Shahida Arabi

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.