The people I relied on for protection were the same people I needed protection from. They were also the ones teaching lil baby Magda about herself, relationships, and the world. And so she gravitated toward relational patterns imprinted on her
For more than 40 years, I didn’t really know how to exist inside a relationship unless I was the broken one, bowing in reliance to anyone gracious enough to let me hang around, no matter the quality of treatment. Could
I’ve been sitting with a word that has always troubled me, a state of “being” that feels out of reach: happiness. There seems to be so little capacity out there to make space for those of us whose life experiences
I’ve been reflecting on how, in my family—and unironically, in the family of the man I had children with—belonging was not rooted in mutual care, nuance, or individuality. It was rooted in alignment with the people who had decided, and
Letting Go Each day, I live with the ache that I may not see my children again. We may not have another real conversation or moment of closeness. That may be the outcome when children grow in a system that
My sons learned, by design, to have zero tolerance for their mother. Ordinary acts of parenting—direction, correction, consequences, even simple questions—were rejected and reframed as manipulation or control. I once read a message from their father telling them, “Disregard your mother.” And
Looking back, I notice how often I gravitated toward people who couldn’t tolerate my pain but expected the world to organize itself around their pleasure. When they were uncomfortable, everyone rushed to soothe them. What’s especially painful is this: humanity
Coercive control is a strategic pattern of behavior used to dominate another person and strip away their sense of autonomy. It is not defined by a single violent event, but by a continuous web of intimidation, isolation, and micro-regulation of the