When you are in a deep dark hole that you can’t seem to find a way out of, everything else around you becomes oblivious.

You don’t see the sun shining, you don’t hear to birds singing and you don’t even notice that the grass is green.  When you are allowed out, you don’t notice the cars driving past you, you don’t see the traffic lights change or hear the car horn beep.  You are in a deep oblivion because the most important thing to you right now is trying to keep safe.  You try and stay safe in your own little bubble whilst trying to stay on the tightrope without falling off and cracking the eggs that lay beneath your feet.

He told me that he loved me but that was usually after he had abused me.  In all honestly, I think it became his safety blankt, if I say this she will acept and forgive my behaviour towards her.

The one thing that really hurt more than anything was how he would humiliate me.

Most days i would be sneered at, mocked, ridiculed and compare to an ex of his.  If i did something nd he didn’t like the way I did it, he would laugh and say, so-and-so would do it this way.  On one occassion when one of his ex girlfriends turned up screaming and shouting outside of the blcok of flats we lived in, he laughed at me and told me I wasn’t like so-and-so because she would have gone to sort her out.

One night he came back home after drinking all day he told me i wasn’t a real woman because I couldn’t even turn him on.  A few seconds later he fell asleep after chuckling to himself.

I remember him laughing when he told his mum, she can’t even cook.  He would tell me, I got my job as a Legal Secretary because I slept with my boss and how my parents must have locked me in my bedroom and made me listen to songs because it wasn’t right for someone my age to know so many.

With him, it was as though everything I ever believed in, all my thoughts meant nothing, as he ridiculed, mocked and laughed at me.

He would come of out the bedroom on a morning and ask his flatmate if he heard us at it last night and then he would apologise for me making too much noise.

One night, one of his ex girlfriends turned up again and between the two of them they were drunking and having a party.  I sat in my usual safety position, knees up to my chin in the armchair, as he crouched down in front of me, got in my face and said through gritted teeth, I dont want any more of your shit, it’s her I love, as he proceeded to turn the chair upside down.

All he ever did was belittle and grind me down so much that I believed everything he ever told me.  I was just existing in a shell of my former self, programmed into something he could easily abuse.

The humiliation hurt more than his hands ever did.