Can abusers really change? It's one of the most searched questions in this entire area, and most of the answers you'll find online are either a flat no or a hopeful maybe. Neither is accurate, so let's look at the research.
If you're asking it, you're probably asking about a specific person. Maybe ...
If they never took responsibility for anything, no matter how calmly or clearly or often you raised it, there's a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with how you communicated.
You'll have tried everything. The gentle version, the direct version, the version where you waited until things were...
If you keep repeating the same relationship pattern despite understanding exactly what happened to you, the problem is not your understanding.
You know more about this than most people ever will. You can name the mechanisms, understand what coercive control is and how it operates, explain intermitt...
You're competent everywhere else. That's the part that never made sense.
You handle difficult people at work. Your friends come to you for advice, and it is good advice. You can spot when something is wrong in someone else's relationship from about three sentences into the story. Then you went home...
"Why didn't I see it?" is the question that outlasts almost everything else. There's a documented psychological answer, and it's called betrayal blindness.
Most people can locate the moment precisely. You're standing in the kitchen, something has just happened, and for a few seconds you see the who...
You got apologies. That's the part that makes this so hard to explain to anyone who wasn't there.
Some of them were good ones. They knew exactly what they'd done and named it. They looked genuinely upset about it. There may have been tears, or a long conversation that went past midnight, or a messa...
Post-separation abuse is one of the most consistently documented and least well recognised patterns in domestic abuse research. It describes what happens when coercive control outlasts the relationship it operated inside.
For a long time, everyone assumed abuse was something that happened inside a ...
If you've gone looking for information on gaslighting, you've almost certainly found the list. "That never happened." "You're too sensitive." "You're remembering it wrong." "Everyone thinks you overreact." Match your ex's sentences against the list, and apparently you have your answer.
Here's the p...
Somewhere in that relationship, you knew not to answer your phone in front of them if it was a particular person calling. You knew which friends could be mentioned casually and which ones needed a run-up. You knew that certain purchases required framing, that some days were fine for raising things a...
There's a particular conversation you have with yourself, usually late at night or in the quiet moments when the question surfaces again. You start assembling the case. The things that happened, the way certain conversations went, the person you became around them. For a moment the picture looks cle...
There's a conversation you can probably still replay in detail. You went into it with something specific to say, something that had hurt you, and you'd thought about how to say it fairly. Ten minutes later you were the one apologising. You were reassuring them, softening what you'd said, repairing a...
You rehearse it beforehand, working out how to frame it so it doesn't come across as something it isn't. You keep your voice level, say what you meant to say, and for a few exchanges it almost feels like it might go somewhere. Then, somehow, you are no longer talking about what you raised. You are e...
