When you’ve been in a difficult relationship for a while, you might look in the mirror and wonder who’s looking back. The person staring at you doesn’t feel like you anymore.
Maybe you used to be confident, outgoing, or quick to laugh. Now you second-guess everything you say, you avoid friends, and you can’t remember the last time you felt genuinely happy.
This isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when someone chips away at who you are, piece by piece, until you don’t know what’s left.
You might find yourself walking on eggshells, constantly monitoring your words and actions to avoid setting them off. You’ve learned to shrink yourself down, to make yourself smaller, quieter, less of a problem. You’ve adapted to survive, and in doing so, you’ve lost touch with the person you used to be.
The scary part is that this change happens gradually. You don’t wake up one day completely different. It’s a slow erosion of who you are. A criticism here, a guilt trip there, one silent treatment after another. Before you know it, you’re making decisions based on what will keep the peace instead of what you actually want or need.
You might feel like you’re going crazy. And they’ll porbably tell you you’re too sensitive, that you’re overreacting, that you’re remembering things wrong. After hearing this enough times, you start to believe it. You stop trusting your own thoughts and feelings. You second-guess your own reality.
This is what emotional abuse does. It rewires how you see yourself and the world around you. It makes you doubt everything you once knew to be true about who you are.
The good news is that the person you were is still in there. You haven’t disappeared completely. You’ve just been buried under layers of manipulation, control, and doubt. In fact, recognizing that you don’t recognize yourself anymore is actually the first step toward finding your way back!
Start paying attention to the moments when you feel like yourself again. Maybe it’s when you’re alone, or with a trusted friend, or doing something you used to love. Those moments are breadcrumbs leading you back to who you really are. You need to get to know who you were so you can be who you truly are once again.
And if you have a hard time doing that, you may need to discover who you want to be. Yes… sometimes we have to start over because that much of us has been taken away.
Never feel like there’s no way back to who you were. Sometimes there is – and sometimes you have to forge a new path to who you want to be going forward.
Always remember:
You deserve to be in a relationship where you can be yourself without fear of judgment or punishment.
You deserve to make decisions based on what you want, not what will keep someone else calm.
You deserve to trust your own thoughts and feelings again.
The person you were before this relationship started is absolutely worth fighting for.
Suggested listening:
https://loveandabuse.com/when-the-emotional-abuse-stops-can-the-relationship-continue/
