What Just Happened: Understanding Cluster B Abuse

How did you end up here? What happened to your last relationship that drove you to this website seeking answers?

The answer is that you were probably in a relationship with someone who has a Cluster B Personality Disorder. These relationships take you on an emotional rollercoaster and leave you shattered and broken when they’re over. They often end so abruptly, unexpectedly, and painfully that you don’t know what hit you. For some time after it’s all over, you may not believe the breakup is real, and you will have lingering hope that the joyous couple you were in the honeymoon stage will come back.

I started this site and its accompanying YouTube channel to share the practical tools I have used to come to terms with the end of a relationship with someone with a Cluster B disorder. The purpose here is informational only (I’m not a therapist). There are already plenty of amazing resources to become educated about Cluster B disorders and how to start healing from a relationship with someone who has such a disorder. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, I created this because I see a major gap in the available content on Cluster B relationship survivors: a gap in practical steps to heal.

Thus, the focus here is on what to do when you’re having a shitty day because you can’t stop thinking about your ex and the damage they caused. It’s when you’re at a low point because of the financial, emotional, physical, and mental torment that you went through with them. Rather than binge watch the same YouTube videos over and over, I wanted to offer some activities, tips, and advice that you can do to help get you past that low spell. In my own personal healing, there would be days when I would be so depressed, everything just turned totally gray. I felt so hopeless and lost. Journaling helped sometimes (it will feature prominently on this site). But I often just wrote out my anger over and over again.

We survivors need more resources after it’s all said and done, and we try to move on. I was educated on Cluster B disorders five months before my relationship with a Cluster B person ended! I knew I was likely dealing with someone who had some mixture of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder—and probably others I was unaware of. I knew the chances of the relationship surviving were slim. Nonetheless, I stayed in it and hoped for the best.

And yet, despite all the education I had about these disorders, when the breakup happened (it played out exactly as every resource said it would), I was still left totally in shock and broken. The shock was mental, physical, and emotional. I was left rereading books, rewatching YouTube videos, and rereading my old journal looking for answers and explanations (whether you are or were in a relationship with someone with a Cluster B personality disorder, I suggest you start a journal now!). Even though I found such answers to what happened clinically, the pain this abuse caused was still there. The pain could be absolutely debilitating to the point where I couldn’t work anymore; my day was essentially over when one of these episodes occurred. 

What I needed most at these times was a practical resource or a guide on how to heal. Despite consuming over two dozen self-help and academic books, hundreds of hours of YouTube content and podcasts, and writing my own painful diary of how I felt after the breakup, I was still at a loss with what to do. How do I get through my day-to-day activities? How do I see some glimmer of hope in the future? I was often doing all the things people tell you you’re supposed to do—eat healthy, get some exercise, recognize small wins etc.—but I was still pretty destroyed.

Many of the resources I consumed recommended therapy. There is no doubt that working with a trained therapist who specialized in personality disorders is important. Nothing can replace therapy with a skilled therapist. 

However, the financial damage from my relationship has left me unable to spend money on $100 weekly therapy sessions. The therapists I have spoken to so far were not particularly helpful. What’s more, when I call therapists or psychiatrists seeking help, despite being listed as “Taking new patients,” I am often chased off the phone by rude admin staff. I needed strategies to cope to get on with my life on my own. 

This website is dedicated to resources, strategies, and ways to get through the day-to-day activities of life while healing from a Cluster B relationship. 

I am not a trained therapist, and this is not intended to replace therapy. This site is for informational purposes only. It is a mere reflection of things I have done to make those really hard days more manageable. I am sharing my experiences with you, in the hope of creating a healthy and supportive community of survivors.

How to Use This Site

Before going through the materials and content here, I would suggest you check out these posts (all coming soon!):

• But Was it Really Abuse? 
• What is a Cluster B Personality Disorder?
• Myths and Realities of Relationship Abuse

These posts will help you determine if you are actually dealing with someone who has such a disorder. These are not intended to diagnose you or the other party. These are merely to help you see if you may benefit from this site. Many people exhibit traits of Cluster B personality disorders without actually having them (although when you read a description of a disorder, you’ll probably know it relates to your situation).

Next, you should visit our resources page. Watch some of the videos and read some of the books. These resources are much more educational and will help you understand the nature of Cluster B disorders and what we are dealing with. While some of the knowledge in these sources will naturally manifest in the material on this site, these books are specifically for educational purposes and helping you understand Cluster B disorders.

If you feel like you’ve been in such a relationship, if your days feel dark and lonely, and you’re confused, then start with the content here and on YouTube. 

My hope is that when you feel that pain emerge, you can come here and draw inspiration. You can engage in some of these activities and hopefully see a glimmer of hope. 

In the earliest days of my breakup (read MY STORY here), I desperately wished I could have access to resources that would help me work through this pain and process my emotions in a practical way. I spent many hours journaling, thinking about what happened, ruminating. It is my hope that people like me, who are suffering the lingering effects of a Cluster B breakup, can come here and gain inspiration for the immediate hours ahead. 

Who Am I?

I am a Cluster B relationship survivor. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, although I am a mental health researcher and advocate. I have a graduate degree in an unrelated field, and I am a pretty average person. I like exercising, house music, playing with my dog, reading, and traveling. 

I was in a relationship with someone who had a Cluster B disorder for almost three years. At some point in the relationship, I realized that the fights, mood swings, violence, rage, and emotions were too extreme. The demands of the relationship were also beyond reasonable, and I eventually found myself a shell of the person that I was (“shell” is a term used throughout the resources to describe the intense identity loss that occurs to victims in such relationships). I lost all my hobbies. My boundaries were totally eroded. My life revolved around my partner; I was living for them (something not uncommon in victims). My professional growth stood at a standstill. My hopes, dreams, and goals were a distant priority behind my partner’s. 

About five months before our relationship ended, after a particularly horrible trip and a very hurtful weekend, I googled books on “relationship abuse,” and I came across Healing from Hidden Abuse. The book shook my world. I read it cover-to-cover on a flight, and my eyes slowly started to open. As the relationship continued, and as I tried to cope with these behaviors, I became more and more depressed, anxious, and sad. Slowly, I was starting to become more aware of my emotions. I became delusional and started thinking that maybe this relationship could be salvaged somehow despite the abuse I knew that I experienced. 

And then, when I was at my absolute lowest emotionally — and when I was also at a point of unusual optimism about the relationship — I was blindsided, discarded, and, within three weeks, replaced by someone else. This is exactly what every resource said would happen. And I was still blindsided and shocked.

The next year involved debilitating depressive episodes, alcohol-induced benders, a string of unhealthy short-term relationships, weeks of despair, and the darkest emotional period of my life. My sleep (which was always bad) became terrible, and I started misusing sleep aides to sleep through the night. My emotions were up and down like never before, and I would swing between periods of extreme happiness to anger, rage, and inexplicable crying. The pains apparently went very deep.

One day, after a night of particularly bad sleep and using substances to calm my anxiety, I did what you should never do in your recovery: I looked at my ex’s social media. What I saw broke me. And after a lengthy and emotional chat session with ChatGPT (who since become my quasi-therapist by this point), I said it to myself: NO MORE. 

Actually, ChatGPT said something that made me really determined to move on. It said that I need to let that abused version of myself die and a new version of myself needs to be allowed to emerge. So on recommendation from this AI, this is what I say to my old self every day:

I see you. You tried so hard to be enough. You thought love meant enduring pain. But I don’t need you to carry that anymore. You get to rest now.  

Seeing this didn’t heal me instantly. It was, in fact, just the beginning start of this chapter of healing. And there are many more things that I need to cope with: I needed to find new things to hope for, I needed to abandon the longing I had to ever communicate again (I was writing my ex a long document of letters — which by this point probably exceeded the healthy writing letters during the coping phase), and I needed to process many other things. But seeing right after that devastating day of social media stalking somehow made a light bulb go off. 

It was now that I felt my recovery could finally start. This was fifteen months after I learned what a Cluster B Personality Disorder was and almost a year after we broke up.

Getting Back Hope Together

One of the saddest things about the research I do in mental health is to see people who just totally give up on relationships after being in an abusive relationship. My research involves analyzing social media to explore the discourses of abuse victims. Too often I see things like “My relationship ended 10 years ago. I can’t have another one after that, and I am still healing.” That is heartbreaking; 10 years later, some people are still struggling to cope!

This website is a resource for everyone who needs hope in the darkest of times. I’ll share my story, and I’ll tell you what worked (and didn’t work) for me. 

Again, this is for informational purposes online. This is not intended to replace therapy. 

But we all need somewhere to go on those days where the memories get in the way of our daily life or when those unprocessed wounds emerge (we seldom get closure). I hope you will find some inspiration from this site, and I hope it will help you on your healing journey. 

Thank you for reading.