Patterns of Abuse, Part 2: Paying Off My Karmic Debt

Content Warning: The abuse demonstrated and described in the screenshots and post below can get pretty intense. Please proceed with caution. And apologies that the screenshots are not screen reader-friendly or totally visually accessible.

I originally wrote this post right after the first part, which spurned on the creation of, what is now, a little over 40 pages of documentation of the gaslighting and manipulation that I experienced with my abuser. I had actually decided against posting it when I realized I had needed to compile these things for myself, as a way to ensure I had a firm grip on reality. But since discovering that my abuser hasn’t being taking accountability, he’s still claiming that there’s “more to the story” and using recordings of my autistic meltdowns as an attempt to blackmail me for speaking up about my experience.

My quality of life has been permanently impacted by the abuse I endured. My heart was damaged during my second COVID infection, and I now have a murmur and long COVID on top of my other disabilities, which shortens my already ambiguous life expectancy. And the reason that many people were able to dismiss the abuse I experienced was because I focused on the impacts to my health and the transphobic and ableist verbal and sexual abuse I experienced, all of which many people see as par for the course for existing in my bodymind. And the reason I’d thought he was dangerous before was because of the careless way he was willing to risk the health and lives of people he claimed to love and care about more than me.

After trying to piece together what happened for so long, I now think that his behaviour was predatory, violent and abusive long before then. So, because he’d like me to defend myself, I will now dredge up some of the most traumatic experiences of my life to explain why I think a knowingly abusive person shouldn’t get a platform in spaces that claim to centre and care for marginalized people most impacted by these kinds of abuse.

I knew that there was some possibility that I’d been triangulated and tricked into becoming a flying monkey for The Comedian. But I thought I had done my due diligence and I thought I could trust him. If it hadn’t been true, then I was next on the line to be a victim. 

While I would never argue that anyone deserves the abuse they experience, I also feel like it was karma that I would live through an even worse version of what The Meta had been through—that I had participated in gaslighting her about. It’s also why I felt trapped into the relationship after I moved in: I gave him language and tools to harm her and then I added to her trauma. I was ashamed and I didn’t want to tell anyone that I’d made such a terrible mistake.

I’m more than willing to believe now that everything she had written was true. Because what happened to me followed the exact same cycle of violence. Whether you call it the cycle of violence or narcissistic abuse (which I don’t), they both follow the same pattern.

[Note: The screenshots below are condensed from a larger document with more context, which can be made available if necessary.]

The Honeymoon or Idealization or Hoovering Phase

Most relationships will have a type of “honeymoon” phase but in healthy relationships, that’s mostly related to something the polyamory community calls New Relationship Energy. Things are new and exciting and you’re just starting to learn about each other so there’s a brief period where they can seem absolutely perfect (because we haven’t had a chance to see their flaws yet). 

However in abusive relationships, the honeymoon phase is a crafted illusion in order to convince the victim that they’ve found their perfect person. It’s also the phase where the abuser has idealized the victim themselves, seeing them as the solution to all of the abuser’s problems. When the cycle restarts, it’s the phase where the abuser declares remorse and promises to change, maybe even sincerely at first, but instead continues the cycle once more. 

For me it began with insisting on integrating himself into my care routine—even when I explicitly said that it was something that required a lot of trust and commitment for me to accept—initiating emotional intimacy, showering me with compliments and attention, and using what I told him about my previous abuser to paint himself as the polar opposite, always reminding me: “Raise the bar, babe.”

Whenever things would get rocky and I started to pull away, he’d beg forgiveness and explain how he was so sorry and he couldn’t believe he do something so terrible to somebody so amazing and perfect. However once I’d moved in and we’d initially thought that events with The Meta had blown over, we entered into a new honeymoon phase. 

Living with me was so much better than living with her, he’d tell me over and over again. He’d told me when he was staying with me that he liked the idea that it was my time to get the spotlight, as my career began to take off, and he was there to support me. This was a promise my previous abuser had made to me that The Comedian knew that I’d been craving to get the follow through. And that summer he seemed to be keeping to his word. 

He wasn’t going out as much and he seemed to pivot his focus to his full time job and the apartment. We created cooking and cleaning routines that seemed to function flawlessly. Not to mention that we were fucking like rabbits. I was making art and connecting with friends and I started to explore our neighbourhood more—it was the healthiest relationship I’d had. 

And whenever something did happen again, he’d be devastated and mortified. He was just so traumatized from The Meta, he was just projecting onto me. He’d cry over how he treated me and tell me all the ways he’d work on his problems. We’d make plans and strategies and he’d follow through on them… or so I thought. 

He’d make up for painful traumatic events with romantic gestures. He took me to the aquarium for my birthday (a grand gesture recycled from a story of my previous abuser doing the same thing and how it’d been the greatest gift I’d ever gotten) after I had to cancel my original plans when he broke our COVID safety agreements. He’d suggest we write music together, he encouraged me to debut my stand-up on his open mic, he’d start planning out some getaway we’d take or some event we’d throw. 

But we’d end up repeating the same problems, having the same arguments, and I’d be recounting the same promises he broke over and over again. With every honeymoon phase, the gestures would get weaker and more transparent. I ran out of ways to try and distort the narrative to give him the benefit of the doubt when he came home after a particularly traumatic fight with a bouquet of flowers. 

At first I threw them in the trash. But eventually I rescued them, putting them in a vase on the dresser beside my bed.

Tension Building and Devaluation

The honeymoon phase is the lure that hooks you in but it always ends, slowly devolving into the “tension building” or devaluation phase. This first time you run through the cycle, the shifts and changes are so subtle and gradual, that it gets easy to dismiss. 

There’s always some external factor or reason that the abuser stops showing up at their best. But you’ve seen what they’re capable of, so you show them some grace, some compassion, they just need a little support to get through this tricky period. It will start off genuinely reasonable, but each time you pass through this phase in the cycle, things only seem to get worse and your earlier words somehow get thrown back against you. 

You start to doubt yourself; you start to wonder if maybe your perspective is too warped to make sense of reality. Maybe you are projecting. Maybe you are annoying. Maybe you are a total burden on everyone around you. Maybe you are the monster. 

But you deserved to be loved and treated properly once, so maybe you just need to prove that you’re still that person, that you really did deserve it, that you didn’t trick them into wasting their love on you. The thing is: They only tell you what you’re doing wrong and there never seems to be a way to do it right. 

Our cycle was relatively consistent in that the triggers always seemed to be when I’d start to ask questions. 

I’m someone who tries to default to a reasonable level of trust with everyone until I’ve been given reasons to adjust. This can go in either direction. There are ways to build more trust with me and nurture closer relationships and there are ways to diminish my trust, keeping you further away. And while I’m not always able to control that distance physically, I will figure out how to do it emotionally. 

If I tried to identify the first time it ever happened, I’d say that it was when I began to ask questions about his housing and his COVID safety when I found out about the other dates and plans he’d been taking great lengths to mislead me about. But it’s hard to say because I hadn’t been paying that much attention to notice when the first little digs and criticisms started to be made. 

But he felt me pull away when I started to enforce my COVID (and other) boundaries and approach our discussions with a little more skepticism. Especially when he caught COVID right after I told him that I couldn’t risk ignoring the danger his behaviour posed to my health. 

While before he’d hardly brought The Meta up beforehand, once he was quarantined there, it seemed like I couldn’t stop hearing about her. There would be times I would have to interrupt and tell him that I wasn’t comfortable with what and how he shared information about her. But he’d always speak about her in this awed reverent tone that made me feel like she’d raised the bar and I wasn’t sure if I was stacking up anymore.

I’m also not totally convinced that he sprung the news about their sex life (which had apparently been ongoing for quite some time) so tactlessly by accident. Rather, I think that it was a calculated move to make me both question my memory and use surprise (which I’d just recently explained to him was the hardest part of adjusting to new changes) to destabilize me. 

Which is why when I corrected him with evidence that I wasn’t misremembering, he criticized me for not trusting him and making him feel like I was “lying in wait to catch him screwing up.” So I stopped trying to prove that he told me different things and instead tried to jog his memory around when we had all these conversations he’d just happened to “forget” about. 

When I found out they were moving in together, if I tried to voice any concerns, he’d accuse me of piling extra things onto him while he was already stressed and struggling. [Sidenote: Many of those concerns would come up later when he’d explain all the many “complicated factors” that made it hard for him to maintain his boundaries with her and he’d tell me how he should’ve listened to me in the first place.] 

After he found out that I struggled with an eating disorder and that I was insecure about all the weight I’d lost and struggling to regain it, The Comedian seemed to have this unbeatable habit of telling me how great her cooking was and how great it was that she loved food the way he did, and oh sorry, he’d gotten used to having to buy way more portions for the groceries for her since she eats so much more than I do. And he always seemed to need to think out loud every time he ruminated on how he wished she saw herself as attractive as he saw her but she was so hard on herself about her weight. 

At first I didn’t feel like I could really respond any way other than to just let him express himself and let him process it out himself. But then I started to get trapped in shame spirals every time I couldn’t eat as much as I’d hoped, first from my internal monologue, then affirmed by some casual comment comparing how much the two of us would eat. When I asked him to stop, he started to wonder if maybe the way he wanted to do polyamory was harder than I could handle. 

By the time I moved in with him, the devaluation phase escalated further and further. The first transition from the honeymoon phase while I was there happened when The Meta posted her thread about what happened. When the stories didn’t align, I started to ask questions. 

When he had control of the narrative, he was super forthcoming. He was ready to get it off his chest and tell me everything. Once there was something to compare up against, he started to get defensive and angry when I brought it up. 

At first I thought he was right to be angry. It was obviously a very traumatic experience and I was forcing him to relive it over and over again. I started to back off. But then the information about her possibly seeing my nudes came up and I felt that knowing who had access to my sexual images was worth diving back into the experience again. 

But no matter how I approached it, or whether we scheduled time to specifically talk about it, I always seemed to do it wrong and all of a sudden I was just like The Meta. He’d accuse me of projecting, of manipulating him, of trying to control him, of being passive aggressive, being too clingy, too distant. 

And most strangely, he began to act in the ways that he’d accused The Meta. He began to complain that I wasn’t pulling my weight with the chores, even after I’d cooked for him, folded his laundry, and stopped asking him for help with my laundry, taking care of my cat, or anything that I was physically capable of doing (regardless of how painful it may be). He’d make hurtful snipes before walking out of arguments, he’d post exaggerated and passive aggressive tweets and stories implying I was using his triggers and traumas against him. 

As we returned to this phase over and over again, things would get worse and worse. If I asked him about people he saw or asked him to try to make some time for me that wasn’t watching TV, cleaning or sleeping, he’d accuse me of surveilling him and restricting him and trying to sabotage his career and relationships and friendships. He kept violating COVID and sexual and communication and domestic boundaries because I couldn’t communicate my boundaries clear enough, they were too complicated to keep track of, they were unreasonable, they were too rigid, they weren’t specific enough. 

If I asked for sex or acted disappointed in any way that we wouldn’t get to have sex, he told me that I was pressuring him or shaming him or that there was something wrong with my body, whether gender or disability-related, that made him not want to have sex with me specifically, and if I acted hurt by hearing that, I was guilt-tripping him. It’s why I eventually wrote my article for Xtra that year after he told me that my incontinence made me undesirable to sleep with in an argument over why he needed to sleep with other people. Eventually it got to a point where if I expressed being unhappy at all, I was being too hard on him, my standards were too high, I wasn’t forgiving enough, I thought I was better than him, nothing was good enough for me, it was like I didn’t see everything he did for me. 

He’d always break COVID boundaries right when I’d make plans with other people or would try to start going out more, forcing me to cancel my plans to avoid breaking other people’s COVID boundaries. I ended up feeling completely isolated and afraid to tell anyone what was happening because anytime I told him I talked something out with somebody, I was “bringing other people into our business.” 

Whenever he felt like he had “enough,” or I tried to end the relationship, he’d tell me to just move out then. Just go somewhere else. When I’d remind him of all the reasons I couldn’t do that and that it wasn’t our agreement, he’d say, “That’s too bad, I changed my mind and you’re not on the lease so deal with it or leave” or “I don’t owe you anything.”  

But I couldn’t deny that I was being abused anymore when he finally started to tell me that he’d never been this way before and that I turned him that way and did I ever consider that I turned my previous abuser into what he was? Maybe that’s why I was always alone and didn’t have any friends and everybody was too afraid of me to say so. 

I still hear that voice in my head whenever I’m trying to speak up about something—with anyone. 

Explosion

The final stage of the cycle is what many people imagine when they think of domestic violence: the explosion. It’s the brief crack in their facade where they “lose control” (translation: they lost control of their victim) and cross lines that they have no way to spin in their favour. It can be physical violence, sexual violence, screaming, breaking things, making threats. 

But there’s also something that abusers use to deflect their blame even for this: reactive abuse. This is a form of manipulation where an abuser uses the victim’s reaction to being abused to deflect the blame for the abuse back onto them. When victims speak out, they use the reaction as proof that they were in fact the victims of the abuse. 

It gets a little tricky to try and define because the definition of abuse relies on the specific power dynamics of the relationship in the context of the environment it’s happening in. There’s no cut and dry way to define it without identifying those dynamics and the patterns of systematic abuse. 

I won’t try to identify what might’ve been the first explosion that he experienced, because before we started to cohabitate, there weren’t really many ways to know about them unless he wanted me to. The first irrefutable explosion that I can remember happened sometime after we’d almost broken up after he’d moved in with The Meta. 

He was back at my place and we were arguing over her again, but it was time for him to leave. I didn’t want to end the conversation where it was, most likely because I’d found some hole in his story that made me feel pretty icky. To this point we’d both worked on being mindful of our tone, volume and language with each other during conflict, but it was the first time I decided to be persistent instead of just agreeing to talk about it later. 

When I told him that all I wanted before he left was an answer to my question, his expression changed and he screamed at me to shut up. I froze. I was scared—of him, but also that I’d crossed a line. He immediately stopped and looked horrified at himself and began to profusely apologize. I apologized for not giving him space when he asked for it. He agreed to stay for a few minutes afterwards to comfort me and then he left. 

But nothing like that happened again throughout the entire incident with The Meta (to me at least that I knew of), so I chalked it up to stress and that it was sorta my fault since I had been reacting poorly in the first place. Then I agreed to move in with him, with the agreement that if things didn’t work out, we’d still try to manage as roommates as best we can—because I didn’t want either of us to be forced to move out—but if that couldn’t work, I needed to be the one to stay because rental prices had gone up since he found this apartment, I was self-employed and my credit was only fair. So I submitted the notice to end my lease on my apartment and that week, things started to change. 

At first I agreed that I was equally to blame and that we were both displacing our frustration from the moving process onto each other. Things had been going fine for the most part until it was getting close to the day that I could start moving my stuff in. I still had piles of things that I’d wanted to give away, donate or sell since it was all still usable and I was trying to finally clear out a lot of things that had accumulated as part of both my own and my previous abuser’s hoarding tendencies. 

He told me it would take too long to do and he didn’t have time to help me so we should just throw it out. I was upset because we still had a month overlap between my old apartment and where I was moving to store it while I coordinated, but he’d promised to help me do the selling part since I was on my first Luminato contract and was moving right during the busiest part of production. 

He wouldn’t consider any of my suggestions or concerns, including that I knew a lot of low income people who could really benefit from my stuff instead of it just going into the garbage, and he yelled at me a couple more times. But at that point, I felt like I was always being rushed so I wouldn’t take time to manage my meltdown triggers before I went into a meltdown and both those times I responded by throwing or knocking over something before I’d walk away. 

The second time it happened, however, was right before I was scheduled to move my furniture into the apartment. My bed had been taken apart, my stuff was split between two apartments and I had about two weeks until I had no other place to live. I’d already begun to start staying there and calling it home. 

We’d gotten into an argument when he began to yell at me again. He accused me of yelling first so I paused and breathed and brought myself back to a calm place and tried to get him to do the same. But he continued to yell at me, accusing me of all the ways that I was just too difficult. It devolved into me crying and having panic attacks. 

I kept asking him what I was doing wrong, how I needed to fix it. And every way I asked it, it kept coming back to: I hadn’t done anything wrong at all. He left to go to the office where he’d taken over my admin job while I was still sobbing in fear. Later he texted to tell me that he never went and had gone to his mom’s instead and would stay there for the night. He was still angry and couldn’t talk to me: I was being too difficult. Even though he still couldn’t tell me what I’d done wrong. 

This stage started to become pretty consistent through the rounds of the cycle we’d go through from that point on. We’d argue about stories that didn’t line up, any reaction would trigger him into fits of rage, and I’d start begging and pleading for him to stop, that I didn’t mean to upset him, that I really wasn’t doing the things he was accusing me of. 

Then he’d either go into his room and close the door, making snide remarks loud enough for me to hear anytime I started to cry too loud but refusing to talk to me directly, or he’d leave to go to a show or a date or a party, making sure to post about how great he was feeling and how terribly someone was treating him. 

Eventually he’d come back and tell me how sorry he was and he had no idea why he would do such a thing. But everything would get better as long as I kept believing him. 

But the honeymoon phase of the cycle would get shorter and shorter, especially after he was made permanent at his full time remote finance job and accessed health benefits, which he used as incentive to stay with him. The cycle would get worse again when the article on how access to health insurance impacted my ability to leave my last abusive relationship and we both had seen the parallels in the behaviour I described with what we were experiencing. 

Then we had a fight in which I had a meltdown and began to hit myself after he kept telling me that he could do whatever he wanted and he could talk to me however he wanted, but if I reacted in any way, that was why I deserved to be spoken to and treated that way. I ended up screaming, curled up on the floor banging my fists into the floor. He mocked my meltdown, calling it a tantrum, and told me to stop banging on the floor. I was still mid-meltdown so I tried to pull my fists back into my body but just ended up hitting myself. 

He told me I was out of control and that I was making him pick me up and throw me around the apartment and pin me down. This is something my previous abuser did as well, and I’d told The Comedian it was terrifying and would often end up with me lashing out at my ex, which is when I started to think I was a monster and deserved to be treated horribly. 

Several hours later, at around 4am, the police knocked on our door. One of our neighbours had reported some kind of disturbance and were concerned. Fortunately at this point, we’d both retreated to our separate rooms and had calmed down enough to try and get some sleep. This had been my worst fear. 

I’d had neighbours in my old building call the police on my previous abuser during my meltdowns in the past, and since he also had Tourette’s and visible tics, I’d be terrified for both of us, telling them we both temporarily lost our tempers but no one touched each other and we were fine now. It happened three times. After the last time, my superintendent had come to my door and whispered to me that my neighbours were just concerned about what they heard and she believed me. I was shocked and assured her it wasn’t anything like that, it was just a misunderstanding. I’d told The Comedian all of this before we’d started to live together. 

I had taken the same tact with the police officer who asked me out in the hallway outside of our apartment to speak with him while his partner spoke with The Comedian in his bedroom. After they left, The Comedian told me that it was absolutely unacceptable and I put him in danger. When I said that I wasn’t the one who called them and I told them that we were roommates and things had just gotten a little heated during our transitional period while I was looking for a new place. He told me that something like that couldn’t happen again. I agreed because if they’d come during my meltdown, it was almost guaranteed that I’d end up either arrested, institutionalized, injured, or worse. 

Repeat or Discard and DARVO

The thing about cycles is that they follow the law of momentum. An object will keep travelling at its current velocity until another force acts upon it, whether its gravity, friction, a rigid boundary or a collision. And if an abuser isn’t willing to actually change, the only ways to break the cycle are for the abuser to lose control of the victim and thus their interest in them or for them to find a new victim that they have more control over. 

Then instead of the honeymoon phase, you move into the discard phase. Now you’re nothing to them. Instead of being told that they’ll change for you because you’re the greatest thing that ever happened to them, now you’re crazy, manipulative, disgusting, ugly, undesirable, and a waste of time all around. If they can’t control you, they’ll cut their losses and move on to controlling the narrative instead. 

This is why I believe my abuser began to purposely trigger my autistic meltdowns and then exacerbate them by berating me, stonewalling me, or continuing to gaslight me about the support strategies we co-built to avoid them. When I told him I’d need space, he’d make snarky or insulting comments about how I was just proving his point loud enough for me to hear as I tried to go into my room. Or he’d tell me that my stims, such as pacing back and forth, made him feel unsafe and I needed to stay still and not move my limbs so much. Or he’d get angry at me when I’d tell him I was feeling overwhelmed and didn’t want to be touched and he’d tell me that if he couldn’t hug me then he didn’t know how to comfort me and it was all my fault I was melting down in the first place. Or if I told him I did want to be hugged, he’d tell me that I wasn’t making him want to hug me right now, so to just leave him alone. 

I’d end up sobbing on my knees, begging him to just speak to me like someone who cared about me if he was asking me to believe that he did. Then he’d tell me how hurtful and horrible I was for accusing him of not caring, that I was just erasing everything that happened in the past. When I’d bring up how I thought he cared about me because of the promises he’d made, all of which he’d broken and told me to “move out if I didn’t like it”, he’d tell me that’s because he stopped caring about me because I’d been so terrible to live with. I’d ask what I’d done other than be hurt about the broken promises, he’d get angry again and accuse me of never letting him make mistakes. We’d end up in the cyclical argument for hours until I was in a full blown meltdown. 

But after the police were called before, he’d begin to start recording me once I reached this point, though I usually wouldn’t realize at first. He recorded me screaming for him to speak to me like a human, with me banging on his door after he’d gone into his room and would loudly insult me for still crying from inside then tell me he couldn’t hear me when I’d beg him to stop, and of me hitting myself as I told him I just wanted what he was telling me to make sense. I’d realize he was recording when his voice would suddenly become level and stern, like he was speaking to a rowdy pet. Once I saw his phone pointed at me, I’d tell him fine, record me, but as I’d start to explain what I was reacting to, the camera would slide right back into his pocket. 

Then he’d tell me it was for his protection, in case the police came back and they didn’t stop to ask any questions. He’d never try to use it against me for any other reason. I’d repeat to him again that I didn’t want the police there as much as he did, and that I was also in danger, especially as I was becoming more visibly trans, was visibly mentally unwell, as well as brown, all of which also puts me at risk for police brutality, but I’d never throw him under the bus to protect myself like that. 

When I began to tell people about how he’d treated me, he told me he’d been “protecting me” by not telling people “certain things” (never named, by the way) about me and my past. I asked him what he wasn’t telling people if he’d already told them I was emotionally and physically abusive. He told me he didn’t have to explain himself to me. 

Experiencing DARVO feels like you’ve not only lost your voice, but your hands are tied and you can hear the faint echo of someone whispering but the only word you can hear is your name and no matter which way you turn, it’s always coming from somewhere behind you. And everyone is telling you to just dust yourself off and move on, but no one wants to untie you, give you a pen or a keyboard or even just pay attention to your gestures, block out the whisper or overpower it with their own voice. 

And sometimes people decide to leave you tied up, add an extra gag in case your voice comes back, and lock you in a room with the whisperer themselves and tell you they’re helping you stand up for yourself but if it doesn’t work, it’s because you just need to get more control over yourself, before closing the door and leaving you there. Which is essentially what you do when you put a domestic abuse survivor into a mediation with their abuser and call it an accountability process. 

I know The Comedian is saying that I haven’t told the full story. I’ve asked him to tell me what I’ve lied about or left out. He doesn’t owe me that explanation either apparently. But if anyone else finds out, I’d love to know myself.