Emotional Confusion in Relationships

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Part 3 of a 7-part companion series to The Narcissism Files.

By the end of year two, the ease was gone.

But the relationship still functioned in the normal ways.

Conversations happened.

Time passed.

Daily life continued.

Nothing had collapsed outright.

What had disappeared was my ability to interpret what I was living inside.

Everything felt random.

Arbitrary.

Mood-based.

I couldn’t tell what mattered anymore.

Or why it mattered.

Or for how long it might.

Paying Closer Attention

I looked more closely at the moments between us that didn’t make sense.

I tried to understand how my experience of those moments aligned - and didn’t - with Mara’s.

What existed early on that no longer did?

Where were the patterns and consistencies?

The shared values?

The moral framework?

Those early years had offered assurances. They gave me something solid to stand on. They made it feel safe to love her.

I wanted to understand why that ground had disappeared.

Quiet Adjustments

By this point, I was no longer moving through the relationship freely.

My choices were rarely guided by my own needs. Before anything else, I calculated the cost.

Would Mara see this as selfish?

Would it inconvenience her?

Make me unavailable?

Ask too much of her time, attention, or solitude?

Existing outside of what she considered worthwhile had become expensive.

Friendships.

Hobbies.

Health concerns.

Anything that distracted me from what she expected of our lives together was a potential problem.

What Started to Accumulate

None of this was occasional.

It was daily now that multiple conversations would leave me confused and needing clarity. But my questions had become triggering for her.

She could interpret them as my not caring enough to listen.

Or my lack of respect for her.

My intelligence.

My character.

The weeks developed their own grim predictability. Tantrums became normalized. Kindness was currency. Lies and secrets were relabeled as her right to privacy.

Each meltdown could include hours of rage texts.

Name-calling.

Character attacks.

Threats.

There was little recovery time between them. This went beyond early relationship misalignment. Nothing had time to reset.

Each episode carried forward, dragging the emotional weight of the last one with it.

The exhaustion narrowed my world. It changed how I moved through it and how much of myself I could afford to bring with me.

Restraint Without Resolution

As the fatigue deepened, I edited myself more ruthlessly.

Very little felt worth the cost of more conflict.

I was careful not just in isolated moments but in how I moved through entire days.

The anxiety showed up in my body before my understanding caught up.

I felt it in my shoulders.

In the way my breath shallowed when I needed to speak.

In the constant, low-level bracing that let me substitute composure for honest expression.

I tracked my tone.

My timing.

Early signs of escalation.

I'd become responsible for everything that happened between us. It took all of me.

I Didn’t Know

I had no frame of reference for what I was experiencing with Mara.

I wasn’t repeating a pattern that already existed in my relationship history.

It was unrelatable.

Illogical.

I couldn’t even understand how it served her.

The mental disorientation was constant. The self-doubt suffocating. My desperation to understand the basic workings of my own life grew by the day.

I was still showing up.

Still trying to move thoughtfully.

Still searching for what might help.

But it felt like time was against us.

I was changing into someone who could survive the relationship.

Someone I did not want to become.

I could feel it happening.

And it felt like the worst thing she’d done to me yet.

🤎Elle

Part 3 of a 7-part companion series to The Narcissism Files.

This piece is part of a larger documented project called The Narcissism Files, which explores the aftermath of this shift and all the came after.

I write more about emotional confusion in relationships and the different ways that can show up.

Read more here.

Process Statement

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Want to keep exploring how emotional confusion in relationships can accumulate over time?

A Related Project

Some of the themes explored here - emotional safety, gaslighting, and the slow erosion of trust - are examined more fully in The Narcissism Files, an ongoing written project about narcissistic abuse and neurodivergent vulnerability.

It’s not a guide or a recovery plan.

It’s an attempt to name what happened clearly, without fixing or reframing it.

You can explore the project here:

The Narcissism Files →

Process Statement

This post was written entirely by the author, without AI involvement. Every word, structural decision, formatting choice, and punctuation mark reflects the author’s own process and intent.

The formatting on this site is intentional. Short lines, generous spacing, and visual breaks are used to reduce cognitive load and reading fatigue, especially for autistic and neurodivergent readers.

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