tryingtomoveforward
New Here
I won't go into too much detail but essentially I had a very short but also very emotionally abusive relationship with a man I met at university when I was a teenager which seems to have caused PTSD or something very like it (on the opinion of a Woman's Aid councilor and a psychiatrist - although I'm aware that my experience might not meet the criteria for an official diagnosis). I had quite an extreme (preexisting) sleeping disorder at the time and from what I've read this made me especially vulnerable given that the body processes stress during sleep. I had to live next door to the guy after we'd split up so the situation kind of extended to last an academic year but I think the main damage was done in the two months or so that we were together (although I was at my most physically ill towards the end of the year; I stopped sleeping almost completely at some point due to the stress and never really started again to the point that I lost consciousness on several occasions, couldn't physically stand up or walk on one occasion and experienced some (momentary) vision and hearing loss, again due to the lack of sleep.) While I was able to move on with my life and largely put this behind me after finishing the academic year it has now come back to haunt me all these years later as the man has now moved to my small home town where I am living.
I posted about the situation on a general relationships forum before I'd seen any mental health professionals and while some people were lovely others were absolutely horrible. For various reasons I didn't go into the details of how the stress affected my physical health and some people seemed to think that emotional abuse can only be harmful over the long term. They said I was an attention seeker and drama queen and I think reading peoples' nasty comments may have done more damage. I'm aware that the relationship doesn't fit the normal pattern of abuse, where incidents, however horrendous in themselves, are usually quite dilute (you might only get an explosion once a month or less whereas I was getting one every time I saw him - 3 or 4 times a week) and where abuse usually starts quite far into the relationship (it started almost as soon as we started spending time alone together in my case) but I'd be curious to know if there has been any research on how quickly trauma can occur in instances of emotional abuse. I googled this some time ago and found a study on bullying that found that symptoms of trauma started to appear at around the 2 month mark but somehow I didn't save the study and now I can't find it. I also had some involvement through my work with an industrial tribunal case in which a man was sacked for bullying his staff. His behaviour was similar in many ways to that of the man that I was in a relationship with (he was mostly just very very very angry over everything and nothing) and many staff members got ill very quickly with some ending up with long term mental health problems. To me this suggests that despite being very susceptible to trauma due to my health condition mine is not an isolated case and that emotional abuse (or bullying) doesn't have to go on for years before any damage is done but I'd be really interested in finding some actual research.
Is anyone aware of any research that looks at the timescale for trauma from this type of abuse?
Thank you.
I posted about the situation on a general relationships forum before I'd seen any mental health professionals and while some people were lovely others were absolutely horrible. For various reasons I didn't go into the details of how the stress affected my physical health and some people seemed to think that emotional abuse can only be harmful over the long term. They said I was an attention seeker and drama queen and I think reading peoples' nasty comments may have done more damage. I'm aware that the relationship doesn't fit the normal pattern of abuse, where incidents, however horrendous in themselves, are usually quite dilute (you might only get an explosion once a month or less whereas I was getting one every time I saw him - 3 or 4 times a week) and where abuse usually starts quite far into the relationship (it started almost as soon as we started spending time alone together in my case) but I'd be curious to know if there has been any research on how quickly trauma can occur in instances of emotional abuse. I googled this some time ago and found a study on bullying that found that symptoms of trauma started to appear at around the 2 month mark but somehow I didn't save the study and now I can't find it. I also had some involvement through my work with an industrial tribunal case in which a man was sacked for bullying his staff. His behaviour was similar in many ways to that of the man that I was in a relationship with (he was mostly just very very very angry over everything and nothing) and many staff members got ill very quickly with some ending up with long term mental health problems. To me this suggests that despite being very susceptible to trauma due to my health condition mine is not an isolated case and that emotional abuse (or bullying) doesn't have to go on for years before any damage is done but I'd be really interested in finding some actual research.
Is anyone aware of any research that looks at the timescale for trauma from this type of abuse?
Thank you.