Types of D&D

It was all manipulations and projections with my N. He had me apologizing for everything...and also liked to pull the disappearing act. He kicked me out of his house multiple times when he decided he didn't like what i had to say. I was so confused and frustrated. He told me I was a negative person...that I had anger issues and needed to get on an antidepressant. He told me his drinking problem was due to the way I treated him. I could go on and on. He never physically assaulted me either....what he did was much worse. He made me question my own sanity and my own ability to discern the truth. It has taken me almost 2 full months just to process how messed up I was in this relationship. The longer I am away from it, the more I see things for what they truly are. But, the damage to my self esteem will probably take a lot longer to repair. This guy really did a number on my head.

N's elderly mother came to live with us & was very ill from stage IV Lymphoma. I was her primary caregiver (even though we're not married & he treats me like a maid most of the time)... She was very sweet and I am glad I took care of her but there were so many issues with the N during that time. He denied her pain meds so she wouldn't get "loopy". Hospice nearly brought in Adult Protective Services to take her away due to that. I gave her tiny doses of morphine under RN instruction & he accused me more than once of trying to kill her. I loved this woman so much and him saying that was so hurtful. It still hurts and it's been 3 months. (So while I put my life on hold for months, spent all my money on stuff for her, essentially ignored my then 3yo's needs because I was overworked and overtired - he ran off to work for 12+ hrs a day (he has 8 hr shifts...) and came home to "help" by feeding his mom soup...and then accused me of trying to kill her...yay)

Mine constantly shamed me. Told me I was always negative and spoke in riddles. Said I could never just say what I meant. If we were out he would tell me to keep my voice down. I was a drama queen, mad, never happy. He said he was only horrible to me in response to my negativity. Then why do I miss him today

only about them. When someone showed interest in me, he would say they were only doing it because I was with him. They are truly ridiculous!

I got several approaches. 1. Slow and subtle devaluing - This was where something he apparently once thought was good about me became something disappointing. Slowly I would get less and less subtle remarks belittling the subject in question. 2. Mind games - It would reach the point where every sentence had to be very carefully dissected to make sure he couldn't twist it round to mean something else entirely. In this way I was never really sure what was going on, which made me doubt my own ability to understand the world around me. 3. Superiority - Every so often I would be "put in my place" and made to feel that he was superior to me in every way. Bit by bit this eroded my self-confidence. It wasn't until after he had gone off with the OM that I began to wake up to that. 4. Withdrawal - There was either a lame explanation each time, or none, but every so often he would decide we were too close and would push me away, leaving me reeling and apologising for mistakes I was only guessing at.

My N/P is the Passive Aggressive kind. He never called me names neither said I was unattractive or stupid. He would make "specific comments" that I think he knew would leave me "wondering". I always felt like a "void" inside of me after these "small comments". Everything was a fairytale until I told him I felt uncomfortable about something in our relationship. This is when his aggressive side would show up and everything was my fault. I think this was a major injury to his ego. After the one big problem that ended our relationship, he used the Silent Treatment for 3 weeks.

I can relate to this,Sea. Nothing overtly abusive that I could pick up on at the time but I now see it was all passive aggressive. Sweet when he spoke to me or texted but mine would never firm up plans to see me until the last minute and then he was always late. Busiest person on the planet, so his excuse was work stopped him from keeping in touch during the week - he worked away a lot. Like someone else said a while ago on here - if you're good enough to sleep with, why can't they take a minute to text or call? Hated if I disagreed on anything - always said I was interrupting him when it was the other way round. I just decided at times to let him rant on about whatever, but that meant that I was changing bit by bit the way I would normally behave. The worst was the sexual manipulation /withdrawal. For instance, being hypersexual in inappropriate places - car, cinema, and telling me everything he was wanted to do to me later. Then we would get back to my place and he'd put the TV on and show zero interest in me. WTF? Or would never respond if I tried to initiate - he felt ill, tired, bloated. Control, control, control. Everything had to be on his terms.

Used to accuse me of being confrontational. You obviously question yourself first and then question other people about the situation to glee their take on it. Turned out that I wasn't being confrontational - just had a different opinion to him or seeking clarification on what he was saying (read, lying about). The ex-P had been rumbled. If I ever challenged him and got angry because, as we all know, they try to twist it back at us. He would say, "this is what I don't like about you, I can't deal with you when you are angry and I can't do arguments or confrontation". WTF, he had created the upset with his inconsideration. My response, "then don't keep throwing in last minute hitches into long organised plans, lying, cheating, disrespecting me, demeaning me dressed up as joking and always putting me at the bottom of your priority list" without consideration for how it would hurt me. I always ended up feeling exhausted, depressed, angrier and worthless and it was a constant battle to bring myself out of it to function. Towards the end I did feel that I had anger issues and felt awful about it but now he is not in my life they have dissipated. I now realise that he never saw justified anger as an emotion because he was constantly trying to control his because otherwise he would have totally lost it and gone berserk. He was like a pressure cooker and totally vengeful. I was often surprised by what he would plan do to whose who had offended him. I invariably was the one who was relied on to pick up the pieces of whatever drama/trauma he had created. He was never at fault because he always remained calm and I was supposed to forgive/forget and just move on from whatever had occurred without a backwards glance. I used to try to explain that's is all very easy if you are not the one who has been hurt and who all this stuff had not been directed at. All passive-agressive abuse in my mind. Deex

He never called me names or hurt me physically but he did tell me I had certain personality traits (always negative ones) that were absolutely not true. For example, he said it bothered him that I never read books. Wtf?! I read more books than anyone I know. Book $ is part of my monthly budget. He's the one who rarely read. He told me he was worried I might have been a closet slut in high school but he had no way of knowing since he didn't know me then. Wtf? He was the one who bagged a complete stranger in the bathroom at a party. No condom. How gross! And then there were all those passive aggressive insults! Ugh. He never owned up to a single one. I was telling my counselor about it and she described it as abusive and I thought she was out of her mind. Criticizing people didn't fall under the heading of abuse in my mind. I went as far as to defend him, telling her that there was a misunderstanding: he didn't hit me or call me names. There was no abuse. It took her several sessions to get it through my thick head that his behaviors were abusive. Until then, I had no idea. I wish I had known then what I know now. I could've walked away sooner and saved myself some pain and humiliation.

My exN used passive aggressive abuse too. I did not realize it was 'abuse' until many months after the relationship ended. It took a very long time for my cog dis to leave because we were still in contact as 'friends'. It wasn't until I found this site that I could believe it. Even though my best girlfriend always told me she thought what my ex did was being abusive, for me to really see it as such took learning about the subtle tactics of narc manipulation in order to understand the full implication of what I'd been experiencing. It's a mind fu*k for sure!