Shahida Arabi

If someone doesn’t have the moral capacity to treat you with basic respect or act with integrity, it is doubtful they have changed overnight for someone else.

You never have to compete with anyone – and a healthy partner would never want anyone who they truly love and cherish to feel like they’re competing with anybody anyway.

I love myself. Truly and always, I love myself. And for the first time in a long time, I am putting myself first.

They may romanticize the relationship and re-idealize you, taking back all their hurtful words and actions in one fell swoop (or cleverly constructed text message).

I am the truth, your karma, the revolt — I am the resistance, the pieces you tried to keep shattered, coming back together again.

Survivors have to regain the certainty that the reason they experienced such a pathological reaction was because they were so powerful in the first place.

You don’t have to justify to anyone the reasons you didn’t leave right away.

Falsehoods about parents always being loving and having our best interests at heart simply do not cut it when it comes to manipulative, toxic and abusive parents.

Philosophies that depict pain as an illusion rather than a legitimate, lived reality can be downright dangerous. They encourage victim-blaming and spiritual bypassing that harms the survivor more than they help. What we have to remember is that our perceptions of trauma are not due to erroneous thinking – they are due to egregiously damaging acts of emotional and physical violence.

The abuse cycle relies on hot and cold, mean and sweet behavior, which means nice actions after an abusive incident cannot be taken at face value, but rather as embedded in a chronic pattern of behavior.

Leaving was not easy but it was also too easy

Read this when your heart is aching and your spirit is broken, when you’re on your knees, depleted and defeated.

Gaslighting is perhaps one of the most insidious manipulative tactics out there because it works to distort and erode your sense of reality; it eats away at your ability to trust yourself and inevitably disables you from feeling justified in calling out abuse and mistreatment.

We can become addicted to the highs and lows of dangerous romantic relationships in a way that makes a break-up from a toxic person similar to rehab from a destructive drug addiction.

He ties his words around you like a corset, fashioning you into his soulmate. Fast-forwarding intimacy on all levels, he plays the victim, weaving a sad story about betrayal by his previous partner who you will later come to learn is also a victim.

These pathological individuals walk among us every day in their false masks, often unseen and unnoticed because of how eerily normal they are.

Contrary to popular opinion, asking for help does not make you helpless or powerless.

It’s important in any kind of relationship that we learn to identify the red flags when interacting with people who display malignant narcissism and/or antisocial traits, so we can better protect ourselves from exploitation and abuse, set appropriate boundaries with others, and make informed decisions about who we keep in our lives.