Amy: ‘My father had died the previous year and this guy looked after me’

Amy* came out of an abusive relationship two years ago. She was 25 when the relationship began.

I met a guy and he was really nice and I think I was pretty vulnerable at the time. My father had died the previous year and this guy looked after me. It was all fun and energetic and hilarious for a while. But the biggest problem in my case was there was a lot of bullying, a lot of manipulation, emotional blackmail, undermining and that went on for about three years.

A lot of the undermining, a lot of the bullying makes you more immature, because you’re living by his rules. He even once asked me if I wanted him to write out some rules for me. It was a nice day, but you’re living by rules, you’re living by his mood, his triggers of what will set him off into his anger and shouting and name-calling. Or sometimes even worse is the silence, the being ignored.

Amy and her boyfriend lived together

I think he had this bizarre fairytale notion of what love was and I could never live up to that. I was never showing my love enough. It didn’t matter how much I modified myself, how much I changed.

I think he got a buzz out of the fact that he was making me modify my behaviour, so he would just move on to something else. So the goal posts were constantly changing. You can’t get comfortable because they’ll just find another way to undermine what you are doing.

After a row, Amy was standing in the kitchen doorway

While I was standing there, he pushed the door full force on top of me and crushed me between the door jamb and the door. That was the first time he had got violent and it was a huge shock to the system. I tried to talk about it but he just, he didn’t apologise for it, ever. He had kind of stopped apologising at that point. I kind of recognised that with that sort of level of escalation that it wasn’t going anywhere safe any time soon.

Finally Amy left, but it wasn’t easy

A lot of people don’t realise that you’re still breaking up with your boyfriend – and your history and your life that you have made. That’s really hard and confusing, to miss someone who hurt you so much.

I loved him, but it’s not that easy. He spent a very long time convincing me that I probably wasn’t good enough for anybody else, because I was so stupid. It’s hard to say goodbye to somebody that you fell in love with. People have this bizarre stereotype that this happens in very rough areas, or they have to be alcoholics, or there has to be real money issues, there has to be some sort of external pressure. I think maybe people don’t realise that sometimes people just can be really bad to each other.

*Amy’s name has been changed

In conversation with Anthea McTeirnan