My ex was emotionally and mentally abusive. He was a control freak too.
Examples: we were pot heads together, smoked all day every day. My ex would yell at people if they tried to clean our cone piece.
He broke my nans (deceased) lamp by throwing one of our cats into it.
He had the cats so scared they would literally shit themselves when he yelled. One day one of the cats was so freaked out she shat while she ran. That was a bad clean up. Oh and guess who got to clean it up and calm down the cats?
I was all kinds of 'stupid', 'slutty', 'nasty'.
He would make me do things in the bedroom I was not comfortable doing. (I discovered quite some time after we broke up he had been wearing my clothes and underwear too)
He would 'allow' me to go out clubbing with friends and then spend the next day abusing me for leaving him home alone and accuse me of all kinds of horrible things.
When we broke up, he wouldn't let me get all my stuff back. I went over there around half a dozen times to get everything. Each time he would let me take a certain amount of stuff and then tell me to stop and throw me out of the flat. He only got physically abusive after we broke up. The last time I went back to get stuff, I wanted to take the cats. He told me I could only have them if I paid all his bills. I was 4 months pregnant at the time with my beautiful son so I decided that I would have to leave them there because it was getting too scary to do anything more. 2 years later I decided I was going to go back and confront him. When I arrived, one of the cats (my favourite) was sitting outside. I stroked him for a while, talking loudly to test if my ex was in ear shot. He didn't seem to be so I grabbed my cat and ran. I don't know what happened to the other cat or the rest of my stuff.
'People are never perfect but love can be. People waste time looking for the perfect lover rather than creating the perfect love' - Princess Leigh-Cheri from Still Life With Woodpecker.