People are always quick to say what they’d never do…what they’d never tolerate, until life hands it to them anyway.

It’s me.
I’m people.

Growing up, I was sure of how my life would unfold: a solid career, a loving husband, a couple of kids, a nice home, mutual respect. Abuse was never part of the picture.

I once had a friend who would show up to events with bruises hidden beneath layers of makeup. She’d slip away to take calls from her boyfriend, her voice low and apologetic as she explained herself over and over, careful not to upset him, because Lord knows what she’d be coming home to. We grew up together. Played jump rope. Went on family vacations. Watching her like that felt impossible to understand.

How did she get there?
She came from a loving, two-parent home.
Was she that insecure?
What was wrong with her?

That’s what I thought.
Twisted. Naive. Cruel, really.

I know better now.

Abuse doesn’t arrive as a fire.
It starts as an ember….quiet, warm, easy to ignore.
It’s often fueled by old, unseen wounds like childhood pain, unhealed trauma, a history no one talks about. Evidence of a flame that once burned and never fully went out.

And embers do one of two things.
They reignite. Angry, raging, destructive, physical.
Or they burn slowly, steadily, until there’s no visible flame left and you lose all light.

That second one is my story.

Emotional abuse is still abuse.
Physical abuse doesn’t always mean being hit. Sometimes it’s objects thrown just close enough to make your heart race. Sometimes it’s screaming while things shatter around you, your body tensing so often it forgets how to relax. Fear doesn’t need bruises to live in the body.

Abusers know exactly what they’re doing.
They trap you with charm, confusion, chaos, and guilt played on a loop until you can’t tell up from down.

Until your instincts go quiet. Until your light dims.

Until the person you were before is so far in the rearview mirror that you forget that version of you ever existed.

It’s manipulation at its finest.
And any one of us can fall into it….
especially if we don’t know what to look for.