This went on for a while, too long until slowly I began to realize how toxic he actually was.
I wanted my old life back and I did everything in my power to get there, which included cutting him out of my life entirely. Honestly, it was one of the hardest things I had to do, but it wasn’t until I was out of that relationship that I could see how much damage he had actually inflicted on my life. I wanted so badly to go back to feeling like my old self, but something felt… different. I realized that even though he no longer has me in his grips, my mind was now in a different type of prison.
My mind switched from self-loving to self-loathing, from trusting to suspicious, from stable to uncontrollably anxious.
My brain functions literally altered: the way I thought, the way I saw myself and thought about others… I didn’t feel even remotely like my old self and I couldn’t figure out why. After hours of research, I finally found that according to a number of different studies, “verbal abuse can affect your brain functions and lead to a host of psychological problems, including anxiety disorders.”