have i been emotionally abused?

[Lyle Lanley]

a thread about me trying to get some clarity about the SA i suffered has left me thinking about the relationship i shared with this guy.
i was close to him during most of my life. we'd been dating on-off until he did that (but there have been other instances of him touching me inappropriately before).

and he seemed to both like me and dislike me at the same time? here are some things i said in the other thread.

truth is that we have had a complicated relationship for most of our lives, dating on-off, sometimes he'd hate me sometimes he'd be head over heels

laugh and joke with him as if he didn't traumatise me and he never apologised.

and you guys of scarleteen said that he was emotionally volatile and i was in a difficult position: this gave me a different perspective and i started putting the pieces together.

there are some things he said and did that make me wonder if it was abuse.

there are the physical ones too, which are what i'm certain about.
for example i've resurfaced a repressed memory i had of when we were very young kids (6-8 yrs age range) and he wanted to roleplay as characters from a famous video game, i'd be the princess and he'd be the monster who captured me. i remember he'd hold me too tight and make me unable to move, then he'd throw me on the bed and lie uncomfortably close to me. i never liked it but couldn't say it.

and sometimes we'd play video games or watch movies at his house and he'd always try to get close to me, since we'd both be sat or laying on his bed. once, he did what in my country is called "the dead hand" aka stealthily molesting someone. he let his hand fall on my chest as we were watching a movie and then when i told him about it he told me he hadn't noticed and thought it was my shoulder.

but what i think may be emotional abuse started in middle school and probably has continued until recently when i started actively avoiding me.

in middle school he suddenly started hating me, hating everything i did, starting to dislike certain pieces of media once i acquired special interests in them, but at the same time he still did things like writing in my notebook pretending to be the character i was crushing on at the time.
later on he apologised for this behaviour.

but in our early teens he still remarked about what i posted on instagram; he talked badly about my style when i started getting into alternative fashion, and once when i posted a swimwear pic (with a sport bra-like top which covered the entirety of my chest and masculine swim shorts which went from my navel to my thighs) he said i should take it down, remarking that "there are creeps who jack off to things like that".
these comments made me feel absolutely awful and disgusted with myself, at the time i was hurt and wondered why he thought like that.

but also, when i was "friends" with him again after the SA, he never acknowledged what he did nor apologised, yet still expected me to act 100% friendly with him, despite my paranoia. also he tried to isolate me from whatever went on around us.

i am in a healthy relationship now, but is it okay that i'm thinking so much about the relationship i shared with this boy?

[Heather]

Hi there, Lyle.

You know, when another kind of abuse has occurred/is part of a relationship, like sexual abuse or physical abuse, it's also usually a given that emotional abuse is involved. With sexual abuse in particular, emotional abuse is usually a component of that abuse in and of itself.

Trying to determine, as a third-party, if someone was or wasn't abusive based on examples like these is difficult, and it's even more difficult to say if any one of these, without context, was or wasn't abuse. That's the kind of thing that is much more reliably determined by the person (in this case, you) that experienced the interactions and relationship.

That said, by all means, nothing you are describing here is kind or caring, and much of it does sound to me like elements of an abusive relationship. If. friend told me these things about a relationship they were in, I would for sure be telling them that this sounded unhealthy and unsafe and that I was concerned for them.

In terms of your other question, processing our abuses and other trauma is the work of a lifetime, often. Being in a relationship with someone else doesn't mean that we're suddenly not healing anymore, or that that process does (or should!) stop. In particular, I think working out what was abuse is also beneficial to our other relationships, because it makes it more likely that those relationships will be healthy, or, if not, that we will be able to spot abuse in them and get out.