ABUSERS ARE BORING
Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence.
The Wrong Question
Why didn't you just leave?
Probably the most common question asked of people who have survived abusive relationships - or the most common question we ask ourselves. It is the wrong question. Even today, with everything we know, society asks victims of abuse: If it was so bad, why didn't you just leave? Even he used to ask me that question DURING abuse sessions.
The question is built on a dangerous assumption: that leaving an abusive relationship is a simple decision made by a rational person weighing up the pros and cons. It imagines a person standing outside the relationship, objectively assessing the situation, and deciding whether the relationship is worth keeping.
That is not how prolonged abuse works.
Abuse is not a series of bad moments or arguments. It is a process of psychological conditioning. It dismantles a person's confidence, independence, sense of self and sense of reality until leaving doesn’t feel like an obvious choice. Sometimes it doesn't even feel possible. It didn’t for me, for a long time. But i’m one of the lucky ones, because i got out alive.
A better question is: What did the abuser do over time to make leaving feel impossible?
I know this because before I experienced it myself, I didn't understand why people stayed either.
Abuse Is a System
Abuse, at its core, is about power and control. It works gradually. Rarely does someone begin a relationship by announcing, Hello, I intend to destroy your sense of self and make you afraid of me so that you will serve me and can’t leave.
Instead, boundaries are tested. Small acts of control become normalised. Something that would once have seemed completely unacceptable is reframed as a joke, a misunderstanding, an overreaction, or an expression of love. The victim adapts. Then another boundary is tested. And another. And another.
The important thing about coercion is that it doesn’t always announce itself while it is happening. It can involve setting someone up to believe that something was their idea. Setting them up to believe that saying yes will keep them safe. Repetition. Pressure. Reward. Punishment. Gradual escalation. A single incident may not look like abuse to someone watching from the outside. But you have to look at the whole picture.
One of the things I now understand about predatory behaviour is that compliance matters. Predators look for people pleasers and test boundaries. They look for what they can get away with. They learn what will be tolerated. I had never encountered someone I understood to be a predator before. I never had reason to study the psychology of predation and coercion. So, ever the people pleaser, I made excuses.
When I was told to remove artwork from my room because it was supposedly "cursed", I didn't understand what I understand now: that control can begin with something that sounds absurdly insignificant. When I was slapped for saying something he didn't like and was told it was only playing around, I didn't understand that normalising the first physical violation can make the next one easier. When i was told early in the relationship that if a partner of his ever says ‘no’ to sex he will get it elsewhere, i didn’t realise that i was being coerced to never say no. When i posted a selfie and was harassed to answer the question “who did you post that for?”, i didn’t realise i was being set up, to never feel safe to just be myself.
The more you laugh something off, or make excuses because they were stressed, or drunk, or have their own trauma, the more ground you can inadvertently surrender. That does not mean the victim is responsible for what comes next. It means perpetrators learn. They learn patterns of compliance and constantly push what little boundaries you try to set. And then, they escalate.
My social life is one of the clearest examples of how gradual this process can be. Before the relationship, I had an extremely active social life - both online and in real life. I had goals, activities, and things that made my life full. During it, my world became almost nothing. Nothing except him, which is exactly what he wanted.
I stopped going to parties. I stopped going to bars. I stopped going to dinner with friends. I barely saw my family. I stopped modelling. I stopped my podcast. I stopped posting anything on social media. I stopped sharing my world with others. He’d say “i always encourage you to see your friends”, but the reality was that every time i did, there was criticism, some sort of problem i’d have to rush home for, or one of the hours long abuse sessions that became the norm. But he didn't stop his social life. I was at home waiting for him to come home on countless nights while he went out, sometimes lying about where he was or when he would return. He could talk about what a good man he was despite all the "temptations" around him, while my own life had quietly shrunk to almost nothing.
Isolation doesn't necessarily look like someone physically locking you inside a house.
Sometimes it looks like one person continuing to live freely while the other person's world becomes smaller and smaller. I was regularly told early on what a failure of a woman i was for speaking to my friends about problems in the relationship, how his sister and mother would never do that, and so of course i slowly stopped speaking about what was happening to me. Eventually, the abusive relationship becomes the centre of everything. That is not weakness. That is conditioning. Conditioning that predators rely on.
By the time many victims recognise what is happening, they may already be isolated from the people who could provide perspective, or more importantly, help. A victim is deeply emotionally attached to the person hurting them, by design, and desperately trying to find a way to make the relationship work. They don't necessarily think, I deserve this. They think: If I can just explain it properly. If I can communicate better. If I can be more patient. If he gets help. If I can just get through this. Then everything will be better.
Trauma Bonding and the Brain Under Terror
One of the most misunderstood concepts in abusive relationships is trauma bonding. My abuser once tried to explain to me that we were trauma bonded because we had experienced a traumatic event together (him slamming my head into a wall, while i was sitting blinded on the floor from whiskey he’d thrown into my eyes).
We were not in a trauma bond together. A trauma bond is not simply two people experiencing trauma together. It refers to the powerful attachment that can develop within an abusive relationship, particularly when cruelty and affection, fear and relief, are repeatedly alternated. An abusive relationship is not a toxic relationship. An abusive relationship consists of one person who is an abuser, and the other person, who is responding to the abuse. I was told countless times “We’re both abusive”, and “You always make me out to be the monster”, and “you always need to be a victim”, and various other attempts to make me believe that i wasn’t being abused and that i was, in fact, a part of the problem.
Abusive relationships are not necessarily abusive every minute of every day. If they were, leaving would often be much easier to understand from the outside. Instead, abuse often operates in cycles. Cruelty is followed by affection. Intimidation is followed by tenderness. Violence is followed by apologies. Threats are followed by promises.
The person who causes the terror becomes the person who provides the relief. And that is psychologically powerful on the victim’s sense of reality, and conditioning the perpetrator relies on.
The moments when the abuse stops can feel like enormous relief. The nervous system comes down from the edge. Hope returns. The victim may experience affection, connection, or reassurance and think: Maybe this time is different. Maybe he understands. Maybe we can fix this. It doesn’t mean victims become "addicted to abuse”, as i have seen it phrased. It means intermittent reinforcement can create extraordinarily powerful attachment. Meanwhile, prolonged fear changes how a person’s brain functions.
When the nervous system is repeatedly exposed to unpredictable threats, survival responses—fight, flight, freeze and fawn—can begin to dominate. Attention narrows. Sleep becomes disrupted. Memory and concentration can suffer. The body becomes preoccupied with detecting danger. Blood work and brain scans of domestic abuse victims show that this type of chronic stress causes the body to pump up to 300% more cortisol than a normal person experiencing normal life stress, the hippocampus - responsible for short term emory - shrinks, the amygdala - responsible for stress responses - enlarges.
You can’t really reason your way out of a situation while your body is screaming that you are in danger. By the end of my relationship, every time he was in the house, or anywhere near me, my body was screaming: RUN. One time he came back from interstate unannounced and i had a two hour panic attack. While he consoled me patting my back as i hyperventilated, all i could think was: this is because you’re here.
That is what survival mode feels like. It isn't weakness. It is a nervous system doing what it has been trained to do: alert you to danger. The problem with prolonged abuse is that your system gets confused, and you’re physically unable to make any sort of informed decision.
The Perpetrator's Playbook
Gaslighting is an obvious one, and such a buzzword that it is almost vomitous to write about. But when memories are denied, conversations are rewritten, motives are distorted, and you are repeatedly told that you have misunderstood things that actually happened, your confidence in your own mind begins to erode. When you cannot trust your own perception, you become increasingly dependent on the person insisting that they know reality better than you do. And boy did he insist he knew reality, and myself, better than i ever could. He quite literally told me numerous times both that he “knows women better than i do” and that he “knows me better than i do”, “that i don’t have the ability to think for myself” - he even said that last one to me in front of my younger sister.
One of the most exhausting aspects of my relationship was his lying. It took me a long time—and far too many repeat offences—to understand that I was dealing with someone who lied pathologically. I was even warned about it, but i couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. But the lies were extensive and relentless. There were lies about women. Lies about where he had been. Lies about when he would come home. Lies after abuse sessions. Lies when I was withdrawing from him. And lies when I was trying to leave - those were the most extensive. There were stories about car accidents he’d gotten into and he needed help, serious illnesses such as telling be he believed he had lung cancer, or another that his mum had been diagnosed with lung cancer (she hadn’t) and he was tormented about the idea of what might happen to her, impending deportation as an excuse to see me after i had said i never wanted to see him again, lies about his past relationships - i was endlessly told what a monster his ex girlfriend was, or that he wasn’t in a relationship when he and i started dating and she was just ‘obsessed’ with him, he told me of therapy that he had started 3 weeks prior but, a week later, apparently hadn't begun at all and he was starting the following week. These are just a small capture of constant and endless lying that alone has affected my ability to trust other people.
At one point, after an earlier incident of violence, he told me he had deliberately left the bathroom tap running while I was working more than an hour away. Because our apartment was in my name, I left work and rushed home. The tap wasn’t on at all. It was a test to make me panic and see what i would do. When i told him a colleague had driven me home his only concern was knowing the name and address of that colleague. Another time, i returned home after staying with friends due to a 10 hour abuse session, to find 2 wine glasses on the coffee table. The initial panic that he had had a girl over subsided when i inspected the wine glasses and they had dishwasher marks in them. This person had intentionally tried to make me think he’d cheated on me, to punish me for staying somewhere safe due to his abuse. Pathological lying plays into a larger issue of entitlement and an extremely delusional sense of importance that most abusers have. I was told repeatedly that he had gotten me the apartment we apartment we lived in. Even though, we only moved out because he didn’t have a home and had moved into my sharehouse. I had already been planning to move out. I did the searches for places because ‘he didn’t like admin’ - i found the apartment and went to the inspection by myself. I did the whole application by myself and the apartment was entirely in my name. He did lend me my first months rent and bond but i had to pay it back. ANd the agreement was that he’d pay most of the rent and i’d cover the bills. But i paid the bills and paid over half the rent for most of the time we were there together - even though i earned less than him. The level of delusion an abuser has about their importance and contribution is almost impossible to argue with - especially when they’ve spent months conditioning you to know that if you defend yourself in any way you will, absolutely, be punished for it. Should i accuse him of his obvious lies, i was told i was projecting. And that’s what pathological abusers do - they INSIST you are the unstable one, and there nothing you can do or say about it.
Eventually, one of the things that gave me the strength to cut him off was not discovering one final lie. It was realising that I could no longer believe ANYTHING he said. Not the good. Not the bad. Not the things in between. Nothing he said had any foundation in reality.
And the irony was that I had been accused of lying constantly throughout the relationship. I mean, literally relentlessly. And it didn’t matter what i said, or how i explained myself or the truth. I was a a liar, a manipulative bitch, a whore, worthless, hopeless, a husk of a person, a cumrag, that i didn’t deserve to be a mother and he would make sure i would never be a mother, that he had ‘his boys’ ready to hurt my family and friends - including my then 12 year old brother, that i don’t have any thoughts of my own, that i can’t be trusted. I mean, all this and more. Over and over. And over.
The same thing happened with double standards. I was told I was a worthless partner because I didn't bring home enough little presents for him on a regular basis. Apparently other partners had done this for him. The infuriating part was that I had done exactly that. But i didn’t receive random presents because he had been thinking of me. Ever. Could i say that to him? No, because it would have resulted in another session of abuse. Could i bring up that my christmas and birthday presents for him were incredibly thoughtful - but what i received was always an afterthought? No. Mitigating abuse and avoiding new abuse sessions became my entire life.
After an 10 hour abuse session that led to me staying with friends for a few days, i was told unequivocally that if i wanted to make it work with him i needed to be going to church and i needed to be in therapy. Neither of which were things he did. The ‘standard’ he tried to set was never the standard. The goalposts moved every time. Nothing was ever enough. He didn’ abide by anything he insisted on. There was no avoiding it, no way to win, and no way out. After he violently assaulted me my dad sent him a text because i wouldn’t let my dad call the police - his response? To tell my dad the he was more of a father to me than my dad had ever been…. Sickeningly delusional.
During one extended abuse session in a car—a setting many survivors will recognise as a favourite of perpetrators precisely because there is nowhere to escape—I was told, as an insult: "You cannot be led." Even then, somewhere beneath all the torment and how broken i was, I knew there was something deeply ridiculous about it. First, being a woman who cannot be led is hardly the insult he thought it was. Second, it wasn't even true. I am perfectly capable of following someone I respect. And third, the real problem was that I couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly follow him: an abusive pathological liar leading me nowhere but an early grave.
That has been one of the strange things about surviving extensive domestic abuse: There were moments when I was psychologically embroiled enough to stay, yet some small part of me still knew that what was happening was wrong and i thought it was, frankly, pathetic. It actually happened often. That part of me mattered. It took about a year for that part of me to rise above the rest, but even then, i knew it mattered enough to take note of.
The Lies Victims Learn
"He's trying." "I'm too emotional." "If I communicate better..." "We both have issues." "Therapy will fix this." "Good people are forgiving."
Hope becomes one of the most powerful tools in an abusive relationship. Those kind of thoughts aren't necessarily irrational. In a healthy relationship, communication, compromise, patience and forgiveness are strengths. In an abusive relationship, they can be, and are, exploited. You hold onto the future they’ve described to you in great detail, many times. You believe, genuinely, though incorrectly, that you are dealing with an inherently good person making bad choices. The psychological damage to your brain makes you just keep believing, keep hoping, that things will change.
I spent an enormous amount of time trying to communicate: I explained. I pleaded. I negotiated. I tried to understand. I wrote hundreds of drafts of texts, emails and letters trying to find the combination of words that might finally make him stop. Throughout the relationship and separation, I kept coming back to three things:
Stop betraying me.
Stop lying to me.
Stop abusing me.
I wasn't asking for perfection. I was asking for the bare minimum requirements of a safe relationship of any kind. I mean, the bar i had set deep into the abuse was so low it was touching the floor. But he could not—or would not—correct any of them. And that’s because a perpetrator feels entitled to causing harm.
Yet I kept holding on.That is one of the things I understand differently now. I was treating the problem as a communication failure. If i said or wrote the right thing he would get it. But you cannot communicate someone into becoming safe. You cannot explain someone into developing accountability. You cannot love someone into choosing not to hurt you. I was treating it as a ‘complicated person’ problem. Being a complicated person myself, who definitely has fucked up many times, i try to lead with understanding and forgiveness. But here’s thing, millions of people have childhood trauma issues, mental health issues, substance abuse issues - and don’t seek to harm others as a form of self validation or pleasure.
Many survivors enter abusive relationships with perfectly healthy self-esteem. Others, like me, may already have struggled with self-worth. Regardless of where someone starts, months or years of criticism, humiliation, intimidation, threats, trauma and coercive control can erode a person's sense of themselves.
A person who believes they deserve better is much harder to control. So the perpetrator has an incentive to convince their victim otherwise. Convince them that they are worthless. Convince them that they are crazy. Convince them that they are wrong.
I was degraded consistently. I was made to feel undesirable. I was filmed whether I wanted to be or not. I was told I was worthless as a partner, hopeless and a husk of a person. I was made to feel that I was somehow perpetually failing a standard that kept changing.
And eventually, the person who once had a whole life can find herself sitting at home, anxiously waiting for someone else to come home, wondering what she needs to do differently to make the pain go away.
That is what coercive control can look like from the inside.
The Physical Cost
The effects of prolonged trauma do not necessarily disappear when the perpetrator does. Living under a chronic, unpredictable threat can keep the nervous system in a prolonged state of alarm, and survivors can experience psychological and physical effects long after the relationship has ended. In my case, my body eventually became the evidence of what my mind had been trying to survive.
Sleep deprivation was part of it. Knowing that I needed considerably more sleep than he did, I was regularly kept awake late, woken during the night usually to make him food, or jolted awake when he turned the bedroom lights on before work and left them on so i could not sleep.
My work suffered. The fact that I kept my job is something I look back on now with a strange kind of disbelief. My performance during those years was, at best, sub-par. But I managed to do enough not to lose it. That was because I was functioning almost normally in public - if you weren’t a close friend you may not have thought anything was wrong. It was because I was exceptionally good at hiding what was happening to me - unless you noticed how much weight i’d lost.
By the end, my hair was falling out and I was essentially a walking skeleton. I had regular panic attacks. I had nightmares every night for about 8 months, mostly about him killing me or finding his way back into my life. For several months I experienced neurogenic tremors—episodes in which my body would shake violently while I remained conscious. My memory and concentration changed, and two years after escaping i am still not back to normal. Anxiety settled into my shoulders and neck and became chronic pain I had never experienced before.
And then came the part nobody had warned me about. When I was finally safe—after months of harassing emails and calls from unknown numbers had eventually subsided—my body seemed to collapse. I had spent so long surviving that there was apparently nothing left to hold everything together once I no longer had to. Like so many survivors after they’ve escaped, I became profoundly unwell. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. I had never taken the notion of it in others particularly seriously before because I didn't understand what debilitating fatigue could actually mean. Oh I learned. I had to lie down for two hours after unloading the dishwasher. If I showered, I had to choose between washing my hair and washing my body because I couldn’t physically do both. It was unlike anything i can describe in words. I was imprisoned in my body.
My weight changed dramatically, from being a skeleton when i escaped him, i gained about 30kg in a year. I developed severe insulin resistance. My blood tests showed significant inflammation. For months—I cried constantly. I was frightened of almost everything, people, places, any loud noise. I had never really feared anything before. I was always naive, yes, but that was part of my charm. That part of me was dead.
That is the part people don't always understand. Escaping an abusive relationship is almost never the end of the story. Sometimes it is the beginning of a recovery that takes more years than the abuse itself. And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to escape alive.
When Survival Becomes Desperation
By the end of the relationship, I was drowning myself in alcohol. For months, I used it to survive being around him. It was the only thing I had found that could reliably numb the pain. Of course, that was used against me. He had become sober after slamming my head into a wall - which i thought was a sign of good faith. But like most perpetrators, most of what they do is performative. I was sober too, for a couple of months. But as the abuse intensified - though it was never physical again, and i couldn’t do anything to get him to stop or leave me alone altogether, i chose to drink.
The irony of it is almost unbearable now: the circumstances that drove me toward alcohol became another weapon with which I could be discredited. I wasn't drinking because I wanted my life to fall apart. I was trying desperately to escape a reality I could not figure out how to change. I couldn't make him stop abusing me. I couldn't make him leave me. And I felt that I couldn't physically leave the apartment that was entirely in my name without consequences because the home itself had become part of the coercive dynamic, at best, at worst i was actively threatened regularly.
I became so physically and psychologically unwell that I reached the darkest point I had ever experienced. I didn't actually want my life to be over. I wanted the pain to stop. There is an important distinction between those two things. Because i had experienced suicidal ideation before - and he used that against me: “you’ve been suicidal before, this isn’t because of me”. But i didn’t want to die. I just couldn’t go on. I had reached a point where I could not see how to make him stop hurting me, so I began drinking to the point where I hoped I might simply not wake up.
I was alone. My best friend was overseas. My mother, who had been my main protector, had died years earlier. I had told my family that things were complicated but being worked out. They did not know the reality.
The people who did know were his family. They expressed concern and offered support in words, but words without intervention can become another form of silence. That is something I have had to wrestle with in my recovery. Loving people who supported and enabled my abuser and what he did to me. Because abuse does not happen in a vacuum.
Distancing myself from them has broken my heart. But people who support pathological perpetrators are perpetrators themselves.
The Violence People Don't See
The physical violence was not a single event. One of the major incidents happened after we had already separated because of an earlier physical incident (separation always meant me leaving the apartment in my name with a suitcase, because he refused to leave). During an abuse session, he smashed up all my belongings in the apartment we shared. Everything of mine in the apartment was piled together and damaged because I had dared to say that someone who cared about me would never treat me the way he did. He told me he’d hang me from the apartment balcony. He told me to kill myself like i’d always wanted to. He held one of my jackets over the stove, turned the gas up and told me he would kill us both. When the jacket didn't ignite, he filled a pot with water and poured it over my belongings. Again and again.
My clothes. My art. My electronics. My things were soaked, and much of it was destroyed.
The following day, work friends helped me get myself and my belongings out. But even that act of escape became another source of intimidation. There were threats against the people who helped me. Demands to know their names - exactly who had come into ‘his’ apartment. Suggestions about what he would do to them. That is the part of abuse that is so difficult to explain to people who imagine violence as an isolated incident.
It isn't necessarily: He hit me.
It can be: He made me afraid of what would happen if I left. He made me afraid for the people who helped me, or the people who love me. He made my home unsafe. He made my friendships dangerous. He made my own judgement questionable. He made me think if i do anything against him, he’ll kill me.
And sometimes the most intimate forms of abuse are the hardest to talk about at all. There are aspects of this story I have not included. Some experiences are private. Some may belong in a police statement rather than an essay. Survivors should not have to publicly disclose every violation in order for people to believe that abuse occurred.
What is written here is not the complete story. And it doesn't need to be.
The Day You Finally Leave
Why is leaving so difficult? Because just like the violence, the leaving isn't always a single event. Sometimes it happens hundreds of times inside your own head before it ever happens physically. And sometimes it happens physically tens of times before it actually sticks.
I asked him to leave for months. I told him that either the abuse had to stop or he had to go. He did neither. Before i’d even asked him to leave i’d tried to leave myself so many times, but i was ‘crazy’ for getting out of the car while he was abusing me, i was ‘unstable’ for walking into the night because he was abusing me, i was ‘manipulative’ for going and sleeping at my office or at friends houses because he was abusing me.
Eventually, in a state of considerable psychological distress, I convinced him to try therapy with me. I had been asking for therapy for months. He had repeatedly said he would never go. Eventually, after being rejected by services that could not ethically provide couples counselling in circumstances involving physical violence, I lied to get us into therapy.
There were individual sessions. There were joint sessions. After a few joint sessions, though nothing had changed in reality, he was pressuring me for a ‘plan’ to have the therapy sessions end. Eventually, in one of the final sessions, he agreed to move out temporarily so that I could begin dealing with what had happened without his constant presence and continued abuse. The therapist followed up afterwards during the week and reiterated that the agreement had been made in front of a third party. That is what saved me.
Out of preserving face in front of another, he moved most of his things out. But leaving was still not simple. He continued showing up whenever he wanted. He claimed he was homeless, despite having family with a spare room minutes away. I sometimes had to let him sleep in the apartment. Eventually I got his key back from him. But he stole it back while I was in the bathroom one time. I managed to get it back again.
This is what people mean when they say leaving is dangerous. It isn't always a dramatic moment at the front door. Sometimes it is a long, exhausting process that takes weeks or months, of trying to establish a boundary that another person believes they are entitled to ignore. Often it’s the time victims end up murdered.
And survivors can still miss their abusers. They can still feel love. They can still feel pity. They can still remember the good moments, even if those good moments were a false pretense set up by the perpetrator. None of the good, or the victim backtracking, means the abuse isn't real.
When the Door Finally Closes
Eventually I reached a point where I was completely done. I left him a fifteen-minute voicemail. I explained the psychological abuse. The pathological lying and cheating. The physical violence. The effect it had had on me. The point was that for over a year I had asked him for three things:
Stop lying to me. Stop betraying me. Stop abusing me.
He had had countless opportunities to choose differently. He had not, and felt nothing about it other than the continued entitlement to use me as a punching bag. So I told him that the relationship was over and that I never wanted to speak to or hear from him again. He showed up at 7am the next morning having an ‘emotional crisis’ that i had to console him about. I did let him in. But after a while of me not folding, not breaking down as i usually would, his tears all of a sudden disappeared and he looked at me with animosity and said ‘you’ve changed’. He stold some things he believed were his and left. Then came the emails. Months of them. Some were angry, telling me how worthless I was and what kind of person I was for refusing to give him "closure" (lol). Some were loving and pleading. Some told me that I simply needed to "let go" of everything I was angry about for my own benefit. Some were completely detached from reality. unrelated religious theories that had nothing to do with anything and spoken as if they were his own ideas.
There were texts. Calls from unknown numbers. Attempts to regain contact. And more than a year later, there were attempts to reach me indirectly through my friends on social media. Because when you tell a perpetrator with delusions of grandeur that you truly never want to speak to them again it’s practically impossible for them to accept.
But something had changed for me. I didn't respond. It sounds insignificant from the outside. But it isn't. And it was helped by things like being sent a clip from his ‘podcast’ where he talked about how Adam should have hit Eve. A joke. A cringey one. But certainly not one that a man who was truly remorseful about being a perpetrator of DV would make. That was actually the moment i had confirmation of who he really was. And the people in his life who upheld him despite it - who would no doubt have seen that clip too. It really was all i needed to know.
Eventually I understood that I didn't owe him another explanation. I didn't owe him access to me. I didn't owe him a response. Silence became a boundary. Not to take some sort of symbolic stand, but because i truly don’t care about him or any of the absolute garbage that spills out of his mouth every time he opens it.
What Recovery Really Looks Like
Recovery is not necessarily forgiveness. It isn't pretending it didn't happen. It isn't becoming grateful for the trauma. And it certainly isn't allowing the person who harmed you back into your life because you've supposedly "healed."
For me, recovery has meant rebuilding. Rebuilding my nervous system. Relearning what safety feels like. Learning boundaries. Learning about predators and coercive control. Rebuilding self-respect. Learning to trust my own perception again. And perhaps most importantly, learning that the abuse was not evidence of my worth - no matter what my abuser endlessly told me. It was just evidence of his ongoing deplorable behaviour and sad psychology.
I don’t ask what was wrong with me that invited someone so evil into my life. I ask:
What is wrong with a person who believes they have the right to do those things to another human being?
What Society Gets Wrong
Before this experience, I didn't understand why people stayed. And originally i started writing an essay about why people stay so long in abusive dynamics because it is so so hard to understand from the outside. Now I understand that the question itself is part of the problem.
We ask why they didn't leave. Why she went back. Why they didn't tell someone. Why she drank. Why she defended him. Why they didn't call the police. Why she didn't have more evidence. Why she hurt herself. Why she didn't behave like the "perfect victim."
But what if we asked different questions? What happened before she became isolated? What had she been taught to believe about herself? What threats had she received? What did leaving mean financially, socially, emotionally or physically? How many times had she tried to leave? What happened when she did? Who was she before the relationship?
And most importantly:
Why did someone believe they were entitled to control and destroy another human being in the first place?
There is another uncomfortable question here. What happens when the people around an abuser see the pattern and choose not to do anything?
I have struggled deeply with this. I can love people who were themselves manipulated by the same person. I can understand that they may have believed his version of events. I can understand that perpetrators are often extremely skilled at presenting different versions of themselves to different people. But understanding why someone failed to act does not erase the consequences of their silence.
People who excuse abuse make it easier for abuse to continue. People who minimise abuse make it easier for perpetrators to maintain their reputations. People who accept the narrative that the victim is "crazy" without questioning what happened before that deterioration become part of the environment in which the abuse can flourish.
I do not believe every person who fails a victim is equivalent to the perpetrator. But I do believe that silence, minimisation and enabling have consequences. A perpetrator needs an environment in which their behaviour can survive. That environment is not created by the perpetrator alone. And why, though it broke my heart, i had to cut off people i truly cared about who i think, in their own way, truly cared about me.
Abusers Are Boring
Here is the strangest thing I have learned. Abusers might be dangerous. They might be unnecessarily cruel. They might be exceptionally manipulative.
But they are not unique. Once you begin learning about abusive behaviour, something almost surreal happens. You start seeing the pattern everywhere. Gaslighting. Projection. Isolation. Future faking. Devaluation. Moving goalposts. Blame shifting. Victim narratives. Smear campaigns. Boundary testing. Coercive control.
The stories survivors tell can sound eerily familiar. I have spoken to other victims. I've read accounts. I've watched documentaries about people who murder their partners and countless stories of people trying to understand what happened to them. Over and over again, I have recognised pieces of my own experience. Sometimes so specific, it could be lifted out of my own memory.
It is almost as though there is a textbook called How to Abuse 101.
The same tactics. The same psychological effects. The same confusion. The same questions from survivors afterwards.
That is why the title of this essay is not meant to trivialise abusers.
It is the opposite.
Abusers are boring.
The behaviour is repetitive. The tactics are predictable. The script is familiar.
And once you know it, you can’t unsee it. The frightening thing is not that one person managed to invent some uniquely brilliant method of destroying another human being.
The frightening thing is how often the same methods work. The frightening thing is how often society doesn't recognise them until after something terrible has happened. The frightening thing is how often we scrutinise the victim's behaviour instead of the perpetrator's. I’m just glad i made it out alive, because i nearly didn’t.
And the MOST frightening thing is that people who use these tactics continue to find environments in which they can succeed. They’re held up by the people who do nothing.
Conclusion
Learning about predators has been a long journey for me. Part of it has been about understanding what happened to me. Part of it has been about understanding why I stayed so much longer than i really wanted to. And part of it has been about trying to understand who I am now that I am no longer living inside it. The question Why did I stay? is one that only I can ask, and only I can answer.
But I don't think the answer is a single sentence. There was conditioning. There was hope. There was fear. There were threats. There was isolation. There was trauma bonding. There were practical barriers. There was an enormous amount of psychological manipulation. There was the belief that perhaps, if I tried one more time, explained one more thing, forgave one more incident, he might finally become the person I thought he was. And there was a version of me who did not yet know what I know now.
Writing this essay has been part of building a bridge in front of me - to move forward - and a bridge behind me, so that perhaps another person who is still somewhere inside this maze can recognise the landscape sooner than I did.
If you are still there, I don't want to ask you why you haven’t left yet. I want to ask what is being done to make staying feel safer than leaving?
If you have left in the past, I don't want to ask why you went back. I want to ask what happened when you tried to leave?
And if you are watching someone you love completely disappear inside an abusive relationship, I don't want you to wait for them to become the "perfect victim" before you believe them. Or help them. I beg you, they need help NOW.
Because abuse doesn't always look like a stranger in a dark alley. Sometimes it looks like someone everyone else thinks is charming. Sometimes it looks like someone who is wonderful in public and terrifying in private. Sometimes it looks like someone whose lies are so convincing that the victim begins doubting themself so much they stop speaking altogether. Sometimes it looks like a woman who used to have an enormous life, shrunk down to a shadow. Sometimes it looks like a person who keeps her job, keeps smiling, keeps answering messages, keeps pretending everything is complicated but being worked out, while privately completely falling apart.
Sometimes it looks like alcohol. Sometimes it looks like drugs. Sometimes it looks like exhaustion. Sometimes it looks like panic. Sometimes it looks like someone who cannot explain why they haven't left yet. And sometimes it looks like someone who has finally left but is still waking up eight months later from nightmares about being killed.
The answer to abuse is not asking the victim why they didn't make better choices. The answer is making it harder for perpetrators to use fear, manipulation, isolation and silence to control other human beings.
Stop asking why they stayed. Start asking why someone believed they had the right to terrorise another person. Start asking why we are so much more comfortable interrogating a victim's decisions than interrogating a perpetrator's behaviour. Start asking why society keeps producing environments in which abusive people can thrive. Why society keeps producing people who know abuse is happening and do nothing, Because that, ultimately, is what has been both infuriating and strangely empowering about learning the playbook.
I thought I had encountered something uniquely evil and monstrous. Then I started studying the behaviour. And I realised he was nothing special. Literally. Not because what happened was insignificant. Not because the damage was insignificant. But because the methods were familiar. The lies were familiar. The manipulation was familiar. The degradation was familiar. The control was familiar. The script was familiar.
He wasn't some extraordinary mastermind. He was a pathetic man who needed to make another human being smaller in order to feel bigger - ironic for a man who claimed so loudly and proudly how much he hated bullies.
And once you understand that, the mythology begins to disappear. The terrifying monster becomes what he always was.
A bully. A perpetrator. A person using the same pathetic tools that perpetrators have used forever.
Predictable. Repetitive. And, ultimately -
boring as fuck.