At the end of an emotionally abusive relationship, a breakup or divorce is unlikely to go quickly and smoothly, and as the nightmare unfolds, you may find yourself shocked that although your mental health has always been strong, you are now beginning to feel yourself slowly disintegrating.

You expect to find empowerment now that the relationship is over, but instead, you start to wonder if your partner was right.

Maybe you’re really crazy…

The most obvious cases where this happens are cases where you stay in contact with this person and he keeps “telling” you that everything that happened between you was entirely your fault.

However, there are usually problems that are much more complex than those at play.

Since it is so difficult to know whether someone has a personality disorder or is just being an asshole, Bill Eddy of the High Conflict Institute coined the phrase high-conflict people as a way to differentiate between those who deal with their conflicts in a typically mental way and those who have a need to… Continuing conflict in their lives. According to Eddie:

“High conflict people (HCPs) have a pattern of high conflict behavior that increases conflict rather than reduces or resolves it. This pattern typically occurs over and over again in many different situations with many different people. The issue with seeming conflict is that “Time is not what increases the conflict. The ‘issue’ is not the issue.”

Related: How Not To Marry A Narcissistic Jerk

When dealing with someone like this, whether they are a true narcissist or not, you can read all the self-help books out there, but as long as you consciously or subconsciously find their voice more important than your own, you will continue to experience a lot of self-doubt, fear, and urges to resolve your feelings more effectively. Effective and move forward.

The longer you stay stagnant in that place of inner confusion, the more you turn over the same stone over and over again looking for a different answer, and so you naturally begin to believe this person who seems completely unconfused.

And if they’re right, well, darn. Maybe you must be really crazy!

But you’re probably being manipulated into believing that.

Here are eight reasons why you might think you’re crazy in an abusive relationship, and what you can do now to remind yourself that you’re really not.

1. Gas lighting.
   The standard for anyone using their weapon of choice is manipulation, gaslighting is defined as follows:

“A form of emotional abuse in which the abuser repeatedly manipulates situations to deceive the victim into distrusting his or her memory and perceptions… [The term is derived] from the British play-turned-movie, ‘Gas Light’, in which a husband tries to drive his wife crazy using a… A variety of tricks that make her question her perceptions and reason.

People who are emotionally abusive like this tactic for two main reasons:

Blaming someone else for all of his problems keeps him safe from the enormous emotional conflict that comes from looking at his own inner turmoil.
It works
It works because reasonable people are fully aware that they have mistakes and that from time to time they make mistakes. Reasonable people are willing to listen to their partner and give due consideration to his words.

What you can do about it:

You won’t be able to stop your ex from trying this strategy, but you can stop yourself from believing it. When your ex says something that makes you feel inferior and doesn’t fit with your self-perception, give yourself credit for knowing yourself much better than anyone else, including them.

Related: Why Narcissists Get Way More Action Than Everyone Else

2. Expectations of reasonable behavior from someone who has already shown you that they are unreasonable.
   We are taught to believe that every person is inherently logical and capable of change. Unfortunately, neuroscience shows that this is not the case.

Those of us with a typical neurological profile only know what it means to think within a healthy mindset, and so we generally assume that everyone else has roughly the same ability to think as we do.

According to the Institute for Personality Studies:

“In healthy psychological development…early, extreme, and separate representations gradually merge into more complex, accurate, and realistic internal images of oneself and others. We realize that ourselves and others have good and bad qualities, and that we can be disappointed in ourselves or in others while still valuing Good qualities.

Not so for healthcare providers, who have the following happen at some point in early development:

“Emotionally charged interactions between the infant/child and significant caregivers, which are choreographed and repeated over time, lead to the development of specific representations of self and significant others, linked to the emotional quality they initially experienced…[Emotions associated] may range from intense love to Intense hatred. At the beginning of life, these dualities are not accurate or literal representations of historical reality; rather, they tend to represent polarized and extreme images and affects. Thus, in response to stimuli… the individual experiences himself, and others, in terms of extreme and simplistic representations that do not correlate coherently with the Self and others that may be triggered by a different event.

In short, the long scientific story is that the brains of many people who experience severe trauma during childhood never develop the neural pathways necessary for what we consider rational thinking to occur. Meaning they don’t think the same way we do, at all.

Understanding that your ex is essentially suffering from a form of “emotional dyslexia” can lead to a massive reduction in your daily dose of banging your head against the wall.

When your ex looks at the page that represents your situation, the messages his or her brain sends are mixed up, just like the letters on the page in front of someone with dyslexia. Unfortunately, we do not yet have highly effective ways to facilitate emotional processing for healthcare providers the way we do for people with dyslexia to reprocess visual information on their page.

What you can do about it:

Remind yourself that your ex’s thought process does not work the same way as yours, and you will no longer find yourself surprised by his or her negative behaviors, nor will you take his words and actions to heart.

Related: How To Spot Early Signs Of Narcissism In Really, Really Nice People

3. Catharsis.
   When we’re going through a tough time, our friends often make sure to say something along the lines of, “I’m here for you if you need to vent.” We’ve all said it, we’ve all heard it and we’ve all done it.

However, the problems with talking too much about your trauma are two-fold.

Every time you broadcast your story, you relive it. We think that getting the story out there will somehow remove its weight from within ourselves, but spreading it too many times has the opposite effect. Not only is the situation weighing heavily on you, but you’ve now cooked yourself in a broth of it, the heavy steam looming around you and pushing you down even further.
Access number 4 (below) and you will see… 😉

4. Issues that are so complex that you find it difficult to explain them succinctly.
   Here is the second issue with venting. Since people like your ex are constantly kept busy by creating more conflict in life, the story of any conflict with someone like this is rarely simple. This means that it’s simply impossible to sum up the sheer amount of insanity you find yourself experiencing in the 3-minute summary that most of our friends expect us to provide.

Because of this, you’ll likely find yourself struggling to find the most convincing arguments you can make while leaving out some details and rushing through others so your friends don’t lose interest. In the end, your friend may or may not get it, and you feel more exhausted, frustrated, and crazy.

What you can do about it:

In order to address issues 3 and 4 above, choose a small, trusted number of close people who you know will be with you throughout the journey. Let others know how much you appreciate their offers, but resist the urge to share the same stories with multiple people over and over again.

5. Confused children.
   If the situation is confusing for your adult friends to understand, it is a completely foreign language for your children. What’s worse is that you can’t even tell your kids the gory details to help them solve the problem.

Regardless of whether they are young children or adults, children neither want nor need to hear sordid stories about what either of their parents did to the other.

However, manipulative people don’t always stop with adults. Some people take advantage of their children’s trust by trying to paint you as the one in the wrong.

When your kids come to you with horribly incorrect or twisted versions of something they’ve been told you said or did, it can be enough to drive you crazy…and make you feel like maybe you are.

What you can do about it:

The good news is that children pay very close attention to their parents. They know who you are almost as well as you do.

As difficult as it may be, ignore the lie they’ve been told with statements like: “I’m confused, my friend. That’s not how I remember it at all. Your mother and father and I have different views on a lot of things. This seems to be one of them,” It can take the pressure off all of you.

6. People who have been poisoned against you.
   Given that healthcare providers carry this type of drama across intersecting areas of their lives, they develop coping mechanisms to enable themselves to retain allies. Isolating partners while keeping friends and family members apart and sharing various scraps of lies or misleading and out-of-context “truths” makes everyone around them believe different sets of bad information.

When you were together, your ex may have told you about something someone did to them, which made you think that person was so reprehensible that you chose not to have anything to do with them. You may now begin to see that stories you have completely accepted as true may turn out to be at least partially fabricated in order to limit your relationship and connection with others.