THE GUILT OF NAMING IT
There’s a specific kind of guilt that hits the moment you finally say it out loud. Not when it happened. Not while you were living it. But the moment you file for the order of protection, sit across from a lawyer for the first time, or say the word “abuse” to a trusted person and hear it land like suspicion in the room.
For months or years, you weren’t just staying quiet, you were defending them. Explaining behaviors away to friends, to family, maybe to yourself, sometimes even role-playing a version of the relationship built on limerence rather than the one actually happening. When you finally switch to calling it abuse, it doesn’t just feel like relief, it feels like fraud, even to you. You wrestle with having to explain why your story changed, why the person you defended last month is the person named.
They don’t have that same problem. They have slowly and meticulously been planting a narrative about you for years, before you ever had a clue. Their story sounds steady because it is. They’ve always resented you. They’ve always looked down upon you. The mask they wore to your face wasn’t real. It was the abuser manipulating their victim to see how far they could push dominance..
Your story is shifting because you’re only now waking up from something specifically designed to keep you asleep. That jarring awakening is proof of who had the plan and who didn’t. A few exceptional professionals understand this.
The rest don’t.