In abusive relationships, it might be difficult or even impossible to discern which parts of yourself are truly you and which are shaped by the abuse.

What does it take to start building or rebuilding your identity?

I received a thought-provoking message from a listener who asked, “You’ve spoken about remembering who you were before the relationship when you have lost yourself, especially as a result of covert abuse. What happens if you’ve been in an abusive relationship from a very young age? How do you understand what parts of you are who you are, and what parts of you are as a result of the abuse?“

This is such an important question. When I talk about covert abuse, I’m referring to something particularly insidious because it’s often invisible, even to the person experiencing it.

You could be in a covertly abusive relationship without even realizing it. All you know is that you’re having “difficulties” with someone who makes you feel bad about yourself, guilty, or responsible for all the relationship problems. What’s actually happening is that you’re being manipulated to believe you’re the cause of these difficulties.

That’s why it’s called “covert” abuse – it happens under the radar. This kind of abuse can absolutely cause you to lose yourself, to become a shell of your former self. But in this case, as the question points out, what if there was no “former self” to begin with? What if the abuse started so early that it became interwoven with your development?

Here’s what I believe: Any decision you make from a place of fear or desperation usually comes from unhealed traumas or coping mechanisms – something you haven’t resolved or processed. If you frequently make decisions based on worry about how you might hurt or negatively affect someone else, you’re probably making choices as a result of some trauma or abuse.

Are there exceptions? Of course. But when we live with fear or worry and most of our decisions come from that place, we probably need to heal something inside of us so that we can make decisions from a more empowered place.

An empowered decision comes from knowing what’s right for you.

Yes, other people will be affected by your decisions, but empowerment means saying, “This is what I need to do because it’s right for me. If you’re affected by my decision, I understand, but you’ll need to deal with that because this is what I need.”

That’s empowerment – making decisions that are right for you, not decisions based on fear.

This fear-based decision-making can happen even when you’re alone. The unhealed traumas and negative experiences you haven’t processed continue to influence you.

I experienced this myself growing up with my stepfather, who would yell, kick walls, throw drinking glasses, and break windows. He hit my mom several times and once even threw a hammer at her head.

They divorced several years ago, and my mom has moved on. She’s incredibly resilient. In fact, resilience can sometimes be helpful, allowing you to continue with your life. But I’ve noticed she still sometimes makes decisions out of fear rather than from an empowered place of knowing what’s right for her.

Again, I’m not saying every fear-based decision stems from unhealed trauma or abuse. But I do know that making decisions from that disempowered place often indicates something that affected you during your formative years. When you’ve truly healed, those past experiences might come to mind, but they don’t affect you at the deeper emotional level that would force you to change your decision.

For example, imagine you escape from a physically abusive relationship and declare, “I’ll never go back to that again.” That’s an empowered decision. Even though there might be some fear involved, like never wanting to experience that pain again, it’s fundamentally about standing in your own power and making a commitment to yourself, to the universe, to God, that you will never be treated that way again.

When you make that declaration, it means that if you enter a new relationship and notice abusive patterns starting to emerge, you won’t tolerate it. You’ll either leave or set clear boundaries by saying, “No more. And if this continues, I’m done.”

That’s enforcing your boundaries, making decisions not from fear, but to ensure you never have to live in fear again. That’s the difference between disempowered and empowered decisions.

So returning to the question: How do you understand which parts of you are truly you, and which parts are a result of abuse?

One way to approach this is by examining how you make decisions. Where do they come from? Are they made for your benefit, or because you’re afraid of someone else’s reactions? If they’re for you, the next question becomes: “How do I know if it’s really for me? How do I know I’m making decisions that benefit me and not just acting from old programming or trauma?”

I believe the answer lies in understanding your boundaries. Many people don’t know what’s right for them and what isn’t. I define boundaries as: What you will and won’t accept in your life.

Let’s say you have no idea which parts of you are authentic and which parts developed as responses to abuse and trauma. Let’s say you were abused from such a young age that you have no reference point for what a normal, healthy, or even happy life looks like. It can be incredibly difficult to build something when you have no reference for it.

It’s like being asked to build a brick wall when you’ve never seen or heard of a brick. You might know that walls exist, but without understanding what a brick is, how would you begin?

What do you do if you have no reference, in this example, for a brick?

You define what a brick is for yourself. Sure, the obvious answer would be to ask someone else what a brick was, but let’s say you had no one to ask, or nobody else knew what a brick was either. You’d have to start experimenting, creating what you think a brick is. If you knew a wall was made of something called “bricks,” you’d know that they would probably need to be thick and solid.

So maybe you’d try piling up dirt and asking yourself if that would be strong enough to make a wall. When that doesn’t work, maybe you’d add some water to see if it would help. But you realize all it does is make mud. So now you see some red dirt, and you add water to that. Hmm, still doesn’t make it solid enough to make a wall.

Through a process of trial and error, you begin to understand that building a wall requires certain ingredients. In a similar manner, trying to figure out how to make a brick is like trying to figure out who you truly are versus what parts of you developed from trauma or abuse.

In order to discover or rediscover who you are, you need to define what you will and won’t accept in your life.

This comes down to identifying your wants and needs, but mostly your wants. What do you want in your life? Many people find it easier to identify what they don’t want:

“I don’t want someone to hurt me anymore.”

That’s valid, but let’s turn that into a positive want:

“I want someone who treats me with respect and kindness. I want someone who takes the time to emotionally connect with me.”

This becomes the first of many wants that define how you’d like your life to be from this point forward. When you’ve lost yourself in an abusive relationship, it’s crucial to define what you want going forward. The “don’t wants” are important, but each one has an “I want” attached to it.

And it’s crucial to know what you want, not just what you don’t want. If you don’t identify your “I wants,” you often don’t get what you truly desire. Let me give you an example from my own life.

When I was younger, I didn’t want to be in debt. I didn’t want to be broke because I’d experienced enough of that hardship. Eventually, I got out of debt, but I was still barely making ends meet. I realized my only goal had been to stay out of debt. And technically, I succeeded because I met that goal by living paycheck to paycheck! I was out of debt, but I was in a consistent state of worry, hoping I’d make enough for the next week. I wasn’t thriving. I was just surviving.

This is precisely why the “I wants” are so important. I could have said, “I want to make a thousand dollars a week.” With that defined want, I would have had something tangible to work toward. When I finally did articulate this to myself, I realized I was doing my best to stay out of debt, but I wanted more for myself.

I’m not suggesting this is a magic pill that once you say, “I want this,” it automatically happens. But I did realize I was always trying to move away from what I didn’t want instead of moving toward what I did want. When we’re in that mindset of constantly avoiding what we don’t want, we might still end up with unsatisfying results.

That’s why I believe it’s essential to know both what you want and what you don’t want. Sometimes you don’t know either because, again, you may have no reference point for what’s good or bad, what makes you happy or unhappy.

Everything you want in your life represents something you value. When we move toward what we value, we become acutely aware of how it feels when we don’t get it. That awareness is important. If you value kindness and respect, you recognize the feeling when those things are absent. If you’ve experienced disrespect and unkindness, you know exactly how that feels.

So wanting something makes it a value in your life. When you define your values and work to fulfill them, you increase the possibility of finding fulfillment and happiness. Moving toward your values and getting as many of them fulfilled as possible usually increases your chances of feeling content.

Boundaries Are The Key

Boundaries are what you will and won’t accept in your life. This is how you find who you are. If you don’t know who you are, if you don’t know which parts of you are authentic or how to reconnect with the person you’ve lost, establishing boundaries becomes your path to self-discovery.

Boundaries are the key to finding yourself.

What does that look like in practice?

Let’s consider an example: Say you want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t smoke. No offense to smokers. Some people do it, some don’t. But let’s say it’s not your thing. Now imagine your date lights up a cigarette on your first evening together, or your partner starts smoking while you’re in a relationship. You find it unhealthy and don’t want to breathe it in.

You have a boundary. The question is: Will you enforce it? And how?

I think the best way to enforce a boundary in a romantic relationship is to express how it affects you: “It bothers me when you do that,” or “I can’t breathe around you when you smoke.” That’s a relatively gentle approach. In my own relationship, I’d probably be more direct: “What the hell? You started smoking?” But my relationship isn’t in a difficult place, so that conversation would be easier to have.

That’s my boundary. I don’t want a smoker in my life or my home. I don’t want my clothes to smell like smoke, or to step onto my front porch and smell it. I couldn’t handle that long-term. But if my wife said, “Well, this is what I like to do now, and I’m sorry you don’t like it, but I’m not going to stop.” Wow, that would be challenging because it’s a significant boundary for me.

I’d ask myself, “Is there a way I can tolerate this? Is my connection with her, my love for her, and our relationship as a whole more important than avoiding smoke?” It would be very difficult.

This is a challenging example of something someone does that really affects you. It might make you wonder, ‘Do I break up? Do I divorce? What should I do?’

I think a conversation is essential. I’d need to tell my wife, “I don’t like when you smoke. I can smell it. I can taste it when I kiss you. It’s unpleasant to me.” Where that conversation leads would determine where the relationship goes. I never want to have that conversation with her, but if it came up, I would need to express myself because it’s my boundary.

That’s a harsh example of a potentially life-changing situation. But isn’t emotional abuse an experience that’s equally harsh and something you don’t want to accept in your life? If you had an emotionally abusive experience, would it not be similar to expressing that your boundary is being violated?:

“When you embarrass me in front of your friends, I don’t like that. It hurts. It makes me feel like you don’t love or respect me, like you’re not proud to have me by your side. Why do you do that?”

Looking at an example like this, you can ask yourself, ‘Is this what I want in my life?’

Returning to what you value in your life, or in short, your values, clarifying what you want and don’t want transforms your values into boundaries. Telling yourself you won’t accept something, then expressing that to whomever violates that, you are essentially telling them and the world, “I will not allow someone to do that in my home. I will not allow someone to speak to me that way.”

That’s how you begin defining yourself and finding yourself, especially if you can’t rediscover who you were before the harmful behavior began, before someone started making you feel less than you are. It might be time to define yourself from the ground up, finding the ingredients for that brick wall of identity you’re trying to build.

You define yourself to the world by letting it know what is acceptable and what is not. And when you do this, you start showing up as the person you want to be. And because of that, you start to feel better about yourself. And you feel more comfortable being authentic because you’re actively defining who you are as you move forward.

If you have a strict boundary that no one is allowed to disrespect you, and someone does disrespect you, you have a choice: you can either back down and not enforce your boundary, allowing a piece of yourself to be taken away, or you can step forward and strengthen that part of you that created the boundary in the first place.

That’s how you build or rebuild yourself. You set boundaries, reflect on what you value, and then start laying these boundary bricks one by one, showing the world what is and isn’t acceptable to you. Rebuilding yourself happens naturally from there.

When you can remember who you were and feel good about that person, you can reconnect with those parts of yourself. But when you can’t, when it’s been so long that you’ve lost touch with the person you used to be, you do have to rebuild. And rebuilding isn’t always a bad thing. I know it’s sad that part of you is gone, but there was also that part of you that got taken on this awful ride.

And I’m not blaming you for getting into that situation. I’m saying there was perhaps a part of you that tolerated something longer than you should have. And again, that’s not to blame you, it’s not your fault. It’s their fault for making you think they would improve. It’s their fault for convincing you that if you just waited a little longer, things would get better. That’s coercion. That’s manipulation.

This happens often. We’re convinced by people who engage in hurtful, emotionally abusive behaviors, and then they say things that make us think, “Okay, maybe they’ll change.” So we give them more time. And they’re very good at this game, so we give them more time, and more time, and more time… yet we never see the change they promised.

That’s why it’s so important to restore yourself, rebuild yourself, or build yourself anew. Don’t be afraid of creating a new version of yourself, because sometimes you discover things you didn’t know you liked. Sometimes you uncover parts of yourself that you didn’t realize were there.

“I didn’t realize I liked that kind of music.”
“I didn’t realize I enjoyed this recreational activity.”
“I didn’t realize I would be attracted to different types of people than I thought.”
“I didn’t realize I would like this kind of job.”

That’s the beautiful part about rebuilding.

I actually had to do this myself, not because of an abusive relationship, but because I was stuck on a certain “type.” For the longest time, I was only interested in brunettes. That’s the only people I would choose. It was shallow, I admit it, but that was my preference, and I wouldn’t let it go. I couldn’t.

Then one day I decided to let it go. I wasn’t in a relationship, couldn’t find one, and thought maybe I was being too closed-minded. Suddenly, I realized I could appreciate blondes, redheads, and other hairstyles and body types. I opened my mind to more possibilities and found more happiness because I wasn’t so fixated on what happiness was “supposed” to look like.

I had believed happiness followed an exact formula. But it doesn’t always work that way. It’s not always exactly how you think it’s going to be. So stay open-minded if you’re in that zone of thought.

When it comes to rebuilding your life, you don’t know what you don’t know until you start doing this work. Start enforcing your boundaries if you feel comfortable enough doing that around the people in your life.

Though I’ll admit, I felt very uncomfortable when I started doing it. Honoring my personal boundaries was a huge leap of faith. I had never done it before. But every day after the first time, and soon the second and third and so on, I’m so grateful I took that initial leap into honoring myself because I was able to live life more authentically, which feels so much better than living the life others wanted me to live.

Honoring yourself around certain people is certainly a “pick your battles wisely” approach. But what’s most important is that you start this process within yourself. Start understanding what you want, what you need, what’s acceptable, and what’s not, so that you can build upon that foundation, then move to the next step (actually enforcing your boundaries), and start living the life you want and deserve.