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...
At some point after a harmful relationship ends, most people arrive at a version of the same question. It might surface at 2am, or in a conversation with a friend who's trying to understand, or just quietly in the background while you're getting on with your day. And the question is some version of:...
One of the most consistent things people say after leaving a psychologically harmful relationship is that they weren't sure - and often still aren't sure - whether what they experienced was "bad enough" to be called abuse.
Not because nothing happened, but because what happened was complicated. The...
If you've ever found yourself completely unable to move on from a relationship that you know, logically, wasn't good for you - this doesn't make you irrational or incapable of making good decisions. You're experiencing the predictable psychological aftermath of something very specific. That somethin...
