Twitter Campaign on Emotional Abuse
A friend shared this on Facebook on Thursday:
These 17 Tweets will completely change how you think about emotional abuse
A few of the Tweets sounded familiar:
#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but he won’t let you go home or see your friends very often or at all.
#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but instead he isolates you and destroys all of you platonic relationships so he’s all you have
#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou, but he tells you what friends you’re “allowed” to have.
Also this one from #MaybeHeDoesntHitYou Highlights the Reality of Emotional Abuse:
#maybehedoesnthityou but he tries to control who you talk to, where you go, what friends you can have, and acts like it’s out of love.
And from Women Are Using A Powerful Hashtag To Talk About Emotional Domestic Abuse:
#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but he’d convince you to hate your parents & friends and to push them away completely because they didn’t like him.
(There are lots more tweets on this theme. Every page I read on this, people tweet about the emotional abuser telling you whom you’re allowed to be friends with, when you can see them, making you ask permission before seeing opposite-sex friends, etc.)
The above tweets remind me of two people:
First, Tracy, wife of Richard, who had strict rules on who could be his friends and what he could do with them (other than the obvious of don’t cheat). She had to meet them, had to be their friend too, had to approve them. Until you got her approval, you had to jump through her hoops, which were constantly changing and which you never knew existed half the time.
It’s so good to see other people confirming what I already knew, but which Richard and Tracy tried to convince me was wrong: that controlling your spouse’s friendships is abuse. This helps heal my mind, which is still recovering from all their gaslighting. I want to make a note every time I see something confirming that I was correct, because it helps break down the gaslighting.
Second, Phil, my ex, who tried to separate me from my friends in various ways: He shamed me for not sticking up for him for supposed slights, slights which never even happened. He told me they hated him, and got upset with me if I wanted to spend some time with them after dinner in the cafeteria. (He and I spent lots of time together, so that wasn’t the reason.) Then after the breakup, he even convinced his best friend that my friends were terrible to him. The friend then came to me and lectured me on how “badly” I treated Phil and that I should distance myself from these horrible friends.
#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but he compares you to other women, criticizes your body and constantly tells you, you aren’t doing enough for him.
#MaybeHeDoesntHitYou but he screams at you even if you did nothing wrong.
#maybehedoesnthityou but he criticised you everyday, he compared you to “better” women & told you you will never be/look good enough.
Yep, that was Phil, too.
Another webpage on this campaign: Daily Share: #MaybeHeDoesntHitYou Highlights the Pain of Emotional Abuse