Exploring the confusion, self-doubt, and hard-won clarity that can emerge from experience with gaslighting and emotional manipulation.
Some relationships don't fall apart because of conflict. They slowly lose intimacy because conflict is never acknowledged, leaving no opportunity for repair. I've been thinking about how perfection, image management, and emotional avoidance can quietly replace accountability, making genuine connection increasingly difficult.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the c-word...."conflict " and also--avoidance and repair. The archetype, to whom I have gravitated to like a moth to a flame, seems…
“In a system demanding performative ease, genuine openly communicated difficulty is handled as treason.”
The Binary The archetypes seem to move through life inside a rigid binary: winners and losers, heroes and villains, right and wrong. In their accounting for outcomes, there seems a…
When your reality is systematically denied, you learn to turn the blame inward. You spend years looking for the "secret" to fixing yourself, believing that your anxiety, your fear, and your struggles are proof that you are fundamentally broken.
But the truth is much simpler, and much kinder: Your body was simply keeping score of an environment that was never safe.
The behaviors we used to survive weren't a sign of madness. They were the only tools we had to cope with a system that refused to see us. Reclaiming your own knowing starts with realizing you were never the problem—you were just trying to survive.
Someone once told me that the cruelest thing you can do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true. It…
A year ago I ended a relationship that I had initially believed was the love of my life. I still kind of feel that way, even though being love bombed…
