From Emotional Crutch to Consequences: Six Years with Fragile Men

In this episode of The 515 Podcast, Raven reads a raw reflection on six years of back‑to‑back relationships that were sold as love but operated as entrapment and objectification. She breaks down how entitled, emotionally underdeveloped men used her empathy, agreeableness, and emotional intelligence as infrastructure for their shame and fragile masculinity, turning her into status, shelter, sex, and free therapy instead of a partner. You will hear her unpack narcissistic shame, the shame–rage loop, and how labels like “attachment issues” or “personality disorders” often become smoke screens that keep women in the role of healer while nothing changes. Raven also shares the concrete shifts she made during her five‑month abusive marriage, from documenting everything and listening to her body to enforcing consequences and controlling access to her time, energy, and body. This episode is part memoir and part field guide for anyone untangling themselves from heterosexual toxic dynamics rooted in control, and it is shared as lived experience, not clinical advice.

Links:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the 515 Podcast. I'm Raven and today I am sharing a raw reflection I wrote recently about my relationships in the last six years. It is part memoir, part field guide. I trace the pattern that kept showing up in different men and how their entitlement and shame met my empathy, agreeableness, and analytical mind in a way that made me easy to use. However, I do want to touch on a few things before we get started. This podcast is not for everyone. This is my testimony, my personal experience, thoughts, and analysis. I am going to be talking explicitly about emotional abuse, narcissistic patterns, and my own trauma history. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you. This is my lived experience, not clinical advice or replacement for therapy. And I am not inviting you to self-diagnose or diagnose anyone else. Take what helps you feel more sane and leave the rest. To that point, for those of you who do not know me, I am a devout psychology and philosophy enthusiast. No, really. That's what I wanted to major and find a career in, but instead it became a personal profession for me. However, it does kind of work with what I got, my bachelor's in English, language, and literature, with a heavy focus on literary criticism and linguistics. Anyway, besides introducing myself to everyone, it is very important to me that I handle my audience with care. In this podcast, I will be using pseudonyms in place of anyone's real name, except for consenting individuals. I am 36 years old, assigned female at birth. I identify as female. My pronouns are she, her, and I am bisexual, partnering with heterosexual males most of my life. I will be using language in this podcast that describes that experience. I want to explicitly say that because the LGBTQ community is welcome here. And anyone of any gender identity or sexual orientation may be able to resonate with my content. Yet still, I will use the language that fits my experience and research. Statistically, the vast majority of perpetrators of domestic violence are biologically male. Moreover, please understand that this podcast focuses on heterosexual, toxic, and abusive scenarios rooted in a male desire for power and control. Please be patient with me. I'll be honest, it has taken me way too long to get this up and running, but it is the first time I am not just a co-host on a podcast. I am also producing content for other plot platforms at the same time. And it's only been five weeks since I ended my abusive marriage. So you guys are on this adventure with me. Maybe soon I'll have better equipment and an intro song and ads and all that jazz. But for now, I am doing the best I can and I am excited, super excited, to share my stories and thoughts. Alright. I am going to read this pretty much as I wrote it. So you will hear both the teacher and me and the woman who is still bleeding a bit from the story. I have been in back-to-back relationships for six years. In the last six years, I have been used and abused under the guise of loving or care. It was neither. It was entrapment. I was objectified in various ways to fit their agenda. They did not want my femininity. They did not want an oracle or divine counterpart. They were drawn to my strength because they were lost, ungrounded, and suffocating in their own shame. They admired my clarity, conviction, and emotional wisdom. Subconsciously they leaned on me for my insight, guidance, and self-worth. I became their emotional anchor. Over time, however, that imbalance breeds resentment because even though they submitted voluntarily, they begin to feel controlled, small, or exposed by my emotional presence. My strength becomes a mirror, reflecting back their confusion and fragility. Instead of turning toward that like an equal, they store it as shame. And shame, when it cannot be owned, has two escape routes. One, growth. Two, attack. Many emotionally underdeveloped men choose attack because it is narcissistic shame, not guilt over hurting others, but fear of being small, ordinary, or unworthy. His entitlement lays the foundation. His shame colonizes the interior like a tyrannical state. His rage is the state violence deployed whenever that fragile empire feels exposed. This is a shame rage loop. A fragile, entitled self-image gets threatened, shame floods in, and rage erupts to push that shame back out onto someone else. When everything explodes and he decides you are the villain, it is no longer about what is true. It is about recovering his pride by destroying your credibility. Because when a woman has knowledge, authority, emotional depth, boundaries, conviction, care, she holds a kind of power some men were never taught to respect. They were only taught to control it or fear it. So when she stops being their emotional crutch and starts becoming their mirror, they panic. A confident, emotionally illiterate woman is one of the greatest threats to fragile masculinity. This is what objectification looks like in real time. You stop being a person and start being infrastructure. Shelter when he is homeless, income when he is broke, status when he feels small, sex when he feels empty, and constant reflection when he cannot bear to look at himself directly. He plugs his fragile empire into you like a power grid and calls it love. In this dynamic, objectification is not abstract. You are used for status and image management, proof that he is desirable, successful, not alone. You are used for shelter and finances, a safer life he did not build but now feels entitled to inhabit. You are used for sex, not as mutual intimacy, but as validation control and sedation for his shame. Each role strips a layer of personhood until you are being related to as a collection of services instead of a soul. For six years I was infrastructure. I was the status upgrade, the soft place to land, the free therapist, the sex, the steady paycheck. They didn't partner with me, they depended on me to function. That dependence didn't replace their other sources of supply. Porn, social media, and other women were parallel power lines, feeding the same entitlement. Each one another way to turn women into services for protection, not people. Men who relate to women as objects are always hungry. They use you to keep a hollow, patriarchal idea of manhood from collapsing. Many of them were never given a solid inner life to stand on. Their emotional development was cut short by shame, neglect, and the demand to be strong. So instead of building a self from the inside out, they reach outward for women's status and stimulation to feel like someone at all. For six years, I begged these men to value me as an equal by over-explaining myself, educating them, and excusing their behavior. I analyzed and diagnosed. I studied how to reach them and rewired myself to try. I am highly emotionally intelligent and discerning, and I happen to be exceptionally high in agreeableness. Paired with my empathy, my analytical brain, and complex trauma, this mix can sabotage my ability to consistently honor my own values. I stretch my tolerance thresholds, and when I am overwhelmed, my usually steady differentiation of self collapses. All of that is perfect supply for an abuser. A woman who will explain instead of leaving, empathize instead of confront and analyze instead of believing her own pain. It keeps the cycle intact. His entitlement, my overfunctioning, his shame, my self-blame, while he continues to feed off the very capacities that are supposed to protect me. An abuser knows what he is doing and he believes he has every right to do it. He may also have disorganized attachment, OCD, MPD, BPD, or profound emotional immaturity, but those labels often work like smokescreens. Recasting a harmful adult as a partial victim of his own story, he still knows what he is doing. He is not a child, and he is not emotionally a child in any morally relevant way. Children do not systemically lie, manipulate from a position of power and use a supremacist system to dim another person's light. A man who refuses real help is already giving you his clearest diagnosis. If you truly believe he has BPD or another personality disorder, his refusal to seek treatment is your brightest warning flare. Diagnostics do not matter when he insists there is nothing wrong with how he treats you. Some men even self-diagnose and confess their wounds like a party trick, but there is no therapist, no consistent treatment, no community holding them to change. They drop labels in your lap so you will study them, explain them, and stay longer. They do not seek help for whatever disorder they claim. They use that story to keep you in the role of healer while they keep taking emotional, physical, and sexual labor from you. A man is not safe if he is not actively taking concrete steps to improve his mental health and grow as a person to better himself and the world around him. This is why coherence is your GPS. Do his actions, patterns, and outcomes match the words coming out of his mouth over time. Coherence means his, I'm working on it, shows up in calendars, appointments, change behavior, not just in late-night speeches that evaporate by morning. Never believe a man just because he finally says the sentence you have been starving to hear. These men are learning the language of pop psychology and feminism so they can sound awake while staying exactly the same. I refuse to let others use my gifts against me for their own benefit. My five-month marriage to an abusive man ripped open old wounds. Yet something changed in me the last few months. I stopped acting out of my usual survival strategies inside a toxic dynamic. That change protected me from further damage, and I ended the relationship sooner than I have ever done before. What did I do differently this time? I built small moments inside dissociation and numb depression where I quietly observed and documented everything. I listened to my body more often. I stood my ground. I stopped allowing him to use my body. I clocked everything, gray rocked, and stayed as calm as my nervous system would let me. Even in freeze and fawn, even in reactive moments, I kept turning back to one question. What are the consequences for him if he keeps doing this to me? And how can I control his access to everything that I am, even if he is still in the same bed? Humans respond to consequences, and women are conditioned to avoid imposing consequences at all, let alone enforcing them. We are taught to prioritize other people's comfort over our own well-being. But the only way things change is when we confront our fear, the anxiety of being disliked, criticized, or abandoned for standing our ground. Women are trained to be the good girl and simultaneously pressured to be the cool girl. That is what I wrote a couple weeks ago. And I tried to read it as smoothly as possible for you guys. I do like sharing this with you. I'm going to stop for now and probably write a little more on it. Finish that reflection with a cohesive like story about my last two relationships. I wanted this part to sit in the fire, to name the pattern, the empire, the objectification, and the ways women like me get turned into infrastructure, okay? And we are going to talk about what happens after you step out of that role. If you are in the middle of the mess right now, you are not crazy, you are not alone. We will pick everything up, try to put together the pieces next episode.