What Seventeen Never Taught Us

We grew up on quizzes about “your perfect match” and “how to know he likes you.”
No one handed us a checklist for manipulation.
I used to think abuse meant bruises.
It doesn’t.

If my daughters ever find themselves reading this—if any woman who swears it could never be her stumbles across these words—this is for you.

If it were up to me, I’d never write this. I wouldn’t give him a sentence, let alone a story. But this isn’t about him. It’s about the truth—and the women who need to hear it. God didn’t pull us from fire for me to whisper

In the 1944 psychological thriller Gaslight,

a husband slowly manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind—dimming the lights, hiding things, rewriting her reality. When she notices, he insists it’s all in her head. That’s where the term “gaslighting” comes from. And for me, that movie didn’t haunt me. It woke me up.

It wasn’t the yelling. It wasn’t the slammed doors or the public fights. It was the quiet erosion of my reality. The way my memory stopped feeling trustworthy.

It didn’t happen all at once.

It happened slowly. Strategically. In the dark.

Until I no longer recognized myself in the mirror.

And that’s the insidious nature of abuse that doesn’t leave visible bruises. It convinces you it’s not real. It convinces you you’re the problem. And while the world says, “Just leave,” they never mention that sometimes, even after you do… it doesn’t stop.

That’s what this story is about. Not him. Not his tactics. But the story I refuse to let him rewrite.

I Didn’t Know He Was a Narcissist

Seventeen years ago, that word wasn’t everywhere. Instagram didn’t hand out red flag lists. TikTok didn’t have therapists breaking it down.

Gaslighting wasn’t a buzzword. It was a tactic.

If you had asked me then what abuse looked like, I would’ve told you about bruises. I would’ve pictured a woman cowering in the corner of a room she wasn’t allowed to leave.

I wouldn’t have pictured me.

I wouldn’t have pictured a girl who thought love meant earning your worth. Who believed she was hard to love, hard to trust, hard to keep. Who thought the way he treated her was a response to her failures, not his cruelty.

I didn’t know that being slowly erased doesn’t leave physical marks.

But it leaves scars all the same.

And I didn’t know that leaving him wasn’t the end.

I had no idea that one day, he wouldn’t come for me—he’d come for my daughters.

New England

Gemma was 3 months old when he moved us 1,600 miles away. He said it was to “get me away from toxic influences.” He meant my family. My friends. The people who had been my lifeline in those first months of motherhood.

Cape Cod in January is desolate, dreary, and cold. He left for work for weeks at a time, and I had no phone, no car, no way out. I bundled Gemma in her stroller and walked miles to the nearest gas station, just for human interaction. I lingered in the aisles, pretending to browse. The gas station attendant would smile at me, and for a few minutes, I felt like a person again. I used my laundry quarters to call home. I told them Cape Cod was beautiful. I told them Gemma was thriving. I held the phone to her tiny ear so she wouldn’t forget their voices.

As soon as my own voice started to crack, I hung up. I wouldn’t burden them with worry.

We moved again. A small town in New Hampshire, tucked into the White Mountains. I was “allowed” to work, so I started waiting tables and quickly became the sole provider.

Fast forward a year later, we were splitting up. I had a 4 week old and no family, no job, nowhere to go. He threatened to take my daughter and me to a homeless shelter. We lived in Gorham, New Hampshire. The nearest shelter was in Concord. Over 2 hours away.

I was terrified.

Sure I could have hopped on a plane and come home.. but I’d never see Gemma again. I had no choice but to stay and try and figure out what I was going to to..

And then, God.

A caseworker found out what was happening. She looked me in the eyes and said, “There is no way a mother and her child should go to a shelter. You wouldn’t make it out.”

I still remember the seriousness in her voice. The way she meant it.

That day, she got us a motel room in North Conway. It reeked of cigarette smoke. Novi’s first doctor’s appointment, the doctor kept asking if I smoked. If I was safe. I didn’t understand why until later. My baby smelled like the walls of that motel.

But we were safe.

The caseworker who got us that room, I still think of her as an angel.

I named my baby girl Novi Sparrow.

Novi means “new” and “restored.” Sparrow, the long journey home.

I didn’t know it yet, but the girls and I were already on the road home.

The Red Flags That Didn’t Look Like Red Flags

You don’t recognize the trap when you’re the one inside it.
Had you handed me a list back then, I would’ve checked off every box—and still justified staying. Not because I was naive, but because I had already been trained to question everything but him.
That’s how psychological abuse works. It trains you to justify the injustice. To normalize the manipulation. To defend the very thing that’s destroying you.
You rewrite reality to survive it.

He wasn’t protective—he was possessive.
He wasn’t under stress—he was strategic.
He wasn’t misunderstood—he was a manipulator.

Here’s what I wish I had known from the beginning:

The way he spoke about his exes wasn’t random—it was calculated. Every woman before me was “crazy,” “unstable,” “obsessed.” And when I left, I joined the list. That wasn’t coincidence. That was method.
The rules never applied to him. If I had questions, I was “controlling.” When he did it, it was “for a reason.” My boundaries were betrayal. His betrayals were “mistakes.” It was never about fairness—it was about dominance.
He used religion as a weapon. He twisted Scripture into submission. He wore a mask of morality to keep others blind. God wasn’t his guide—He was his excuse.
The punishment wasn’t always loud. Silence was his weapon. Disdain, his favorite tactic. Days of being ignored. I learned to apologize for things I never did just to escape the cold war of his disappointment. That wasn’t peace—it was psychological warfare.
Everything was a performance. Not just for me, but for everyone. The charm in public. The cruelty behind closed doors. His mask didn’t slip—it was ripped off piece by piece.
He turned people into pawns. Friends, family, even children. He used triangulation to pit people against each other, ensuring I was always unsure of who to trust—always dependent on him.
He didn’t just want control of my actions—he wanted my identity. My opinions. My voice. My dreams. All slowly erased. Not by accident. By design.
I was always too much—or never enough. What once made me “special” became a threat. My strength? Mocked. My independence? Targeted. My voice? Silenced. He didn’t want a partner. He wanted someone to dismantle.
How I felt around him told the entire story. My nervous system knew before my mind could name it. It wasn’t his words—it was how unsafe I felt in his presence. My body screamed the truth. I just hadn’t learned to listen.

This isn’t a checklist to shame you. It’s the one I wish someone had handed me before I lost myself. This is the lifeline I wish someone had thrown me before I disappeared.

Trained Not to Scream

When my daughter was kidnapped, people called me strong. A warrior. They said, I don’t know how you do it.
But they didn’t know I had already been trained not to scream.

My voice wasn’t stolen in courtrooms. It was erased long before that. Before the custody battles. Before supervised visits. Before emergency orders.
It vanished in the quiet, systematic dismantling of who I was—after years of being told my words were dangerous, my instincts were wrong, my emotions were too much.

Years of being conditioned to be small, silent, and easy to control.
By the time he came for my daughters, the system didn’t need to destroy me.
He already had.

And then he took the one thing I couldn’t shrink for.
He took my child.

And that’s when I finally understood.

I’m not telling this story to be brave.

I’m telling it so my daughters will never mistake control for love. So they’ll know how to trust their gut. So they’ll leave at the first red flag instead of the last.

I’m telling it for the woman reading this who’s still twisting herself into something softer, quieter, smaller—still calling abuse “love.”

I’m telling it because the most dangerous lie we believe is: It could never be me.

But it was me.

And if I had known then what I know now—If someone had looked me in the face and named what I was living through—

I might’ve gotten out sooner.

And maybe… just maybe…

I would’ve believed her.

The Wilds Project.