I think it's manipulation, maybe at the beginning, I don't know
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I think it's manipulation, maybe at the beginning, I don't know**
Hi, I need to vent and get some advice and opinions on something. I THINK I'm being a victim of a pattern of manipulation, but I think it's still at the beginning; what I want to know is if it might get worse in the future. Recently I managed to live on my own and distance myself 100% from my family. I was born in a very abusive family environment, a very dysfunctional family, and in my family there were also many ped*ph*les, and the family blamed me; today I think I've already overcome all of that.
The last contact I had with my mother, and when I cut ties 100% with her, was when she disappeared with my kitten, who was the being that helped me when I was alone. I planned to take my kitten to live alone with me and even when I left my state, but my mother never liked to see me even 1% happy, so she disappeared with her and to this day I don't know what happened. Before that, I still had contact with her because I had many of my things at her house, and I was removing my things from there little by little, so I had to talk to her a few times, but after what she did to the cat, I cut ties definitively and didn't even finish removing all my things.
When I met my boyfriend, I thought he might be the only lucid and mature person I would ever meet; from the beginning he already seemed to have a very evolved mind. In the beginning, I told him my whole story, the abuse, the relationship with my mother, everything. At the time, he showed he was totally on my side, he welcomed me and I finally thought I could rest and trust someone. We really liked talking about philosophy, people's behavior, society and those kinds of subjects that before I only read about on Wikipedia and debated with ChatGPT, and he did too.
But, over time, his behavior changed in a way that left me confused; it might seem like small things, but since I was a child, I analyze people's behavior a lot. Now that the "worst" of the family chaos has passed, I started to notice patterns in him that made me lose trust:
The "Neutrality" with the one who hurt me: Even knowing everything my mother did (including what she did to my kitten), he now says he feels "pity" for her because she "is human." He even sought her validation; when my mother found out I was dating, she managed to get his number and kept sending several messages saying she was worried, that I left home out of nowhere, and he thought someone had spoken badly about him to my mother. And there's also the part where I didn't give his number to her because I had already cut ties, and my boyfriend, thinking my mother was thinking he was a bad person, insisted that I let him call her to say he was a good person etc. I explained that my mother wasn't worried and that she was just in one of the stages of trying to pull him away from me: first she tries to win over the manipulated person by showing concern for the daughter; after the manipulated person opens up to my mother, she slowly starts talking about her life, that she works a lot and things like that, until the manipulated person starts to see my mother as "wow, she wasn't like I thought" or "she's a good mother, why doesn't the daughter like her?"; and then, in the final stage, my mother starts talking bad about me until the manipulated person moves away. I explained ALL of this to my boyfriend; my mother did exactly all of this with everyone I had told, even schoolmates and my bosses at work. And even so, my boyfriend continued insisting on talking to her; I only allowed it out of exhaustion.
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Gaslighting: there was only 1 time he did this. He said he felt pity for my mother more than once, and in a situation where a man on the street did something wrong (I don't remember what it was), my boyfriend commented on it showing a lot of contempt, and I said "oh but, in the case of my mother you said you felt pity," and he said "I NEVER said I felt pity for your mother," and when I started to insist that he did say it, he said "oh but we are talking about that man, can we go back to the subject?" And I just said "ok."
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Word Salad: this part is long because I like to tell things with context, sorry, but he only did this once too, and I think he did it another time too but it was for a very trivial reason, I think the context was Minecraft, so it doesn't count because it was a joke.
He doesn't have a habit of waking up late, but I was trying to wake him up since 08:00, and he always said "1 more hour" and this lasted until 11:00. I went out and went to the street, later he called and I said "oh you must still be in bed" and he replied, showing he was hurt, "I already went by Uber and I am at this location" and sent the location, he really was far away, and he said "you can't assert something without knowing," and I replied saying that I only asserted he was still in bed or sleeping because of the usual pattern when I woke him up, he'd ask for 1 more hour without ever really waking up, fine. When night came and I was returning home, I was returning home passing through neighborhood 1, but before I had the habit of passing through neighborhood 2; I started passing through neighborhood 1 because in neighborhood 2 a dog attacked me, and I was on a call with him while I was returning home, and he said without any basis "I don't know why you keep passing through neighborhood 2" and I said "but it's been more than 3 weeks that I've been returning home through neighborhood 1," and I used the same logic of his from the morning that "you can't assert something without knowing," and he replied "did you apologize for this morning?" And I replied "no" and he said "then your argument is nullified." It was the first time I saw him acting without the intellect he had before, so I was in shock, and just hung up the call. He sent a message saying "I already noticed that you can't stand being contradicted." After that, I talked to Gemini asking if I had misunderstood or not, and explained the situation, and it said he acted wrongly and showed the reasons. I sent Gemini's answers to him and only then did he apologize. However, after my boyfriend apologized, he stayed quiet for a few hours and didn't talk much, he sent some messages showing maybe he was bothered, later we called, and he started to debate the subject which, in my view, had already been resolved. He tried to use arguments that didn't make much sense, in my view it had no head or tail, and said that I had to apologize too for what happened earlier. I apologized because I don't care about that, but even not caring, I felt a somewhat childish air or an inflated ego, I can't say for sure, I was finding it strange. He said at one point that after I hung up the call he understood his mistake right away, and I said "if you had understood that you were wrong, you wouldn't have said 'I noticed you can't stand being contradicted' right after I hung up." I noticed that he stayed in silence for about 2 seconds, and that's when the word salad started. He said something totally meaningless, I only remember him saying "I only said that because..." for the rest I don't remember anything else because it simply had no logic, and at that moment I realized that maybe he was saying all those words and complex things for me to get confused and think that it has logic but only I wasn't understanding it; human beings sometimes believe in complex discourses just for the complexity of it, even without understanding anything. Talking to Gemini today I learned this term "word salad."
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Only apologizes if I apologize too: this is the only thing I say he has done several times, the other things were only 1 or 2 times. There are several things he does, from involving my mother to more trivial things, in which he only apologizes if I also apologize for something. As I said, I apologize, however this brings me an air of childishness or inflated ego (I don't know the right term). At another moment too, while I was showing my hurt because he sympathized with my mother, he said "okay, sorry," but I noticed it wasn't sincere. When I said that, he said "you want me to apologize, don't you? So there, sorry." There's no way I can trick my brain that this was a sincere apology, clearly it was just to make me shut up, and I really am a person who doesn't keep talking about things that hurt me, I just keep it to myself, so this was one of the few times I tried to show that I was hurt by something.
In my whole life I was manipulated, I was manipulated by family, at school, even in the public prosecutor's office and child protective services when I went to ask for help, so today I notice many nuances, and maybe for other people it could even be trivial things or nonsense, but my doubt is if this can evolve. The only thing I know is that I don't see him the same way anymore; before I saw him as one of the few people in this world who was lucid and evolved, very intelligent, intellectual, and I thought he wouldn't let the selfish feelings that humans usually have take hold of him, and I thought that if ever this happened, if he lied or tried to manipulate, he would ask for forgiveness in a sincere way, but I've already seen that this doesn't happen.