When Intimacy Is Used as a Weapon: Speaking the Truth About Intimate Partner Violence

 When Intimacy Is Used as a Weapon: Speaking the Truth About Intimate Partner Violence

There’s something I need to talk about something many survivors of narcissistic abuse and intimate partner violence have experienced but rarely feel safe enough to name. It’s the kind of abuse that doesn’t leave visible bruises, but it leaves permanent scars on your psyche, your sense of reality, and your ability to trust.

For me, it was one of the most psychologically shattering parts of the abuse I endured.

For the first time in my life, I thought I had found both the physical and emotional connection I had always longed for. Until then, people had either been attracted to me but emotionally unavailable, or they had loved me in theory but discarded me when I needed real intimacy. I never had both not at the same time. But with my abuser, it felt different. At least at first.

He made me feel seen. He made me feel beautiful. He created an illusion of safety and depth. Sex felt intimate, even sacred. He mirrored all my dreams and convinced me we were building something real. I believed it with my whole heart. I believed I had finally found what I had been searching for my entire life. But what I found was a carefully constructed lie. When the truth unraveled, it shattered me in ways I’m still learning how to understand.

What made it even more psychologically confusing what turned the pain into trauma was what he did to me when I was most vulnerable.

There were moments when I was on the brink of suicide moments where I was disoriented, desperate, and completely broken. And instead of helping me, he used those moments to tighten his grip on me. He would tell me that how I acted in the next few minutes would determine how the night went. Then he would bring out drugs. Sometimes he would inject them into me himself. I wasn’t in any state to make decisions. I was fighting for my life, and he knew it. He took advantage of it.

And then he would force himself on me.

But it wasn’t just physical assault. It was psychological assault. During the assaults, he would start describing our wedding day in vivid detail. He would ask me to imagine us adopting a daughter together. He would make me name her right there in the middle of what was happening. And when he would finish inside me, he would whisper things about forever, about family, about a life he was pretending we were building together.

And I just stood there. Dissociated. Disconnected. Confused. Dazed. Trying to make sense of what was happening to me.

This is what makes intimate partner violence so hard to talk about because it doesn’t always look like violence. Sometimes, it looks like love. Sometimes, it looks like connection. Sometimes, it looks like a wedding proposal in the middle of a rape. It’s not just betrayal. It’s betrayal that is wrapped in false tenderness, designed to make you question your own memory, your own reactions, your own worth.

For a long time, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t fight harder. Why I didn’t run. Why I didn’t scream. But the truth is, I was in survival mode. I was manipulated, drugged, emotionally entrapped, and psychologically broken down to the point where my nervous system shut down. I wasn’t “letting it happen.” I was being held hostage inside my own body.

This is what needs to be understood: intimate partner violence is not just about physical beatings. It is about psychological bondage. It is about coercion. It is about weaponizing vulnerability and exploiting the deepest parts of someone’s soul. It is about manufacturing connection as a form of control. And when someone does that to you, they are not loving you they are dismantling you.

If you’ve experienced something like this, I want you to hear me clearly: It wasn’t your fault. You were manipulated. You were conditioned to believe that this was love. You were made to feel like you had no choice. And what you felt the confusion, the pain, the dissociation that was your body trying to protect you.

There is nothing shameful about how you survived.

You may still be trying to make sense of it. You may still be wondering if it was “really” abuse because there were times it felt so real. But abuse that disguises itself as love is still abuse. And when someone fuses intimacy with terror, connection with coercion, and affection with assault that is intimate partner violence in its most insidious form.

One day, you’ll be able to call it what it was without shame.

One day, the confusion will start to clear.

One day, the power they stole will begin to return to you.

And on that day, you’ll realize: You weren’t discarded.

You were set free.

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