Imagine...

Imagine if you were the kind of person who, for your whole life - even as a little kid, expressed your thoughts and feelings openly. Imagine that every time a conflict happened, you immediately expressed your thoughts and heard the other person's and came to a compromise or at least listened and were heard.

Now imagine if you, being this expressive person, suddenly found yourself in a relationship with a person who lacked integrity, rewrote history to make himself right (and, often, to make you wrong), invented people, places, and things, dramatically exaggerated to "win", cut you off in mid-sentence, completely disregarded your professional experience and opinion, was so self-absorbed that he rarely asked about your life and feigned interest when it came up - mainly using it to talk about himself.

Imagine that your attempts to handle this the way you always have - by communicating openly and honestly - is received with animosity and more of the above. And you're getting angrier and angrier and it's building up inside. Then yesterday you overhear this person tell someone else that your partner has a small brain and the anger is so great that you simply must leave. You complain of a stomach ache (which is only halfway untrue) and go home. He responds with a phone call expressing concern that you're ok but that simply cannot be reconciled with his complete lack of empathy and selflessness at all other times.

The intensity of this rarely happens to you because of how communicative you are. It's very uncomfortable and you can feel it physically making you ill. But you're stuck. Because you need this person. The only thoughts running through your head while awake are angry and bitter. While asleep, you dream of unleashing the anger in a verbal tirade and walking out, yet somehow intuitively knowing that this would be you acting just like him and the thought of THAT sickens you more. Because this has built up, unleashing it now would create a tidal wave of emotion that would easily overcome the years of training you've had in communication. It would surely result in the end of your job - either voluntarily or otherwise. So you sit and stew...

...and feel like a prostitute every time you get your paycheck.