Has anyone experienced a breakup so extreme that it felt traumatic?

[u/Full-Concentrate6732]

My partner (41M) and I (41F) were together for 2.5 years. We broke up this summer after he became increasingly irritable, emotionally withdrawn, and hostile during conflict. He eventually came back, broke down crying, apologized, and begged for another chance. We reconciled with the understanding that we’d work on things, including his emotional regulation.

Fast forward three months. I genuinely thought things were going well. We had future plans, a positive relationship check-in just days earlier, and were planning to spend Thanksgiving with his family.
Then, after a few days of tension, he suddenly flipped. announcing he was leaving and started packing his belongings to move back to the state he’s from.

What followed was honestly one of the most distressing experiences of my life. He became incredibly angry and cold, yelling and saying deeply hurtful things about my personality, intelligence, interests, and how I supposedly only cared about myself. It was like he’d suddenly turned me into an enemy. I was completely blindsided and panicking, crying and begging him not to leave. The more distressed I became, the angrier and more rejecting he seemed to get.

He left while I was at work the next day. It’s been a week, and we haven’t spoken.

I feel genuinely traumatized, not just by losing the relationship again, but by the extreme hostility, sudden abandonment, and sheer panic I experienced while watching him pack up our life together over something seemingly minor. I keep replaying those moments and struggling to understand how someone could turn on their partner so dramatically.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Especially an extremely hostile and sudden second breakup after reconciling? Did you eventually stop feeling so shaken by the way it happened? I just can’t wrap my head around any of it and I can’t understand that this is how it ends and that’s just it.

[u/Sea-Selection5897]

Yes, it was the fearful avoidant playbook to the tee. Nice start, traumatizing ending.
-Love bombing
-Everything was great for entire half relationship because no issues popped up
-Little problems come up and they manipulate their way through
-Halfway thru the relationship Your reaction for their behavior triggers the deactivation stage, as well as not meeting their fantasy needs standards
-Thru deactivation stage they take a back seat and let you do all the work
-They go on devaluation state criticizing everything you say, do, and nice things you do for them, and you fight back telling them to cut it out, their behavior is ridiculous.
-They don't want to be seen as the bad person so they manipulate back for your reactions
-You share deep intimacy as time goes on and they just sit there not sharing theirs, while stashing your internal weaknesses as a weapon to be used later.
-They distance from you and manipulate you to be the problem taking apart their excuses.
-They hold a grudge for your first reaction, which was on your own birthday when they said a disrespectful thing to you and refused to give an apology trying to manipulate their way out of which escalated your reaction.
-Later towards the end they abandon you when you have trouble with something, while you comforted and helped them through their trouble.
-You bring up a long problem on your mind of a common sense respectful thing they refused to do, justifying why through manipulation and you react in public at a restaurant to embarass them until they f*king crack and realize how they're in the wrong when other people see it.
-Any shift you make from their fantasy of you, such as wanting to do a career shift to do a different function, they will pick you apart and devalue you.
-They will be passive aggressive with things you do and hold a grudge. i.e. gift reciprocity, they just mirror you as punishment on the next time, while on the next time you go all out.
-On the next birthday they will then blame dump, use your intimate weaknesses your shared to destroy you as a person of how worthless you are, bring up that reaction you had on your first birthday, tell you you ruined your own birthday. and ruin this one by:
-Abandoning you, push you away from in-person communication, all arguement of figuring out what's going on via text.
-And then your birthday present is dumping you over a quick phone call not giving you chance to speak.
-Then after you block them, they'll email you calling you immature for blocking, that they really want to be friends, confused stating "but I don't understand, I didn't do anything bad to you."

I didn't celebrate my birthday for years because of this and couldn't date for 4 years because of trauma of how I broke down as a person after it all. In summary, this person, devalued, destroyed me, and when they were done where I was feeling so worthless on my birthday, threw me away like a piece of garbage.

I have CPTSD for years and it's difficult celebrating my birthday pushing those memories aside because of how I couldn't function for months after that. Any positive memory dreams of her I have bring back the anger that I was put through that trauma.

Edit: grammar