Abuse doesn’t always look the way people expect. It isn’t always visible. It can be emotional, psychological, financial, and more. In my case, it was all of these and then some. My abuser manipulated, isolated, and controlled me in ways that slowly stripped away my sense of self. My confidence was chipped away piece by piece, until I no longer recognized the person I had once been. For a long time, I didn’t even realize how much of myself I had lost.
The cruelty wasn’t always obvious. Sometimes it was so subtle that I questioned what was real. Other times it was so horrendous that it left me stunned and broken. Keeping me constantly off balance, my abuser would flip between tearing me down and moments of temporary kindness. I kept telling myself, “If you just try harder, things will get better.” They never did. Over time, I stopped trusting my own instincts and did whatever I could to avoid conflict because pushing back only made things worse. It’s a vicious cycle, and that’s exactly what my abuser wanted.