young age that actually the majority of people are pretty indifferent to the suffering of others. The bystander effect has been described for a reason. That's how people really are. If most people see an abuse victim dying, they step over your twitching corpse as if you are roadkill and go about their lives, secure in their convictions that it's your own fault that happened to you, you're a goner, it could never happen to them because they're not as stupid as you were, and that that's just the circle of life.


When I was a child everyone left me to die for the first time, so that affected me the way it sometimes does for people and I grew up to feel compelled to help people who are being abused. I'm currently trying to resuscitate a dying butterfly who is riddled with parasites.

I carry a knife with me everywhere (for opening mail in case the feds where I live ask). I'm glad I made it out and I don't want to be just told to leave my town.

I'm so so so so so so so tired of people finding any way they can to make it the abuse victim's fault. I can defend myself and articulate why they're wrong, but it's so exhausting to have to do it and it doesn't help me to hear victim blaming so I just don't tell anyone what happened except other people who also experienced something similar.


My ex is a monster. The things that happened to me are indescribable and I will never recover from them. I was tortured. People want you to just find ways to get over it and move on because they need to believe that it would work that way if they were every tortured. But it doesn't. When you're tortured, you can't just go to therapy and be all better. You'll never forget being tortured and you'll never get over it. You can technically keep living and I will do so for my community's sake, but I will never be ok again.

I am lucky that this already happened to me when I was a child. When I was 3 I started my training to escape abuse and not kill myself as a result of what happened. I am estranged from my only direct family member. When I was 6 I thought I would never make it to 30. I know how to do this and I can do it again.

I am tough as nails and when people find out what happened to me they often say I seem pretty normal. I have so much information to offer to other abuse victims and I don't think a lot of people know exactly the same things as I know about survival. I prayed to God that he would send me people who need help and he did. I'm glad I survived because I've already used my experiences to save two peoples' lives that I know of and I'm not even close to done.

I am so sorry you were abused, threatened and tortured.

Did I understand correctly that you were also abused as a child?

I was in an abusive relationship and I found meeting with others (in a structured group) who had experienced similar to be helpful... There is also CoDA.org which offers, not only in-person meetings, but online meetings.

You might want to check it out...

In the meantime, I've started EMDR therapy for trauma. There's that and also EFT-tapping which you might want to look into doing.

Stay safe