What Is Love? (Baby Don’t Hurt Me)

The stories that follow represent experiences many survivors face when navigating relationships affected by trauma. Lucille and Dominique’s journeys aren’t outliers or extremes – they illustrate common patterns that emerge when love becomes entangled with harm. Through their experiences, we can explore the confusion, pain, and ultimately the clarity that comes from understanding love’s true nature amid the fog of trauma.

As you read through these stories and concepts, you may find yourself confronting painful questions: “How did I not see this sooner?” “Am I stupid for loving someone who treats me this way?” “Why do I keep making the same relationship mistakes?” Please know that these thoughts are not only common but an expected part of processing relationship trauma. Later in this article, we’ll explore why intelligent, perceptive people find themselves caught in these patterns and why self-blame isn’t just undeserved—it’s actually part of the trauma itself. If these thoughts arise as you read, try to notice them with gentleness, knowing we’ll address them directly when we explore the grief that comes with recognizing what’s been missing in our relationships.

Lucille’s Choice

Lucille sat on the floor of her new apartment, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes that contained the modest remains of her former life. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across bare walls – walls that held no family photographs, no inherited heirlooms, no visual reminders of where she had come from.

Three months ago, she had made the hardest decision of her life: to move across the country and change her phone number, cutting contact with her family of origin. It wasn’t done in anger or as punishment. It was done because she finally understood that her survival depended on it.

For years, Lucille had battled thoughts of ending her life. Each interaction with her family – the subtle criticisms, the dismissal of her feelings, the explosive arguments followed by pretending nothing had happened – left her feeling hollowed out, worthless, and increasingly convinced that her presence in the world was unnecessary. Therapy had helped her recognize that these weren’t her original dark thoughts but internalized messages planted through years of emotional abuse.

“You just need to be stronger,” her mother would say whenever Lucille tried to discuss her depression. “Everyone has problems. I love you, but you’ve always been too sensitive.”

Before he died, her father’s approach had also been damaging. Though he too regularly told Lucille he loved her, his actions communicated something else entirely. He would walk away whenever emotions entered the conversation, dismiss her accomplishments, and make all her life choices about himself, criticizing anything she did that he felt made him look bad. The stark contrast between his words of love and his acts of rejection created a confusing double-bind that Lucille had spent decades trying to reconcile.

When her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Lucille dropped everything to care for him. She spent months shuttling between hospitals and his home, managing his medications, coordinating with doctors, and sitting beside his bed during long, silent nights. Her siblings visited occasionally, but the daily burden fell to Lucille.

What confused Lucille most was her own reaction to his diagnosis. Despite years of emotional neglect and having essentially given up on ever having a real relationship with him, when she learned about his cancer, she was overcome with panic and terror. She sobbed uncontrollably at the thought of losing him. This panicked devotion felt entirely disconnected from her understanding of their relationship.

Despite his lifelong emotional unavailability, she couldn’t bear the thought of him suffering. Throughout those months, she kept spending her own limited money on things to make his room nicer. She wanted the whole family to come closer and lend emotional support during this hard time. She waited for a shift in what “I love you” felt like. It never came. Her father died as he had lived – emotionally closed. And her family never hugged and cried together, she felt utterly out of place.

Oddly, once he passed, Lucille didn’t really miss her dad. The grief she expected never materialized. This confused her deeply – how could she have felt such desperate attachment at the thought of losing him, yet such numbness once he was gone?

Sometimes, when Lucille questioned whether her parents had ever truly loved her, a particular memory surfaced—one that made it harder to walk away. She was nine, home sick with the flu, curled up on the couch in a ball of fever and chills. Her mother, who usually brushed off illness as weakness, had unexpectedly brought her a bowl of homemade soup and stroked her hair while Lucille drifted in and out of sleep. For that one afternoon, there was no criticism, no tension—just warmth. Lucille had clung to that sliver of tenderness for decades, using it as proof that love had existed, even if it had rarely returned.

After her father’s death, Lucille hoped that perhaps her mother would finally become more emotionally available. She had always believed that her father’s narcissism somehow prevented her mother from showing the warmth and empathy Lucille craved. With him gone, Lucille waited for the mother-daughter relationship she had always wanted.

Instead, her mother’s emotional neglect continued unchanged. When Lucille finally gathered the courage to express her needs directly, her mother responded with dismissal. This final rejection of what seemed like such a reasonable request – to be treated with basic empathy – felt like a betrayal. The subconscious fantasy that had sustained Lucille for years – that her mother was capable of loving her but simply prevented from doing so – collapsed entirely.

Lucille had tried casual distancing with her remaining family. She had tried limited contact. She had tried explaining how their behaviors affected her. They would respond by insisting they loved her, but nothing changed, except that her resolve to stay alive grew more tenuous with each attempt at connection.

So she left. Not with a dramatic announcement, but quietly, as if stepping backward out of a room where no one had noticed her presence anyway.

Now, as she unpacked her sparse belongings in this new space, Lucille realized something unexpected. The crushing weight she had carried for so long had begun to lift. She slept through the night. The constant knot in her stomach had eased. Most surprising of all, she didn’t miss them. She had anticipated grief, guilt, longing – but what she felt instead was relief. Freedom. Space to breathe.

And this confused her deeply. If she loved her family – and surely she must love them, they were her family after all – shouldn’t she miss them? Shouldn’t their absence feel like a wound rather than a healing? If she could feel this peaceful away from them, had she ever truly loved them at all? Or was the fierce protectiveness she had always felt toward them, the desperate hope that they would change, the willingness to endure their mistreatment just to remain connected – was that something else entirely?

As she reflected, Lucille realized she had already been grieving her family for decades – grieving the relationships she had always wanted but never had, grieving the support and love that never materialized. The grief had started long before she physically left.

Even now, in her moments of peace, bitter memories would occasionally ambush her – her brother mocking her teenage poetry, her father saying “I love you, princess” while turning away when she tried to hug him, her mother ignoring her tears. Each memory triggered physical symptoms – racing heart, tight chest, the urge to hide. Her therapist had explained these as symptoms of complex trauma, remnants of a nervous system still responding to dangers no longer present.

Her mother had reached out through mutual connections, expressing profound hurt at Lucille’s decision to cut contact. “Why did you leave me? I miss you. I’ve always loved you more than anything,” she had said, words that triggered waves of guilt and confusion in Lucille. Was she wrong to protect herself? Was her mother’s pain more important than her own survival?

It had been three weeks since any fleeting thoughts of not wanting to be alive had drifted through her mind, a vast improvement. As Lucille placed a small plant on her windowsill – the first living thing she had ever felt confident she could nurture – she wondered: What exactly is love, anyway? And can we love someone we cannot safely remain connected to?

Dominique’s Boundary

Dominique stood in the center of what was now her room, a small utility room she had transformed into a sanctuary. The walls were freshly painted in soft blue, a color her husband disliked. Books she loved filled the bookshelf. A comfortable single bed replaced the air mattress she’d been sleeping on for the past two weeks.

Ten years into her marriage, Dominique had discovered her husband’s secret porn habit. While devastated, she had committed to working through it together. He had promised to stop, and as far as she could tell, he had kept that promise. But three years later, she discovered something worse – while there had been no physical affair, her husband had maintained inappropriate emotional relationships with several women, flirting, sharing private marital struggles, and seeking validation outside their marriage. When confronted, he dismissed her concerns, insisting she was trying to control him and “overreacting.”

This pattern of dismissal was nothing new. Throughout their marriage, Dominique had consistently found herself at the bottom of her husband’s priority list. He never missed his weekly basketball game with friends, but frequently forgot commitments he’d made to her. He remembered his mother’s favorite flowers but couldn’t recall Dominique’s birthday without a reminder. He would stay late at work to help a coworker but rarely offered the same support to her. In the early years, before the erosion began, he used to write her notes and make her laugh until she cried. That version of him felt like a dream she had once believed with all her heart.

What made all of this especially painful was that Dominique had chosen to save herself for marriage. Her decision to wait for physical intimacy had been deeply important to her. Yet within the first week after their wedding, her husband began turning down her advances. This profound rejection, followed by his years of sexual disinterest while maintaining a secret porn habit, left her questioning her identity as a woman and feeling fundamentally undesirable.

For years, Dominique had silenced the alarm bells in her body – the tightness in her chest when he was nicer to the female server than he ever was to her, the nausea when he dismissed her feelings, the exhaustion from constantly wondering when the next wrecking ball would hit. She had convinced herself that marriage required sacrifice, that her discomfort was the price of keeping her family intact. Somewhere along the way, she had mistaken endurance for virtue.

Periodically, only after Dominique took action to distance herself, her husband would seem to recognize the damage his behavior caused. He would apologize, promise to change, and show genuine improvement for weeks or even months. During these periods, he would be attentive, communicative, and seemingly committed to rebuilding their connection. Each time, Dominique would cautiously hope that this change would last. And each time, once she had emotionally reinvested in the relationship, he would gradually return to his old patterns, as if maintaining healthy connection required too much effort to sustain.

With two young children and no independent income, leaving seemed impossible. After a particularly painful argument – where her husband had once again shown complete disregard for her emotional safety – something in Dominique shifted. She didn’t have the resources to leave the house, but she could leave the bedroom. She could create a boundary, a space where she didn’t have to pretend.

On her first night in the new bedroom, Dominique had expected to feel sad, to mourn the loss of the marriage she had wanted. Instead, she felt an unexpected lightness, almost giddiness. The relief of not having to sleep next to someone unsafe, of not having to wake up with a feeling of dread seeing him there – it was overwhelming. For the first time in years, she felt free.

In the weeks that followed, Dominique and her husband established a careful choreography of co-parenting. They shared meals with the children, coordinated schedules, maintained the appearance of family unity. But beyond these necessary interactions, they rarely spoke. Her husband, who was taking her warnings seriously for the first time, occasionally attempted to discuss “fixing” their marriage, insisting he loved her and wanted to make things work. Dominique would simply respond, “What you did wasn’t love. If you loved me, you wouldn’t have lied to me for our entire relationship.”

Since their in-home separation, her husband had begun therapy, stopped his emotionally unfaithful behaviors, and was working on healthier communication styles. He seemed genuinely committed to change, though still very limited in his understanding. Yet despite these improvements, Dominique felt no return of warmth toward him. Her nervous system remained on high alert in his presence; her body remembered the years of emotional abandonment even as her mind acknowledged his efforts.

The strangest part for Dominique was that even with these changes, even wondering if she could eventually have financial independence if she returned to work once the children were older, she couldn’t imagine actually divorcing him. The thought of being the only two people left in the house after the children eventually moved out felt like a crisis, yet she couldn’t picture taking the final step to legal separation. This confused and frustrated her – why couldn’t she leave, even in her imagination? What invisible force held her in this relationship when all warmth and connection had died?

Sometimes Dominique worried that she had lost the capacity for romantic love entirely. The thought of physical intimacy – with her husband or anyone else – left her cold. Was this a temporary protective shutdown, or a permanent change? Had the years of emotional neglect and betrayal fundamentally altered her ability to connect?

Like Lucille, Dominique realized she had already been grieving her marriage long before learning about her husband’s secrets – grieving the partner she had thought she married, grieving the future she had imagined, grieving how she’d been mistreated, grieving the person she had been before repeated betrayals had taught her to expect pain from closeness and made her put up walls.

And like Lucille, she experienced unexpected moments of bitterness – rage at the years she had wasted trying to earn love from someone refusing to give it, sorrow for the younger self who had accepted so little while giving so much. These emotions would arrive without warning, bringing with them physical symptoms – headaches, digestive issues, overwhelming fatigue, panic attacks – that her therapist identified as manifestations of trauma stored in her body.

As she arranged her new space, placing framed photos of her children and herself (but none of her husband) on the dresser, Dominique wondered: Was what she and her husband had over the years ever love? And if not, what was it? And what would happen to this family once the children were grown?

What Is Love?

Love is perhaps the most discussed yet least understood human experience. We speak of it as an emotion, a choice, an action, a bond, and a commitment – sometimes all at once. To build a meaningful understanding of love, particularly when examining it through the lens of trauma and healing, we need to consider both its behavioral expressions and its felt experience.

At its core, love is a combination of genuine care for another’s wellbeing coupled with consistent actions that demonstrate that care. However, how this care is expressed may vary significantly based on neurological differences.

True love manifests through:

• Consistent kindness and compassion toward the other person
• Deep respect for their autonomy, thoughts, and feelings
• Active support during both their triumphs and struggles
• Understanding that accepts imperfection without enabling harm
• Reliability that builds trust and safety

Bell Hooks in her book All About Love eloquently defined love as “a willingness to extend ourselves for the spiritual growth of others.” While profound, this definition may seem abstract to those seeking practical understanding. We might expand this to say that love is the ongoing commitment to support another’s fullest, healthiest self-expression and development, while respecting their autonomy and honoring our own boundaries and wellbeing.

Neurodivergent Expressions of Love: Different, Not Deficient

When discussing authentic love, it’s crucial to recognize that neurodivergent individuals (those with autism, ADHD, sensory processing differences, etc.) may express love in ways that don’t align with neurotypical expectations. These differences don’t indicate an absence of love or attachment, but rather reflect fundamental neurological variations in how connection is experienced and expressed.

How Neurodivergent Love May Look Different

Communication Styles: An autistic partner might express love through detailed information-sharing about special interests rather than conventional romantic gestures. They may demonstrate deep care by solving practical problems or creating systems that support your wellbeing, rather than through words of affirmation or physical touch.

Emotional Processing: Neurodivergent individuals may process emotions differently—sometimes experiencing them more intensely, less intensely, or with delayed recognition. A partner with alexithymia (difficulty identifying emotions) might deeply love you while struggling to articulate those feelings in ways you immediately recognize.

Sensory Considerations: For those with sensory sensitivities, traditional expressions of love like sustained eye contact, certain types of physical touch, or crowded social gatherings might be genuinely distressing—even when desire for connection is strong. Their avoidance isn’t rejection but self-regulation.

Executive Function Impact: Someone with ADHD might forget anniversaries or struggle with consistent check-ins not from lack of care, but from differences in time perception and executive functioning. Their love might appear in bursts of hyperfocus and enthusiastic connection rather than steady, predictable patterns.

Distinguishing Difference from Harm

The key distinction: neurodivergent expressions of love may look different, but they should never be consistently harmful. Mutual respect, basic consideration, and willingness to understand each other remain essential regardless of neurotype.

When a neurodivergent person loves you, they may:

• Need explicit communication about your needs rather than picking up subtle cues
• Show care through unconventional but meaningful gestures
• Require accommodations for sensory or executive functioning differences
• Express love more directly or literally than you expect

However, neurodivergence never excuses:

• Consistent emotional neglect or dismissal of your feelings
• Refusal to acknowledge impact regardless of intent
• Unwillingness to work together on mutually satisfying compromises
• Using diagnosis as a shield against accountability

Building Bridges of Understanding

For neurotypical-neurodivergent relationships to thrive, both partners need:

• Explicit communication about needs and expressions of care
• Willingness to translate across neurological differences
• Recognition that different doesn’t mean deficient
• Respect for neurodivergent boundaries and accommodations

For readers questioning whether differences in love expression reflect neurodivergence or genuine emotional unavailability, consider: Does this person demonstrate consistent care in their own way, even if it’s not your preferred style? Are they willing to discuss these differences with openness rather than defensiveness? Do they acknowledge impact even when intent was different? The answers help distinguish between neurological differences and truly harmful patterns.

Love, in its healthiest form, is never one of submission, self-erasure, or suffering. True love cannot coexist with patterns of abuse, control, or disrespect. This fundamental truth forms the foundation for the questions we’ll explore throughout this article.

Understanding the Person Who Cannot Love: It’s Not About You

The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling

While intellectually understanding “it’s not about me” can provide relief, your body may still react as if you’re the problem—flooded with shame, self-doubt, or the urge to become “enough” to earn love. This disconnect between mind and body is normal when healing from relational trauma.

As you read, notice if your body tenses, if thoughts like “but in my case, it really was my fault” arise, or if you feel compelled to defend the person who hurt you. These responses don’t mean the information is wrong—they signal your nervous system is processing truths that challenge deep survival beliefs. Healing begins when we hold both the intellectual truth and the body’s protective reactions with compassion.

Why Some People Cannot Love Authentically

Most people are born with the capacity for love, seeking connection instinctively. Under healthy conditions, secure attachment forms through consistent, attuned caregiving, creating a blueprint for future relationships.

Yet this innate capacity can be profoundly disrupted by:

1. Childhood Attachment Wounds
   When early needs for safety, attunement, or validation go unmet, the ability to form secure bonds fractures. A person who never received consistent love struggles to give what they’ve never known. Their relational template organizes around survival rather than mutual care.
2. Survival Adaptations
   Harmful behaviors often begin as creative childhood strategies. Emotional withdrawal, control, or manipulation may have once shielded them from overwhelm or danger. These adaptations become automatic, operating far below consciousness.
3. Intergenerational Trauma
   Patterns of neglect, abuse, or dysfunction often pass through generations like an invisible inheritance. Epigenetic research and attachment studies show how relational behaviors and stress responses are unconsciously replicated, even when they cause harm.
4. Developmental Trauma
   Trauma during critical developmental stages can alter brain structures governing empathy, emotional regulation, and connection. This may impair their ability to read emotions, regulate stress, or maintain consistent presence.
5. Personality Structure
   Some develop psychological frameworks (e.g., narcissistic or borderline patterns) organized around protecting a fragile sense of self. Their entire system avoids vulnerability—the cornerstone of authentic love. While these patterns are deeply entrenched, some individuals, particularly those who commit to long-term therapy, can develop a limited capacity for reciprocity over time. Their limitations don’t reflect a conscious choice but a psychological system that makes genuine connection feel threatening.

In rare cases, genetic predispositions combined with severe early trauma may result in an almost absent capacity for empathy or attachment, as seen in some antisocial traits. These extremes highlight that love’s absence isn’t always about you—or even something the other person can fully control.

The Nuance of “Self-Love First”

The adage “you can’t love others until you love yourself” contains partial truth but oversimplifies. While self-worth fosters healthier relationships, love isn’t just a choice or self-improvement project. It emerges from biology, early experiences, culture, and relational history.

The person who cannot love you authentically isn’t merely “choosing not to love themselves.” They may be trapped in attachment wounds, nervous system dysregulation, or personality structures that render vulnerability intolerable. That said, rebuilding your own self-worth remains essential—not to change the other person, but to break cycles of tolerating inadequate love.

What This Understanding Offers You

1. Freedom from the Impossible Task
   Recognizing their limitations stem from factors beyond their (or your) control liberates you from the fantasy that “if I just try harder, they’ll change.” You’re released from a mission that was never yours.
2. Compassion Without Compromise
   Understanding their wounds allows compassion—without confusing it with permission. You can think, “This person acts from unhealed trauma,” while affirming, “I deserve relationships that don’t demand my self-abandonment.” Healthy boundaries aren’t punishment; they prevent further harm to both parties.
3. Breaking Trauma Bonds
   Intermittent reinforcement—cycles of idealization and devaluation—can create addictive emotional hooks. Understanding the other person’s limitations can help you recognize that the “good times” aren’t evidence of potential for consistent love, but rather part of a pattern driven by the person’s own attachment needs. Seeing these patterns helps you disrupt their pull and choose relationships grounded in consistency, not familiarity with pain.

The Line Between Understanding and Enabling

A trauma history explains behavior but never excuses it. Compassion for someone’s wounds doesn’t require tolerating harm. In fact, boundaries with those incapable of authentic love may be the most compassionate act—for yourself and them.

Their inability to love reflects their limitations, not your worth. You can grieve the wounded child they were while refusing to be harmed by the adult they’ve become.

Remember: Their deficits were never about you. Your worthiness of love is immutable, regardless of another’s capacity to recognize it.

When Attachment Isn’t Love: Understanding Trauma Bonds

The Biology of Trauma Bonds and Fantasy Attachments

One of the most confusing aspects of recovering from relationship trauma is reconciling the intense feelings we have for those who have harmed us. Many survivors describe feeling desperately attached to those who hurt them – experiencing anxiety when separated, relief when reunited, and persistent hope that things will improve despite evidence to the contrary.

Trauma bonding occurs when a powerful emotional attachment forms through repeated cycles of abuse, tension, and reward. This happens on a biological level – when an abuser unpredictably alternates between cruelty and kindness, it triggers the brain’s survival mechanisms and addiction pathways. The resulting biochemical response creates feelings that can be more intense than typical romantic or familial love.

This biological reaction involves several key processes:

• Stress hormones and pleasure chemicals create powerful emotional highs and lows
• The body’s natural pain/pleasure system becomes dysregulated, creating addiction-like patterns
• The primitive attachment system, designed to keep us connected to essential caregivers for survival, overrides our logical assessment of danger

For someone like Dominique, her husband’s occasional moments of attentiveness after long periods of neglect created exactly this kind of emotional rollercoaster. Each improvement triggered hope, flooding her system with relief and reinforcing her attachment despite the overall pattern of emotional abandonment.

Many survivors describe their trauma bonds as the most powerful “love” they’ve ever felt. These feelings are real and overwhelming, but there’s a critical distinction: trauma bonds are rooted in survival responses, not authentic love. They revolve around relieving anxiety and pain rather than mutual growth and joy. They create dependency rather than healthy connection. And they feature dramatic highs and devastating lows rather than consistent safety and respect.

Often what keeps someone in a harmful relationship isn’t love for the person as they actually are, but attachment to who they could potentially become. This “fantasy bond” involves loving a fictional future version of the person rather than accepting the reality before us.

Dominique wasn’t in love with her husband as he was – chronically dishonest and emotionally withholding. She was in love with who he had pretended to be (who she believed was the “real” him) in the beginning, and who he could be again if he overcame these tendencies and went back to his “real” self. Each small improvement reinforced this fantasy, keeping her invested in a future that never fully arrived.

Lucille experienced a similar pattern with her mother. After her father’s death, she clung to the fantasy that her mother would finally become emotionally available. When this didn’t happen, Lucille felt not just disappointed but betrayed – as if a promise had been broken, though no such promise had ever been made except in her own mind.

When survivors finally accept that this potential version of their loved one may never exist, they experience grief – not just for the relationship, but for the death of a dream they’ve held onto, sometimes for decades.

Love vs. Trauma Bond: How to Tell the Difference

The Existential Search for Love’s Logic

Beyond the biological mechanisms of trauma bonding lies an even deeper existential drive. When someone who should love us fails to do so consistently, we often find ourselves returning to check if love has finally appeared—not just from emotional need, but from a profound desire to make the world make sense.

This impulse operates below conscious thought, arising from our instinctive understanding that being properly loved is the natural order of things. The mind struggles to accept a reality where this fundamental need remains unmet by those designed to fulfill it.

It’s like desperately craving a hug from the person who just punched you—a paradoxical yearning that defies logic but speaks to our soul’s deep need for coherence. This creates a reflexive pattern where, even after painful interactions that logically should push us away, survivors experience an overwhelming urge to reconnect—as if drawn by gravity to repair the tear in the fabric of how relationships should work.

This isn’t merely attachment seeking security; it’s the human spirit seeking coherence in a situation that fundamentally violates our deepest understanding of how the world should function.

The Protective Shutdown: When Your Body Says “Enough”

Both Lucille and Dominique experienced moments of emotional detachment – periods when they felt numb or even disgusted toward people they had once deeply cared about. This numbing isn’t a character flaw or evidence of coldness; it’s a protective mechanism deployed by an overwhelmed nervous system.

Emotional numbness is your body’s way of protecting you from repeated emotional injury. When you’ve been hurt too many times in a relationship, your nervous system essentially “powers down” emotional receptivity to prevent further damage. This protective shutdown often involves the dorsal vagal response – a primitive survival strategy that conserves resources when fighting or fleeing isn’t possible.

Signs of this protective shutdown may include:

• Feeling emotionally “flat” or numb
• Physical distance (avoiding touch or proximity)
• Cognitive distance (difficulty remembering positive aspects of the relationship)
• Dissociation (feeling detached from your own emotions or body)
• Disgust or aversion toward the person who caused harm

For Dominique, her aversion to physical intimacy represented this kind of protective mechanism; her body wisely refused to remain vulnerable with someone who had repeatedly proven unsafe with her heart.

Rather than seeing this as “falling out of love,” we might understand it as the protective wisdom of a body and heart that value survival over harmful attachment. This emotional detachment represents the natural boundary that love requires to sustain itself. Just as our physical pain response prevents us from keeping our hand on a hot stove, emotional detachment prevents us from continuing to invest in connections that consistently cause harm.

For some survivors like Lucille, suicidal thoughts can emerge as the ultimate form of protective shutdown. In therapeutic approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS), these thoughts are understood not as self-destructive impulses but as desperate attempts by protective parts of the self to end unbearable emotional pain when no other escape seems possible. These parts believe they’re helping—trying to protect the person from continued suffering when all other coping mechanisms have been overwhelmed. Recognizing these thoughts as misguided protection rather than character flaws can reduce shame and create space for healing. When Lucille’s suicidal ideation decreased after establishing physical distance from her family, it demonstrated how creating external safety can reduce the need for these extreme internal protective measures.

When Your Mind and Body Are on Different Timelines

For many survivors like Dominique, a confusing disconnect emerges between intellectual understanding and bodily response. Her mind had already cataloged her husband’s betrayals and recognized the relationship as harmful—yet something kept her physically unable to take decisive action toward divorce.

This mind-body gap creates profound confusion. “If I know this relationship is damaging me, why can’t I just leave?” survivors often wonder. “Am I weak? Do I secretly want to stay? Is something wrong with me?”

This mismatch isn’t weakness or contradiction—it’s your nervous system working exactly as designed. Your cognitive brain can process information and reach conclusions rapidly through conscious thought. Your body, however, changes more gradually, through lived experience rather than intellectual insight.

Dominique’s conscious mind understood her marriage was unhealthy, but her nervous system—shaped by years of intermittent reinforcement and trauma bonding—remained physiologically tethered to the relationship. Her body remembered both the pain and the occasional relief of connection, creating a complex web of neurological and hormonal responses that couldn’t be dismantled through reasoning alone.

This gap explains why many survivors experience the frustrating cycle of “knowing better” while feeling unable to act on that knowledge. You might intellectually recognize a relationship as harmful on Monday, yet find yourself deeply longing for that same person on Tuesday—not because your assessment was wrong, but because your body is processing change at its own necessary pace.

Healing this disconnect requires patience with your body’s timeline. Rather than forcing action before your nervous system is ready (which often leads to return cycles), focus on gradually building safety signals that allow your body to catch up with your mind. Small, consistent steps toward safety—like Dominique creating her separate bedroom—often prove more sustainable than dramatic gestures that overwhelm your system’s capacity to integrate change.

Harmful vs. Abusive: Understanding the Spectrum of Relational Harm

Relational harm exists on a spectrum – from consciously abusive to unintentionally harmful. While both can damage your wellbeing, understanding where someone falls can help determine whether reconciliation is possible or whether distance is safest. Many survivors struggle to categorize relationships that cause pain but don’t fit clear definitions of abuse. Is Lucille’s mother who failed to protect her from her father’s emotional neglect “abusive,” or simply “harmful”? Is Dominique’s husband who betrayed her trust repeatedly but shows a measure of remorse “abusive” or just deeply flawed? Does intention matter when the impact damages your wellbeing either way?

While impact ultimately matters more than intent, understanding these distinctions can help you navigate complex relationships and determine appropriate boundaries. Consider these differences:

Signs a person may be engaging in abuse:

• Pattern of control and domination (limiting your autonomy, monitoring behavior)
• Consistent disregard for your boundaries after they’ve been clearly communicated
• Calculated manipulation, including intermittent reinforcement to keep you attached
• Emotional punishment when you assert independence or challenge their behavior
• Denies harmful behavior even when presented with clear evidence
• Shows dramatically different behavior in public versus private
• Creates isolation from potential support systems
• Blames you for their harmful actions (“you made me do this”)
• Shows minimal genuine remorse that translates into sustained behavior change
• Uses threats (explicit or implied) to maintain compliance

Signs someone may be harmful without being intentionally abusive:

• Causes harm through passivity or avoidance rather than active control
• Shows genuine remorse and temporary improvement when confronted
• Their harmful patterns often mirror their own unhealed trauma
• Lacks emotional skills rather than deliberately manipulating
• Behavior is more consistent across different relationships and contexts
• May show real confusion or distress when told they’ve caused harm
• Has moments of genuine empathy and connection, though inconsistent
• Harmful behavior often emerges from overwhelm, fear, or limited capacity rather than from desire for control
• May accept boundaries once they truly understand them, though they might struggle to maintain this acceptance under pressure

Questions to help you reflect on your specific situation:

1. Does this person show different sides to different people, or are they consistently flawed?
2. When they hurt you, do they seem satisfied or distressed by your pain?
3. Have they shown capacity for change in other areas of their life?
4. Do you generally feel controlled by them, or disappointed by their limitations?
5. If they had more awareness and skills, do you believe they would choose to treat you better?
6. When they do show improvement, does it seem strategic or genuine?
7. Do they seem invested in your growth and independence, even if they struggle to support it?
8. When they apologize, is it focused on your pain or their justification?
9. Do you find yourself constantly researching their behavior to understand it?

Remember that these distinctions aren’t about excusing harmful behavior, but about helping you understand what you’re dealing with. Even well-intentioned harm can necessitate strong boundaries. The key difference is that relationships with non-abusive but harmful people may have potential for change if the person commits to sustained work with appropriate professional help and sincere effort, while relationships with truly abusive individuals rarely improve sustainably without profound intervention and change.

Your nervous system will often signal the difference before your conscious mind recognizes it. Trust that wisdom—it’s trying to keep you safe. When harm persists despite awareness, even well-intentioned relationships can leave us emotionally numb – a protective response we’ll explore next.

Affirmation: Understanding someone’s harmful behavior doesn’t mean I must endure it. My boundaries protect, not punish.

The Heartbreak of Growing Numb: When You Still Want to Love Someone Who Hurts You

Perhaps one of the most painful experiences for survivors is the disconnect between their hopes and their nervous system’s protective responses. This is especially acute when dealing with people who may not consciously intend harm but repeatedly fail to provide safety—particularly aging parents or long-term partners who seem to understand in some moments yet continue patterns that cause pain.

Many survivors face relationships where the harm isn’t constant or obviously malicious, but occurs in patterns of:

Inconsistent protection – Like a parent who acknowledges your pain in private but won’t stand up for you when it matters, saying they “don’t want to get involved” in conflicts between their children, even when one child clearly harms the other

Moments of genuine connection followed by devastating betrayals – Such as when a parent sincerely validates your experience and promises change, only to revert to harmful patterns when pressured by others

Passive enabling – When someone doesn’t directly hurt you but consistently allows others to do so, perhaps due to their own fears, dependency needs, or conflict avoidance

Selective awareness – When someone seems to genuinely understand in some contexts but becomes conveniently “unable to see” the problem in situations where protecting you would come at personal cost

These unpredictable patterns – where hope and harm alternate – create a special kind of pain because they offer just enough hope to keep you invested while repeatedly demonstrating that the person cannot or will not provide consistent safety. Your nervous system registers this inconsistency not as “sometimes safe” but as “fundamentally unpredictable”—a state that often triggers stronger protective responses than consistent harm.

When someone is unpredictable—loving one moment, hurtful the next—our nervous system doesn’t know how to respond. If a situation is always dangerous, our brain can adapt with clear survival strategies. But when the danger comes and goes without warning, we’re forced to stay on high alert all the time, never sure what’s coming next.

This kind of inconsistency creates deep confusion in our bodies and minds. It’s what trauma experts call disorganized attachment—a painful inner tug-of-war where we’re wired to turn to someone for safety, while also sensing that person might be a source of harm. It’s a no-win situation that leaves us stuck in a constant state of stress.

Imagine living in a house where the floor could give way at any time. Even when things seem calm, you can’t truly relax. That’s what it feels like to be close to someone whose love isn’t safe. Over time, this nonstop vigilance can be even more damaging than being in a situation that’s always hurtful—because at least in predictable pain, your brain knows when to brace itself. With unpredictable harm, there’s no off switch.

Many survivors express this heartbreaking dilemma: “I know they sometimes try. I see them understand in certain moments. I want to feel warmth and compassion toward them, especially knowing they won’t be around forever—but my body won’t let me. Instead, I feel dread, obligation, and guilt about these reactions. Why can’t I override this? Am I broken?”

This gap—between the compassion you wish to feel and the protective numbness your body imposes—creates a special kind of grief. This is a double grief: mourning the love and safety you deserved but never received, and the love you long to give but cannot safely express. It’s okay to ache for both.

This emotional numbing isn’t a moral failing or character flaw. It’s your body’s wisdom asserting boundaries that your conscious mind—influenced by cultural expectations, guilt, or genuine compassion for the other person’s struggles—might not be ready to establish. Your nervous system has reached its limit for absorbing harm while maintaining connection, even when your mind understands the reasons behind the harmful behavior. This numbness isn’t indifference—it’s often the aftermath of prolonged emotional strain. Think of it as your heart’s ‘calluses’ after years of walking barefoot over gravel.

Many survivors find themselves in an impossible bind: maintaining contact damages their wellbeing, yet distance triggers guilt and grief, especially with aging family members. The thought, ‘They’ll be gone soon, and then I’ll regret not trying harder,’ often overlooks a harder truth: you’ve likely been trying for decades. Healing isn’t about giving up—it’s about redirecting your care in ways that don’t demand your own destruction.

If you’re experiencing this disconnect, consider:

• Your emotional numbing doesn’t negate your compassion; it exists alongside it
• You can hold awareness of someone’s limitations and good intentions while still honoring your body’s need for protection
• The guilt you feel often comes from cultural messages that prioritize others’ needs above your survival
• It’s possible to wish someone well from a distance that protects your nervous system
• Healing may eventually allow you to feel compassion without the overwhelming need for protection, but this healing requires safety first

Remember that your nervous system’s protective responses developed for good reason. Rather than fighting against this numbness or judging yourself for it, you might view it as valuable information about what you’ve endured and what you need now to heal. Sometimes the most compassionate choice—both for yourself and ultimately for the other person—is to honor these protective responses while finding ways to express your values that don’t require continued exposure to harm.

Your numbness isn’t a wall—it’s a bridge. It carries you toward a future where compassion won’t require self-abandonment, and where love won’t demand your silence.

Affirmation: My body’s protective responses are wise, not cold. This numbness is keeping me safe, not making me heartless.

Read the rest of this article in the first book of Ellen’s series “There’s A Word for That”: https://a.co/d/0fA4uGN6

Copyright Notice: This excerpt is from my book. All content is © 2025 Worldwide Groove Corporation. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this material without permission is prohibited. Thank you for respecting my work. 😊

Photo Credit: Author, Substack

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Filicide (n): is the deliberate act of a parent killing their own child. In 1969, Dr. Phillip Resnick published research on filicide and stated that there were five main motives for filicide, including “altruistic,” “fatal maltreatment,” “unwanted child,” “acutely psychotic,” and “spousal revenge.”

You know the houses that end up in the newspaper where a parent kills all the kids, and everyone is shocked? I come from one of those; I just made it out alive. There were numerous threats, even what could be considered an attempt, on my life while my brain was developing.

Several of Dr. Phillip Resnick’s categories fit the household I grew up in. Two stand out the most to me: acutely psychotic and fatal maltreatment. Acutely psychotic filicide occurs when a parent in the throes of acute psychosis kills his or her child with no comprehensible motive. Fatal maltreatment filicide may occur because of child abuse, neglect, or Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In fatal maltreatment killings, the goal is not always to kill the child, but death may occur anyway. Acutely psychotic is a match for many of our childhood experiences, such as being chased with a knife or threatened with death in the car. But fatal maltreatment (with Munchausen syndrome by proxy) is a match for what occurred over the course of my sister’s 43 years of life, a form of filicide in slow motion.  

Rose’s life was tragically stolen

I do believe the pain of helplessly watching my sister, Rose, tormented for decades as an adult, culminating in a devastating loss, was worse than anything done directly to me in childhood. My sister was the kindest person I’ve ever known with a heart of gold. She was beautiful and smart with all the potential in the world. It was not my sister’s fault. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who truly understands that. It’s incredibly hard to heal while financially ensnared with the source of your childhood horror. Rose’s life was tragically stolen. 

My name is Victoria, and I live with my husband of eleven years, Jack, and my 9-year-old son, Owen. I’ve essentially been in therapy and mental health treatment my entire adult life. I was left with numerous humiliating symptoms and no believable story for how I came to have them. When I told the truth, I would usually be interpreted as the delusional one. I was thrown out into the world with no life skills and a wicked case of CPTSD. I don’t even want to know what I’ve spent on therapy or treatments by now. Probably a couple of hundred thousand. I spent a long time wondering what was wrong with me. Now I wonder if I simply had a perfectly rational response to perfectly irrational circumstances.

I’ve created an anonymous website to raise awareness about surviving life-threatening abuse perpetrated by primary caregivers in childhood, to show how this abuse can continue into adulthood, and to improve treatment outcomes for survivors. After years of research, I have discovered there are no studies on the experiences of adult survivors of this specific pattern of abuse.

www.filicidesurvivor.com documents a lifetime of severe financial, psychological, physical, and coercive control within a family system that ultimately contributed to my sister’s death. It offers a personal perspective on clear blind spots in the mental healthcare system, and the resources in place meant to protect us, such as Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services. I’m sharing this experience so that others in similar homes may recognize the signs earlier, trust themselves, and find a way out.

Thus far, I’ve only met one person in my life to report life-threatening abuse from a parent. She is much younger than I, and likened her lived experience to dying inside a little every day, invisibly. And I’ve never met anyone whose mother told them to kill themselves or told them, as well as their siblings, that they deserve to die. But I do believe and know there are people like me out there who probably feel all alone in this as I do. So here I sit, writing to you. 

I was 40 years old when I first learned the word “Filicide.” I was in search of community. I wanted to know if what I was telling people was, in fact, reality. I couldn’t easily track down individuals with similar life-threatening childhood experiences. I learned the term, but I quickly realized I was right. There is no community that I could find. I found one small study of seven live children of attempted filicide. The children either had to have wounds to prove it, or the parents had to admit it. I wouldn’t qualify. My injuries are invisible, and the idea of my parents admitting fault in the slightest is laughable. I promise, I HOPED and TRIED for a long time to get through to them. It’s impossible, and no psychologist would tell me to speak to them. 

Few can wrap their heads around biological “parents” who would do this. It is very hard to be believed. Further, my “father” was a top executive at an international food/beverage company, an arrogant millionaire, and 6’5”. It’s impossible for me to explain to others how a 5’5” woman with no job completely controlled him. I don’t understand it myself. Sometimes I think I’m interpreted as arrogant simply for stating his job title, but I’m not saying it out of ego. I believe his career is how they got away with a lifetime of abuse, and why my sisters and I have rarely been believed. People do not expect child abuse like what we went through to come from a household like mine with wealthy, educated “parents.” Socioeconomic status and professional credibility can act as a shield that prevents abuse from being recognized. Multiple clinicians have described my “parents’” behavior as consistent with severe personality pathology and psychosis. 

There are many severe traumas in the world, and my heart goes out to each one of you. People who work on and overcome traumas are warriors. Because no matter what, you’re facing a painful uphill battle. And other trauma survivors have been the people who carried me through my darkest days. Severe traumas certainly include fighting in war, sexual abuse, having alcoholic, abusive parents, parental abandonment, racial trauma, and more. I have not directly experienced many of these severe traumas. I cannot speak to the impact all these traumas have on individuals as I feel it’s comparing apples and oranges. What I will say is that I’ve often felt alone in my trauma being understood. While we all have our own powerful and unique stories, I often feel some of the broader categories of severe traumas have more community access to others who have experienced the same, more understanding of the impact, and perhaps more general acceptance in society. However, society’s understanding of the effect of trauma on individuals with CPTSD is still staggeringly inadequate.

So now I’m asking, where’s my comparison on who knows what it’s like to have your “mother” threatening and/or attempting to kill you while your brain was developing?

One critical aspect identified in the study I found of seven children is the theme of “I’m alive thanks to my siblings.” I discovered after decades in therapy that I had been living with a severe case of Survivor’s Guilt over my sister, Rose. I feel like this could have been identified far sooner if this topic were researched. Survivor’s Guilt in a Filicide Survivor is likely to be significant due to the unique sibling bonds under lethal threat. 

Please be aware that www.filicidesurvivor.com contains descriptions of severe parental abuse, psychological trauma, and death. Some content may be triggering, so it is important to prioritize your safety and mental health. If you are able to relate to this content, please consider processing this information alongside a qualified mental health professional.

The site includes our story, redacted evidence (family messages, witness statements, police statements, and counselor reports), and resources. Most people do not believe me without evidence, so this is unfortunately necessary to tell our story. Over time, I hope this space can also serve as an anonymous platform for others who want to safely share their experiences.

One lesson I learned throughout this process is the nature of the psychological double bind. If I stay silent, I betray myself and my sister. Speak, and feel conditioned fear, guilt, and shame. I choose the path of speaking. I choose truth. My loyalty is to my sister, and my heart is with survivors. If even one person recognizes their own family in mine and breaks free, then our story will have made a difference. 

If you are a mental health professional interested in researching this topic, I welcome the opportunity to speak with you.

Names in this story have been changed for anonymity. 

Source: https://jaapl.org/content/33/4/496

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

“Did you hear a knock?” I asked my husband.

“No, maybe that raccoon has come back.” My husband went to check that our trash cans were secured in place.

When he was gone, I heard the same knocking sound again. It was a little more forceful this time. But there was definitely someone at the door.

Who would be knocking on our door at 10:30 at night?

I went to the hallway and peered out the window. A small shape stood on our doorstep, and I heard whimpering. The shape looked familiar, but I couldn’t place who it was in the dark. Our porch light was broken, and it gave me no help.

I opened the door, and a form fell into my arms.

“Lizzy, I can’t take it anymore.” My friend Abigail (Not her real name) was sobbing in my arms.

I froze in my spot and just held her as she cried.

“Honey!” My husband called after me.

“Yeah, I’m here. Can you make some herbal tea?”

“Sure thing.” My husband peeked through the hallway and saw me with a sobbing Abigail. He disappeared into the kitchen without a word.

“Let’s get you inside, and you can tell me all about it,” I murmured, as we hobbled into the house. I noticed that she was limping and favored her left side. Alarm bells screamed in my ears, and I felt an awful sensation in my stomach.

I settled my friend on the sofa and brought her a box of tissues, allowing her a few minutes to pull herself together. This was unlike her to show up late at night.

Abigail took her time, but I’ve been crying at her house many times in the past, so I copied what she normally does for me. It felt strange, seeing my friend distraught. It was so unlike her.

“It’s Chris (not his real name),” she sniffled. “He (sob) is hurting me.” Her crying started up again; this time I moved closer and hugged her. She flinched and retracted her right arm. My sick feeling intensified. I knew without knowing what she was going to say. Her body was screaming at me for help. I knew that feeling, and my heart broke into pieces for my friend.

My husband surfaced with two cups of chamomile tea. He set them on the table and quietly retreated into the den. Without being asked, he returned with a pillow and some bedding. I nodded a silent thanks.

I knew it was going to be a long night. Abigail needed me.

“Abs, where are the girls?” She has five-year-old twins.

“They’re staying at Mom’s tonight. I went for a drive. Lizzy, I can’t do it anymore.”

I held my friend for a long time while the sobs took over her slim body. I noticed she had lost weight. She wasn’t normal Abs anymore. Guilt took over me as I racked my brain over how long it had been since I saw her. Was it last week or the week before that we met in the park?

“Talk to me, Abs. What’s going on?”

My friend started explaining, in between sobs, that her husband, Chris, had been hitting her. It started when he lost his job, and got worse. He’d hit her once before when the girls were babies, but apologized quickly. Abs didn’t know what to think, and she believed him. She told me Chris had started drinking heavily and gambling away all their savings after he got laid off. Now, she was scared every time he returned home. She showed me her bruises but refused to let me take her to the ER.

We stayed up talking until way past 2 AM. Together, we made a plan for her to leave Chris and move in with her mom and dad. I advised her not to return home and to give me the key to pack up their stuff when Chris was out.

Domestic violence happens everywhere, but it’s hard to spot it–even when it seems obvious. Heck, I’m a trauma survivor, and I missed it in my dear friend. Abs had never shown me the bruises, and when she said Chris was working late at a bar, I believed that he was working and not drinking himself stupid.

What is Domestic Violence?

• Domestic violence is when someone in a relationship or family hurts or controls another person to scare or dominate them.
• Domestic violence can include physical, emotional, sexual, and/or financial abuse.
• Anyone can experience domestic violence, regardless of their background.
• Domestic violence is never your fault.
• If you are experiencing domestic violence, reach out to family, friends, or a doctor. There is help available from numerous community centers, non-profits, spiritual organizations, and activism groups. To start, try The National Domestic Violence Hotline, with free help available 24/7: 800–799–7233.

Here are some signs of Domestic Abuse:

• Violent, threatening, or controlling behavior to make a partner feel scared and unsafe.
• Humiliation and constant criticism.
• Sudden signs of anxiety and fear.
• Inappropriate clothing for the season (long sleeves in hot weather to hide bruises and injuries).
• Change in job performance: errors, slowness, lateness, absenteeism, and lack of concentration.
• Emotional distress, such as sadness, depression, or suicidal thoughts.
• Isolating the victim.
• An abuser acts as if they own their partner.
• Lying to make themselves look good.
• Dominating conversations.
• Checking up with constant texts and phone calls.
• Suggesting they are the victim.

Abuse must stop. If you know of anyone who is experiencing abuse at home, please reach out and report it.

My name is Lizzy. I’m a mom, teacher, and trauma survivor.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

“What stops victims from leaving?”

It used to be called “domestic violence,” when, in fact, abuse isn’t always violent. Before any types of violent abuse occur, there have been months, if not years, of more subtle, but as destructive, forms of abuse:

• Verbal abuse: Insulting, shouting at, and threatening partner for the smallest reasons. Uncontrollable bouts of anger. Victims feel uneasy and unsafe. 
• Emotional Abuse: controlling and manipulating partner by gaslighting, lying, threatening, or by giving silent treatment; as well as switching from loving to distant/ unavailable regularly, isolating the partner from loved ones.
• Financial abuse: stopping a partner from getting a job. Withholding partner financial help and stopping access to bank accounts, forcing the partner into prostitution/ trafficking. 
• Neglect: Not caring for an ill or disabled partner. Not seeking medical care. Not giving emotional support and meeting the needs of the partner.

Sexual abuse, rape and sexual abuse aren’t always violent either. If there aren’t any physical signs of struggle or “defensive marks” on a victim, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, nor does it prove the victim consented to the act.

Domestic Abuse: The latest statistics.

The Office for National Statistics blog page reads: “From the new questions, we estimate that, for the survey year ending March 2024, 8.0% of people aged 16 years and over experienced domestic abuse in the last year (equivalent to 3.9 million people). When breaking the figures down by sex, we estimate 9.5% of women (2.3 million) and 6.5% of men (1.5 million) have experienced domestic abuse in the last year.”

In the patriarchal society we live in, women are most at risk of domestic abuse; however, all genders suffer when no one should be victims of abuse. All have the right to live safely and peacefully. Figures don’t truly give the real picture and don’t convey the suffering that victims and survivors go through.

What stops victims of domestic abuse from leaving?

• “Didn’t they see the red flags?” 

They probably didn’t, and not for lack of intelligence: perpetrators groom victims. Grooming can take the form of “love bombing” and of only showing their sweet, romantic side, saying everything the other person wants to hear. Groomers are often very good at making their partner relaxed and trusting while detecting someone’s fears, worries, and vulnerability. Perpetrators also groom their partners’ friends, children, and family. They lie and manipulate police officers and judges against their victims.

• “Why bring it up now? Or if it is true, why wait so long to speak up?”

There are many reasons why a victim/ survivor doesn’t speak up straight away: for adult survivors of child abuse, some forget the abuse. Forgetting isn’t something they control: the mind does that in times of extreme distress, to survive. What can a small child do against an adult anyway? Victims are often threatened: “If you say anything about this, I will kill you/ your kids/your pet…” Some survivors have actually spoken out and reached out to the police or other people in authority, only to be further abused or for their cases to be pushed aside.

• “Why didn’t they say NO or just leave?”

 Another survival skill is “Freeze”. It is when a victim is paralyzed with fear, knowing that rebelling means more pain or even death. At other times, the freeze response is automatic, and victims feel shame, or are shamed, for not fighting back or for not saying “Stop”, for letting it happen. Many scream NO, and the perpetrator doesn’t stop. Is it as simple as that?

• “Don’t you think they are doing this for attention? for money?”

Society views victims as weak, vulnerable, and somehow responsible for the abuse they’ve experienced. IF cases involved “powerful” figures, such as Donald Trump, Jimmy Savile or Huw Edwards, these individuals are always protected by the institution for which they work, and by other powerful friends. Some victims did speak out, went to the Police to report, but they weren’t believed. The last resort is to go to newspapers, but by telling their stories, they are then accused by the public of seeking fame and fortune.

We often hear of financial settlements, but those are a way for the perpetrators not to go on trial. If there were more solicitors willing to go pro bono or if the justice system weren’t so financially out of reach for many victims, there would be fewer settlements and more offenders convicted. 

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s latest report, Shifting The Scales –  Transforming the criminal justice response to domestic abuse,  identifies 3 barriers blocking the way for victims and survivors from speaking out and reporting their ordeals.

1.  “Victims and survivors do not identify with terminology around domestic abuse.”  

 A lot of people still believe that if a partner isn’t physically abusive, they aren’t covered in bruises, it isn’t that bad. It isn’t domestic violence. Or victims are being turned away from police stations because there are no signs of violence

2.   “Police have lost the trust of victims and survivors”: 

In recent years stories of police officers killing, raping women, such as Wayne Couzens, as well as the MET lack of care and cover-ups, have seriously damaged what little trust the public held towards them. Police Perpetrated Domestic Abuse is a real issue and needs to be dealt with on every level.

3.  “Victims and survivors have had their  own – or have witnessed others’ – negative  experiences of the criminal justice system”: 

Too many victims are further traumatised and shamed during police interviews and by the criminal justice system. For instance, while being cross-examined in court, victims are often treated as if they are criminals or liars for bringing perpetrators into court. Not enough cases go to trial. Not enough trials bring justice to victims. The report shows that, by the end of March 2024, the estimated number of victims was 2,307,000, 851,06 2 cases were recorded, and only 38,776 offenders were convicted. 

In conclusion

There is more awareness than ever of Domestic Abuse, but unfortunately, prejudices and misunderstandings persist. 

• Most people still believe that if the abuse isn’t physically violent, it isn’t abuse. It isn’t that bad. There is still this misconception that victims can and should be aware of red “flags” and that it is easy to leave if victims really wanted to. 

There needs to be more education about the grooming process and more subtle types of abuse (such as verbal and emotional abuse) 

• Victims are encouraged to speak up, to report, and to leave, but when they do, they are shut down, shamed, and abused by the people who are meant to protect them. The Justice system is outdated, out of reach for many, and is guilty of favouring the perpetrators (White, rich, powerful men) 

For victims and survivors of domestic abuse to speak up and to leave, they need a safe space to go to. They need compassionate people around them and a fair justice system fighting for them regardless of their gender, the size of their bank account, and their place in society. 

• The infamous video of Cassie trying to escape P. Diddy, for him to strike her multiple times and pull her back into their hotel room, has gone viral on social media. Still, some people ask, “Why didn’t she leave?” A lot of individuals will defend him no matter what, even when faced with clear evidence. Of course, some knew, but they looked the other way. There was a lot of money to make, and nobody wants to kill their golden goose. Capitalism and fame/ idolatry enable some of the worst human behaviour. 

Society needs to put people’s well-being,as well as their safety, first. People before profit. People before power. Right now, it feels hopeless, but we need to persevere in enabling victims and survivors of Domestic Abuse to share their stories, to find refuge, and for them to rebuild their lives. 

Sylvie Rouhani

If you need help, you can contact the organisation below:

Refuge  “Refuge is the largest domestic abuse organisation in the UK. On any given day our services support thousands of women and their children, helping them to overcome the physical, emotional, financial and logistical impacts of abuse and rebuild their lives — free from fear.”

 ManKind Initiative:  “The Mankind Initiative is the principal, expert and specialist charity in the UK focusing on male victims of domestic abuse.”

Reducing The Risks: “Domestic Abuse can happen to anyone, but it doesn’t always present in the same way. Those in the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Queer Intersex Asexual+ (LGBTQIA+) community may experience specific forms of abuse and be at risk of certain types of abuse more often than others.”

Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Mushrooms are notorious for only being distinguishable as poisonous by the elite. It’s how they collectively protect themselves. If our individual and collective personalities continue to proliferate in such a disordered way, we would be wise to proactively develop a counter strategy. We must develop a new approach when compassion and flexible thinking are exploited. In no uncertain terms, when it is safe to do so, some of us need to hold the line in small ways—in this case, calling a horse a horse.

The lifeblood of language is only possible through relinquishing power: when a word leaves one’s mouth and reaches another’s ear. “Grey-rocking” and “no-contact” advice have their time and place; for me, they echoed the agency-stripping accommodations I’ve been forced to swallow too often. I couldn’t do it; I was filled to the brim. My body is metabolizing intense bouts of word salad: when someone says words in sequences that follow syntactic rules but rapid-fired so you can’t stop to notice they have no meaning. Word salad is strategic, a mechanism of misdirection. Direct language is an antidote to narcissism, a non-black-and-white intersubjectivity that never guarantees dominance or falsely proselytizes “truth” but is 100% honest. Exacting direct language is, at least, a surefire way to get a read on the person you are dealing with in flesh and blood at any given moment: Can they tolerate an external consensus that places restrictions on them? Can they accommodate others even if there’s nothing in it for them? Or do they balk at the request for adjustments? Is “no” enough?

I have read enough articles about triggers as superpowers for a lifetime, about sensitivity being like a carbon monoxide detector, and about how our bodies are trying to tell us something. I keep waiting for this steady collective strength to appear in all its terrifying glory, like the unveiling of a game-changing map. They say pain and fear are messengers; we are wise to listen, but I am no longer interested in protecting myself alone.

I’m not asking for compassionate or PC alternatives to official NPD naming, but ones that are precise and on the record. (After NPD abuse, my knee-jerk defense is to rename it “black-hole broken-cup disorder” or “soul-raping joker-faced syndrome.”) I am asking for suggestions on language that will distinguish the everyday usage of narcissism from when you realize too late that you’re deeply entangled with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to hold back harm. For when you require intervention more urgently than the time it takes to rewire every one of your childhood trauma responses.

Here is my call to this community of resilient deep thinkers: what do you wish was said instead? What language did you develop that you wish you had from the beginning to describe this bizarre exploitation style? Or are words offered by elders along the way that someone in the white-hot thick of it might not remember available? How do you explain this behavior to your children or prepare them for this dynamic in the world? During your recovery, did you feel a pit in your stomach as the word narcissist was casually thrown around? At the same time, maybe you calculated the personal-danger/societal-progress ratio of hearing the word aloud in public spaces. Hopefully, it wasn’t just in pop culture but in poli-sci theory, legislature, medical settings, schoolrooms, and good company with people learning to reflect on the first person and the collective impact.

Any suggestions on what else we might name it for those who find themselves in chat rooms at 3 AM, pouring over “dark triad”/cluster-B literature, drained, on the brink, watching their brains attempt to make sense of bizarre nonsense… clinging to lifelines of writings that use phrases like psychological murder and mental rape, praying that the accurate usage of this extreme language won’t be judged as “dramatic” by people from which they are asking for help and harbor? Suggestions for what to call it when this energy follows you (maybe because you’re now able to see what was always there) … but don’t know what to call it and can’t call it by its name… but can’t tolerate it anymore, either? We get to decide. Language is arbitrary, and form follows function.

Suggestions for alternative names to NPD are welcome in the comments below from experiences as affirmed by the victim of a fun house “love” that engaged in recon to target your weakest spots. “Love” that left you wondering how to compost your murdered self without accurate language. Relationships that whipped you in the same place twice when you attempted to describe them accurately.

Nuances in NPD diagnoses would benefit from reference manuals recognizing variants like covert, grandiose, or malignant, but a new paradigm could also be modeled off a five-alarm or def-com system. Could a renaming honor that little zombified ant? Or, maybe, in the tradition of Greek mythology, instead of Narcissus, Orpheus—master instrumentalist and enchanter? Orpheus lived out a tragic story: he loved, or at least he tried. He went to the depths of hell to rescue his beloved Euripides and succeeded because he was intelligent, charming, and determined. But it didn’t occur to him to ensure that Euripides was also in the light before looking back to unravel it all. From then on, he was a broken man. He was later cannibalized alive by the women to whom he could no longer connect while attempting to rest and grieve his losses.

I look forward to doing what the intersection of my life’s greatest griefs has brazened me with the capacity to do: metabolize how it is both about me and not about me with an understanding of consequences, object permanence, and shreds of compassion even after my most outlandish moments. (I am returning to myself.) I am curious about what language was harmful, helpful, or an absurd replication during your recovery from NPD abuse or what language you prioritize for the next generations. The more survivors I speak to, the more I realize that it irrevocably alters the way one sees. I aim to use my strange afterlife to call upon institutions (like mental health diagnostic manuals) to call horses by the name we gave them: to call pop stars and assholes “narcissists”; and call NPD something more nuanced amidst this evolution.

I twirled around, causing the skirt of my best Sunday dress to flair out in a way that delighted my four-year-old sensibilities. It was 1966, and my black patent leather Mary Jane’s made a wonderful clacking sound on the creaky oak floors of the sanctuary. The problem was I was supposed to be sitting in my seat. My father scowled at me from the pulpit. Mrs. Wagoner, a wonderful, kindly old widow, had been tasked with watching me that Sunday morning, but try as she might, she couldn’t convince me to sit down. For some reason I cannot remember, my mother was not in attendance at the service that day. 

I did not want to sit in the hard pews and listen to another one of my father’s long, boring sermons. I wanted to twirl and watch the pleated columns of my skirt float around me like the ballerinas I so admired. Mrs. Wagoner finally enticed me back into the pew with a stick of fragrant fun stripe chewing gum.

After the service, I stood on the stoop of the church in abject shame as, one by one, the congregation filed by, waiting to shake my father’s hand. “Good sermon,” a man said as he looked at me in pity. “Your little girl has a lot of spirit.” The man gave me a weak smile, but I only stared at the ground and tried to disappear behind my father’s black suit. 

As soon as the service had ended, my father had made a beeline straight for me. His familiar look of rage communicated just how much trouble I was in. Grabbing me by the arm, he gritted his teeth and growled into my ear, “You’re getting a whipping when we get home.”

I knew I deserved it. I was bad through and through to the core of my being. I was the most wicked girl that had ever lived. Why did I constantly cause so much trouble everywhere I went? I looked over at my older brother by eighteen months. He was perfect. Able to sit for interminable amounts of time without moving a muscle or saying a word, I could not understand why I could not be like him. Why was it so hard for me to get through the Sunday morning service? Not only had I failed to sit still, I had committed the unpardonable sin. I had made my father look bad, and I had done it in front of the people he most wanted to impress—the church congregation. 

One by one, the congregants filed by until it was poor Mrs. Wagoner’s turn. She tried to defend me as she placed her white-gloved hand into my father’s. “She’s just a little girl,” the old lady clucked. Reaching over, she gently touched my hair. “Don’t be too hard on her.”

Mrs. Wagoner could not imagine what awaited me when we got home. No one in the congregation could. I would get a beating within an inch of my life. I don’t remember ever moving during a church service again after that day. 

To outsiders, we were the perfect family—my father, gregarious and socially adept, covered for my mother’s awkward introversion. Pillars of the community, my father was a bi-vocational pastor and a successful businessman. My mother, an elementary school teacher and avid homemaker, was famous throughout the community for her amazing rose garden and specialty Christmas cakes. But underneath the surface, a boiling rage ran through our household. My father was a monster, and my brother and I were terrified of him. Beatings were dispensed at the slightest infraction. No emotion, expression, or individuality was allowed. He and he alone ruled the household, and he did so literally as an iron-fisted tyrant. 

My mother was just as dangerous. Perhaps more so. Unstable, you never knew what might set her off. Filled with unexpressed anger from my father’s dominance, she took her frustrations out on her children. In addition to physical abuse, my mother perpetrated the most damaging abuse of all. Warped from her own sexual abuse, she, in turn, abused us. Even your body was not your own in our household. She played endless mind games where emotional torture and threats were her favorite tools. Constantly fearing for our lives, my brother and I lived in the shadows, sneaking from room to room, hoping our parents would not notice our existence. Staying out of the way was the only way to survive. The trouble was that I couldn’t figure out how to do that. My brother, however, was stellar at it. No matter how much he tried to protect me, I somehow managed to be in the way. He would look at me with compassion while I took another beating or sidle up to me in sympathy as my mother, fists balled,  screamed at me for some small mistake. 

The abuse seems so clear as I describe it now, but I emerged from that home at the age of eighteen, still thinking we were not only perfect, we were better than other people. My father was the authority on all things. His opinion held special importance because he had more insight than anyone else. My mother couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t as wonderful as she was and why the accolades she deserved had never come her way. My home might as well have been called a mind-control cult because that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t until much later, when the wheels came off that I began to see the truth, and that truth would come to me in stages as my mind and emotions were able to handle it.

Middle-Knowledge

Dealing with childhood trauma takes time. When your mind is shattered and your emotions a wasteland, there is a place that trauma survivors live called middle-knowledge.(footnote 1, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy by William Wordan, pg 44). Middle knowledge means knowing and not knowing at the same time. Underneath the surface, I knew that my parent’s behavior was off, but I put that knowledge away. To fully embrace the truth was too great a threat to my existence. My father and mother and the constructed reality they ran held complete control over my thoughts and actions. To step outside of that system would be to call down the most disastrous consequences possible. Dread and fear are powerful ways to control other people, and my father and mother wielded those tools with exact precision. 

Underneath all these power plays lay the worst threat of all. The threat to withdraw love. Abandonment hung over everything my parents did. If I refused total compliance, I would be shunned, cut off, and thrown out with the dogs. Love was never unconditional, and the carrot of acceptance was like a disappearing vapor that I could never quite grasp. 

My abusers used a two-pronged approach. Do everything you can to undermine the self-confidence of your victim while at the same time convincing them they cannot live without the abuser’s control. 

I lived over half my life before I began to make significant strides toward healing. My twenties, thirties, and forties were spent in survival mode. By the time the suffering was so severe I was forced to address it, I had lost over five decades. So much time had passed. My children were raised, my career path chosen, all the major decisions of life had been made, and I had stumbled through it all with trauma undermining my every thought and decision. It was too late! Too late to be a better parent! Too late to be an encouraging partner! Too late to follow my dreams! Too late to be happy and too late to heal! Or was it?

We took my mother out to eat on one of my last visits with her. She was at the beginning of twenty years of institutionalization that would define the last years of her life. For ten years before that, I had tried to deal with her mental illness expressed through panic, rages, control, manipulation, blame, and coercion. Nothing I did made any difference. She was completely lost. Her life had fallen apart after my father left and divorced her, and though she lived in a beautiful home, she could not manage her money or her life. Inch by inch, the darkness completely took over. The torment of knowing her in the present was just as destructive as her abuse had been in childhood.

My husband, my two college-age sons, and I sat together with my mother in a booth at the restaurant. She had aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her. The wild-eyed hunted look that used to come and go had taken up permanent residence. My children looked at her in fear. She was so odd. Later, on the drive home, my oldest son commented. “That was the closest to meeting Gollum I have ever been in real life.” And indeed, that’s what she had become. A wizened, withered shell of a person existing but not living. I cried all the way home.

The eternal flame of hope that somehow, some way, my family of origin might return to that idyllic perfection I had been brain-washed to believe in finally began to die. My mother was never going to get better. Things were never going to return to the secure delusion I so longed for. She was never going to comprehend the destruction she had wrought in my life, and worst of all, I was never going to be released from the prison of trauma that so pervaded everything because both my parents were still participating in it and in fact would keep participating in it until the day they died.

I felt condemned to repeat the dysfunctional patterns forever. Terrified I would destroy the lives of my children and haunt their adulthood as she had mine, I began to consider what to do. I felt lost, just as lost as my mother had been. I couldn’t control my emotions or anxiety any better than she had. Terror ran my life, and I knew it had already had a major impact on my children. But I wasn’t dead…not yet. My mother had resigned from life. I, at least, was still in the game.

It is never too late to heal from trauma. In fact, it is imperative that you take up arms and heed the call to do so no matter what life stage you are in. You have been given a mission, and you alone are the only one who can fulfill it. Within your grasp is the ability to break the transfer of trauma from one generation to the next. Your choices have a profound influence on the world. Perhaps you think your little life doesn’t matter. I can assure you it does. You have the chance to be a blessing or a curse. To leave behind anger and hatred and give the gift of peace and kindness. It is a gigantic task and one that can feel overwhelming. Where in the world do you begin? You begin where you are. Whether you are eighteen or eighty, if you take one small step toward healing, you will be starting at exactly the right place.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

I want to preface the following with a distinction between “a narc” and abusively narcissistic patterned behavior because this is so much bigger than any one individual. People who suffer from NPD (as opposed to narcissistic jerks) are so deeply traumatized and will take it as a reflection on them… but it isn’t. I’m not wishing to incite violence, but the idealism of “becoming the change I hope to see” doesn’t hold water when what I hope to see has been reverse-victim-ordered.

NPD has a high correlation with misogyny, racism, xenophobic discrimination, and all the other ailments of the world we are regularly told can’t be fixed. When the man to whom I was trauma-bonded (but didn’t yet comprehend had NPD) projected by screaming at me until he was sweating and his eyes were black that I had a personality disorder, I was naively trying to care for him and his sprained ego, ahem, I mean, ankle… and reacting to being snapped at that I “could stand to get him a cold drink”. He later made me apologize for suggesting this happened. At that point, I was hooked by a web of stealthy lies that reflected everything I had ever hoped for and belittled through the grooming of incremental boundary-testing, so my broken spirit acquiesced. My pupils were probably large and black, too, from fear.

A year and a half into our relationship, after much talk about his “very observant, quick-learning, self-aware and progressive path,” he grinned while he tested me with “suddenly realizing” who my closest friend was (he was attempting to suggest a threesome) and the sudden information about his possession of U.S. Confederate memorabilia. My gaslit bleeding heart tried to respect this complicated ambush of cultural heritage and sexual pseudo-liberation and told him, “Just don’t be hateful to people” and “yeah, I don’t need you two to be close”. In retrospect, it was the same grin that he had while I frantically searched for items I’m fairly certain he intentionally hid from me and, to this day, still has in his possession.

I would have said anything at that point so he would stop trapping me. Looking back, this fueled the entrapment. Then again, once the funhouse music and coercive rage started, there was nothing I could do. There was no appeal to logic or facts, no appeal to empathy. Even abrupt no-contact would have had severe consequences for my life, but I was also naively trying to get back to the great love that was first sold to me. Once the funhouse music started, I would apologize for things he did so he wouldn’t scream at me then he would scream at me for apologizing too much, mocking my lack of self-respect. He kept coming back because I had something he wanted, something to which he felt entitled, but it was pure sabotage.

Based on what I now know about my ex’s reputation (that was strategically hidden from me) and how furiously he screamed that I had “ruined everything” the first time I confronted him, I believe I was recruited to prove to everyone that he could keep an LTR. This was why he was on such deceitfully good behavior in the beginning. Today, the recovery advice relating to brainwashing and cult leaders has been most relevant. And since I proclaim honesty, there is a part of me that realized halfway through our relationship that I was deep undercover. Every day still, talking myself through the ambiguous grief of being in love with a man who never existed takes up most of my calories.

During my attempts to get anyone in a position of authority to hold my ex accountable for his psychological violence, half the officials told me, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, that’s incredibly abusive, but unfortunately that’s not how the law works.” The other half said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you, and that’s not how the law usually works… but I see what you’re saying. Where are you in the process? I’ll tell you what I know.” I followed their advice as far as I could.

I was then repeatedly told not to say the word narcissist in a courtroom because it’s style of abuse is notoriously difficult to prosecute, and the precedent varies from state to state for its connection to the intentional infliction of extreme emotional distress. In my highly triggered state, this struck me as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, so I took a page out of his playbook. I proceeded to fight my way into courtrooms and get the word on any record as often as possible, even if it had to be mine. Today I still can’t, in good conscience, say that I disagree with myself. But I admit it was a messy process amidst an insufficient status quo.

Nowadays, I reassure myself about my worst reactions by noticing that this is not a pattern in any other of my relationships. I understand that it’s my responsibility to work through the shakes that making even simple decisions gives me after having my sense of self gutted by being regularly screamed at for being a “stupid, useless little girl that shouldn’t trust my body or judgment”. I wake up every day with a restraining order on my name because the reactive abuse was effective and remind myself in the mirror that I didn’t ‘lose it’; it was taken. Keep your chin up, kid. I tried to take the shame and secrecy out of what was already happening since there was no higher road.

But I still stand in front of judges who’ve heard decimated versions of the saga (but ask zero contextualizing questions) and simply accept the consequences. I go to therapy twice a week, plus domestic violence support groups plus EMDR for the laundry list of intrusive thoughts from the distorted intimacy. I’m resilient and adaptive, and I see leaps and bounds of the hallmarks of health since denying the continuation of this treatment. Every morning, I remember the most bad-ass advice I’ve been given so far: that my best revenge is to prosper.

More importantly, in these therapies, I accept my part, realizing that fawning is manipulative even when rooted in fear, and yes (go figure) I didn’t get enough unconditional love as a child. I was tenuously glued back together when my abuser met me, and he smelled it on me. Since he scapegoated my past for everything, it kept me reluctant to admit that all of these are true. I think it is a good sign that I am even considering my part and how to prevent it in the future. I’m proud to take what’s mine, but I am not strong enough to take it all, nor do I deserve to. I’m not willing to “get on with my life.” I’m actively discontinuing this tradition of complicity.

Suppose our best guess about the root of NPD is stunting around the developmental stage of object permanence (peek-a-boo age). In that case, I defer to all the mothers who contain their toddlers’ outbursts on playgrounds: letting kids live out Godzilla fantasies without repercussion isn’t healthy. It isn’t healthy (or loving) to let a toddler feel entitled to that behavior. It gets murky when the toddler is in an adult body with a credit card and voting rights. By the time they’ve grown into an adult body, it’s far too late.

We need to teach kids this discretion as early as possible before sending them back out onto playgrounds (and workplaces, and sacred contracts of intimacy) where sadistic Godzillas will repeatedly bludgeon them. It is a slippery slope to collectively tell others that it’s now their responsibility to metabolize violence far beyond interpretive doubts. I can live with my sandcastles being swallowed by the tide or stomped on by bullies; I can’t tolerate being assaulted behind the swings and then denied the language to accurately describe what happened.

The perks of constant interconnected global conveniences and entertainment come with a responsibility to exercise this hard-earned discretion, part logic and part intuition. If violence is cyclical, we need to find a way to support the wrenches in the wheel who have first-hand knowledge of how enough has become enough and connect them to developing little minds. We need to intervene because narcissistic traits are running rampant like bullies on playgrounds, except now they exact policy through the offices they hold or through their 200 million Instagram followers that enact their word like Gospel. And with so many networks, most behavior has gone covert.

It will be one of the wildest rides you will ever go on to call out narcissistic behavior, be it individual or institutional. Do so judiciously and take care of yourself during the backlash. Men in uniform will choke on their best attempts at trauma-informed language, gate-keeping your recourse. They may tell you the threats you made against coveted models of cars are more valid than what you endured with your body and psyche. Strangers (who know half the cherry-picked version of what happened) will scream at you in the street. People you’ve known since birth will tell you that “good girls don’t talk about that kind of thing.” Connecting your story to the bigger story will get you shamed (and forget to mention how it can be both). You’ll somehow be simultaneously selfish and at fault for giving too much. You’ll be “over-reactive” when it’s convenient and told your trauma is nothing special if you start making sense. They are shades of the same playbook.

However, it will be a rock-hard reclamation of self and reality. People will vet themselves, and flying monkeys will drop like flies when they know they can’t play you like a violin anymore. Some may say that fighting fire with fire makes the world burn, but we are already burning, and self-defense has long been distinguished from preemptive strike. Sauter it with precision.

Participation in this style of resistance calls for deep discretion. In recovery groups, I spoke with mothers who couldn’t fight back because they had kids they were protecting from their exes. I also interviewed someone who told me they wished they had fought back seventeen years earlier in their marriage to get their abuser to back off. (This account single-handedly helped me start sleeping better amidst the consequences of my body’s reasonable reactions to my ex’s gaslighting and reactive abuse.) If you need to get to safety before you use this hard-earned knowledge to fight a dark societal trend, let that get you up in the morning. Let that guide you to a centered safety one day at a time. We need you. We all need what your body now knows.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

In an oversaturated language, I ran out of words to describe the extent of the damage. Psychological murder and mental rape seemed more appropriate, but using spiritual, metaphysical descriptors in a secular world is challenging. You’re treated like you don’t know the strength of your words; you’re covertly tagged as hysterical. And yes, I am sensitive to that treatment, however inadvertent. It’s reasonable that any survivor of narc abuse would be. My ex’s treatment would have broken anybody, and I’m no longer available for conversations about how I could’ve handled it better.

Analogies have proven helpful: descriptions of the dark spider web I was living in are most proportionately responded to when I describe my narc as “less Taylor Swift, more Ted Bundy.” It illuminates his superficial charm and the unease and chaos that follows. Yes, people can be that improvisationally manipulative, down to their precognitive skeletons, reflexively transactional, even in their best attempts at loving and being loved. The conversations in recovery groups and with practitioners who don’t balk when I use words like sociopathy and violence (even though my ex never hit me) are markedly safer and more productive.

Back to mushrooms: they each have their taxonomy institutionally sanctioned as distinct from all the other mushrooms’ excellent works. Yule log mushrooms will not understand the coercion experienced by a zombified ant. They won’t relate to the alchemy that Cryptococcus neoforman wield. The zombie ant fungus spore babies did nothing wrong, but the ants need convalescence after their heads split if we expect them to return with their stories from the other side and rejoin the work force.

Even after having the mechanisms of NPD shoved down my throat for the last time, it broke my heart that people with NPD are institutionally abandoned, that their suffering is forfeited, and abuse acquiesced to. In contrast, because I had already shouldered violent amounts of blame-shifting, it further broke my psychologically assaulted brain to be told there was nothing I could do but metabolize it. Professionals told me they were baffled; that my ex (and formative family members) would never see it; and sorry, good luck. Stay hydrated.

Meanwhile, institutions collectively take on these patterned behaviors. It drives us to near extinction. As a student of global power dynamics, this parallel keeps me from accepting the radical acceptance stage. If one “can’t get well in the environment that made you sick,” how am I supposed to get well in a world where collective narcissism is running rampantly unchecked? It’s scary to let go of hopes for accountability; where does that leave my god- and grandchildren? (And the philosopher’s quintessential quandary: Why do we do anything without hope for change?) Radical acceptance is a powerful tool for protecting oneself in a damaging world. But the world is becoming one big rug, under which room runs out for things to be swept.

I’m not the only one at this trend’s mercy: I see it in the desperate relief of people in survivor groups. Self-accountability is essential in healing, but it’s too much to ask those already humiliated and repeatedly mortally wounded to bear the exclusive brunt of rectification while their brains (bodies) are functioning at an all-time low. Narcissists, being narcissists, will exploit this, and so on. It’s a societal extension of scapegoating that keeps suicide rates disproportionately high in narc abuse survivors. We are watching this socio-epidemiological snowball in real time. It turns voting polls into circuses. It lines Taylor Swift’s bank accounts with fur: fans crying at concerts, relieved that someone sees it… or is she embodying it? The whodunit is juicy.

Thoughtful choice of words is not diplomacy at cocktail parties; it’s our lifeblood. In a world quickly becoming a compassion vacuum, I was enduring a strange formula of social endemics like rapists and cults that were officially weaponized as only my burden, and recovering from severe abuse under the guise of love. I barely endured the aftermath of unremittingly brutal spiritual assaults (in part) because we’ve made too much wiggle room. During my attempts to not turn against myself this time, I have engaged with group after group of disoriented victims who gather. They hope to re-learn how to validate what was first dismissed by their formative caregivers, secondly, dismissed by their abuser(s), and thirdly, dismissed by society at large, yet is somehow officially only their responsibility. We are being told to run and hide from the air we breathe.

In interviews with narc abuse survivors, especially those entrenched in legal battles, one piece of advice repeatedly pops up: write everything down. Keep a log. Date it. Keep a journal of intuitions you don’t know where to place yet. Keep two paper copies. Fight dirty and record conversations, with or without consent. Even if it’s not legally admissible in court, it will ground you in the fact that you’re not going crazy. Ever notice how some folks get when they’re about to be inexorably caught red-handed? It’ll tell you everything you need to know about a person. We need to accurately get this behavior on the record. Ink is magical in this way.

Narcissism isn’t the word that should be attached to NPD abuse anymore. That’s not what happened. I needed that word to be stronger. I needed to be able to walk into a doctor’s office under Medicare and say, “A narcissist has attacked me,” and not have them look at me like I had been listening to too many true-crime podcasts. Fewer and fewer of us have access to gurus, homeopathists and publicly appointed attorneys that will understand this wavelength. I want those at highest risk for narc abuse who are emerging from having their childhood traumas subjugated to recognizance, coerced, lied to, puppeteered, tricked, then subtly raped, hollowed out, fed upon, then their faces rubbed in it like a bad dog to be able to walk into a medical office and say, “I have my suspicions that I am in relation with a sociopath.” They walk among us and don’t look like they belong in Taylor Swift’s music videos. I am beyond my attempted gestures of inclusive understanding being met with taunts of how history belongs to the victor.

Anything said will be bastardized if you lack the muscle to understand the need for gray spaces, grace for others, and reasonable interpretation. Not having the bandwidth for others who have explicitly expressed the need for support in enduring society’s cracks is not the same as cheekily weaponizing a disregard for transgressions of known boundaries. It’s why some people can’t stand that it’s not PC to say certain words anymore. They are sans the muscle that sees that they’re “allowed” to say these words, but there are harmful repercussions to vulnerable populations that have been begging people to stop for decades; it’s reactive abuse. It’s the basis of NIMBYism: that ideals are good in theory until someone must make a sacrifice that doesn’t directly benefit them. Accountability is being DARVO’ed in our collective ethics. “Consent” is being reduced to an annoying digital box we check to get to a main page. A new strategy is needed.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

The natural world is rife with much richer analogies than our “higher” cultured structures. We have been strategically separated from the knowledge that mushrooms are awesome. They are resilient, adaptive, adept at divvying up decomposition, and taxonomically distinguished amongst the many types. Consider three examples: 1.) Mushrooms that grow on New England Yule logs (morels, oysters, lion’s mane) are iconic, delicious, and indispensable to the ecosystem. 2.) Cryptococcus neoformans fungi are doing a different alchemical work: metabolizing radiation thirty-eight years after the man-made nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl. 3.) Deep in tropical forests, a spore called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (zombie-ant fungus) infects ants’ brains to alter their behavior. The fungus drives an ant to the top of a hill, where there is sunlight that the fungus can’t otherwise reach. It then releases spores for reproduction via the ant’s exploded head. (Plus thousands of examples of fungi soldiers in between!) Yet even in the natural world, parasite populations sometimes get out of balance.

Trauma is everywhere; the more humans there are on the planet, the more trauma there will be. A vast majority of us are living in a triggered state, and only some of us admit it. We also foster minds that can navigate the nuances necessitated by spectrums, strengthening our non-black-and-white thinking in an exponentially complex world. We are tending to those historically kept out of conversations or that need triage because of an immutable past. Institutional sanction may “seem like a trivial issue to some,” but although I didn’t have a say in the need for triage, my privileged access to narc abuse research was undeniable. I accessed it via sanctioned definitions plus survivor’s accounts.

Defending the farthest ends of imposed destruction is essential. In the mid-20^th century, the philosopher Jacques Derrida watched his non-binary deconstructionism weaponized by Holocaust deniers. It was a quick adaptation, one which he himself waded in. Comparisons aren’t logical in trauma-informed arenas; we cannot let it turn into an Olympic sport. First-person accounts are invaluable; they are tools against didactics. If “power over” is the enemy, let it burn. We will benefit from listening to those who have been to the far side: they embody a cipher, attuned to the most damaging collective dynamics.

I would never claim to know the trauma of someone chained in a basement for a decade. To an analogous but empirically lesser degree, it was maddening to hear people say they were “triggered” by things for which they have distaste or “gaslit” by someone who disagreed with them once. During the last chapter and harrowing afterlife of my NPD narcissist, my evenings resembled an Apocalypse Now hotel stay. The mechanisms found when local labor is coerced into performing its own resource extraction are not far off from what drives domestic violence, but it is not the same as the discomfort caused by calling someone out on their bullshit. All of these can be covert, blatant, or have spectacle. It is up to us to navigate the shades in between.

You can’t gaslight someone once or accidentally; it is a method, a grooming process. It is based on a pattern, and keeping a log of this pattern before throwing the word around would serve us all well. Trauma bonding isn’t what occurs when two people become friends by sharing accounts of their trauma, however true and deserving of recognition (think: Stockholm’s Syndrome). You don’t have PTSD from stressful experiences; you have PTS. Love-bombing isn’t over-zealous, misguided courtship, though the pattern of suspicion by its recipients is illuminating. The idealization phase isn’t a “honeymoon period” (think objectification). And the lyrical, colloquial usage of the word narcissist doesn’t do justice to the factions of survivors clamoring to get well in an environment made of this stuff.

It was a year into my recovery from acute NPD abuse before I found therapeutic environments where I could use the word sociopath, which was the accurate word. A year to find spaces where clinicians heard me say: “I’m not sick, I’m injured.” There is growing research that NPD abuse causes literal brain damage, cognitive severance based on coercive depersonalization, inflammation, increased cortisol and adrenaline, and a weakened immune system. Anecdotally, every hellish microsecond of my burning nervous system concurs. Without this patient narrative, my doctors were mistreating me for an inaccurate condition.

By then, I was regularly calling suicide hotlines because my support system was exhausted or my abuser had triangulated them. I cut ties with the rest because of their unnuanced judgments. My tolerance was at an all-time low, and I was realizing similar traits in the people with whom I surrounded myself: they were used to me allowing this behavior, too.

For a while, knowing narcissism is prevalent and underreported, I tried to stay with people’s best commiserative offerings. I believe in this practice of respectful witness but, exhausted from fighting for validation (mine and precedence), my stripped psyche has retreated. I will return. These days, I hold a policy that I won’t discuss “narcissism” with anyone who hasn’t done basic research into the condition.

 I spent a year navigating significant neurological and physical dysfunctions like sequential reasoning, short-term memory, debilitating fatigue, loss of coordination, vision impairment, constant pain and inflammation, sleep disruption, and seizures. My community insisted that eating well, stretching, and forgiveness meditations would help me feel better. I am absolutely not knocking the first two; recovering from narc abuse has taken more physical stamina than I knew I had. But because of the underestimation from all outward appearances, being asked to take better care of myself at that early stage was like asking someone to perform their own appendectomy. I was then criticized for not doing it quietly enough.

I still defend against forced premature forgiveness, though. Insistence on it is dismissive and minimizing. I’m grateful to now be in companies that don’t see it as a prerequisite for my recovery and acknowledge that it may never be possible. I don’t yet talk to many people from “the before times” because the level of sociopathic abuse I experienced is not well-represented by the public’s definition of narcissism. Few aspects of my life that are unscathed by it, about which I can chit-chat. I appreciated the sentiment to take better care of myself and extended grace to their confusion. But thinking positively was not going to cut it. So, I fought my way through.

Recovery coaches recommend not defending yourself to conserve energy. Paradoxically, however, I couldn’t get the treatment I needed without defending the gravity of the situation. I spent taxing amounts of energy defending myself against “breakups are hard” rhetoric. (Several times, my abuser manipulated my closest friends into relaying this message to me. Hearing his echo through them was spooky, but it taught me much about them. I was then ostracized for this accurate paranoia.)  I’m not saying the outlandish reactions that followed were justified (I was as surprised as anybody by them) or that the lack of narc abuse awareness caused them, but it made me significantly lonelier, angrier, and gaslit by proxy. I spent a year putting out some fires and stoking others — because my dangerously empathetic heart sees how this isn’t just about me or my ex — before getting to the actual work. The delay was (partly) due to a lack of shared vocabulary.

Part 3 will be published on Wednesday, 9/25/24

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