He was a charming, good-looking, successful man, who treated Claire like a princess - when it suited. For Claire (not her real name), the four years she spent with a man who was supposed to love her destroyed her self-esteem, separated her from family and friends and sent her into a downward spiral. In our series on abuse, Otago Daily Times and Queenstown Times bureau chief Tracey Roxburgh talks to Claire about her story.
"You can't see it at first ... it started very subtly ... when it got really bad, I felt like I was going crazy".
When Claire, a single mother of two, met her former partner, she was bubbly, outgoing, confident and preparing to take on tertiary studies.
Within four years, she was unrecognisable to family and friends, with no self-esteem or confidence, had lost an unhealthy amount of weight and had a child to a man who subjected her to psychological abuse on a daily basis.
"He was so charming. He seemed like a great catch. He was good-looking, he had his own business, he seemed really generous. He was very expressive and always giving me compliments, building me up and making me feel really good about myself at the start," Claire said.
"It [the abuse] started very subtly - little comments every now and then if I hadn't been working out as much - 'You're putting on a wee bit of weight' or 'You're not as toned'.
"He seemed to really just target any insecurity or things that mattered to me."
However, it was not until Claire fell pregnant that the psychological abuse started to become prevalent, even though at the time she was completely blind to her situation.
"Once I had [our child] I was more dependent on him and he used that to have more control ... when it got really bad I felt like I was going crazy and he would feed that by telling me I was ...
"He would say things to me and I started to believe it, but the whole time my intuition was telling me, 'You're not that person'."
During a conversation with a longtime friend, the penny began to drop.
"[She] ... asked me to look back to before I got together with him and asked if I thought I was the same person.
"I wasn't. I felt like he just ... manipulated me and toyed with me. He kept my family and friends away ... and made me choose [between him and them]."
After a conversation with her brother, who had also been the victim of psychological abuse, Claire got some distance from her partner.
"Family and friends could see it, but felt hopeless, especially because he kept pushing [them] away.
"Every time my family and friends were around, he was right there. They felt they couldn't get near me.
"It wasn't until I got that distance [I could see it]."
Claire said that just before the pair temporarily split up, her former partner used physical violence.
"He was very [careful] not to hit me", but he grabbed her so hard he left bruises on her arm.
When he was shown the bruises, he felt it was "justified" because Claire had "upset" him.
"He said to me ... he had 'every right to do that'. That was when I thought, 'No, you don't'."
After they broke up, the former partner would keep coming back, always using their child as an excuse.
"I had to get strong, which was hard ... but I just gathered all the support I could from family and friends. My brother had a chat to him ... in the end I got a protection order."
Claire's lawyer saw the signs of abuse and recommended she get protection from the law.
"With the protection order, I had to sit down and go through it all - have dates and times and specific incidents.
"We had to prove there had been a pattern of behaviour.
"That was a real eye-opener.
"It wasn't hard to get it [the protection order], it was the process that was difficult ...
[but] putting all that down on paper was quite therapeutic.
Seeing it made me realise it wasn't just me."
While women in a psychological or emotionally abusive relationship were often blind to it, friends and family were not, and Claire had some words of advice for those people.
"The best thing a friend or family member can do is just be there, not to tell the person what to do, but listen.
"I had a friend who never once said, 'You need to leave him', she just listened.
"I was determined to make it work, we had a child together and I had already been through one failed relationship. If she'd said to me, 'You need to leave him', I probably would have pushed her away."
Psychological abuse - the facts
Psychological abuse is one of the primary ways abusers control and intimidate their family members.
It involves many different behaviours which can sometimes seem like separate or small things - some women have said they felt like they were going "crazy" because their abuser's actions seemed random and isolated, or small, like a look or gesture, or were hard to explain.
Like emotional abuse, psychological abuse includes a range of non-physical controlling behaviours which cause emotional damage and undermine a person's sense of wellbeing.
It is often difficult to recognise and can be very subtle - and is often overlooked by friends and family of a victim.
The victim may not even think or feel the abuse is taking place because it can begin slowly with little things and continue for several years.
However, psychological abuse can leave deep scars and can seriously damage the self-confidence of the victim.
Often abusing, or threatening to abuse, animals is indicative of psychological abuse, with research suggesting acts of animal abuse may be used to intimidate women and children into remaining in, or being silent about, their abusive situation.
Many women and children stay with violent partners because they feel they cannot leave their pets behind and in some instances violent men are also violent towards the family pets.
Research also shows there is a link between animal abuse and domestic violence - men who are violent to women may threaten to harm, or actually kill, a beloved pet in order to intimidate their partner in a bid to maintain their power and control.
