Our Relationship With Abuse

I had a thought.

Why do we love people who’ve hurt us?

Not just tolerate them. Not just stay.

Why do we actually love them?

Whether it’s physical, emotional, mental, or verbal.

Why do we keep holding on to the same rope that’s lowering us deeper into something we know is destroying us?

It doesn’t make sense.

But if you sit with it long enough, you realize it’s not about them.

It’s about us.

Because somewhere along the way, we started believing that what we were receiving was what we deserved.

I’ve been there.

I’ve stayed after things I should’ve walked away from the first time they happened.

I stayed after trust was broken.

I stayed after being ghosted, after plans were canceled like I didn’t matter, after silence replaced effort.

I stayed through nights where everything flipped.

Where someone I cared about could go from needing me to tearing me down in the same breath.

Where I’d be sitting there trying to stay calm, trying to understand, trying to not say the wrong thing, because I knew one word could set everything off.

I remember walking on eggshells and calling it patience.

I remember being there at 3AM, listening, holding, showing up when things fell apart.

I remember pushing my own needs further and further back because I thought that’s what love looked like.

I remember telling myself:

“they’re going through something”

“they don’t mean it”

“this is just a phase”

“I know this is how they act when they’re truly hurting and I don’t hate them for it”

i gave them every excuse and explained it away.

And that’s the part people don’t talk about.

Abuse doesn’t always feel like abuse when you’re inside of it.

Sometimes it feels like:

loyalty

understanding

strength

love

You convince yourself that staying makes you better.

That enduring makes you deeper.

That if you just give a little more, adjust a little more, become a little easier to love, eventually it will finally balance out.

But it doesn’t.

Because honestly

When you stay in something that hurts you long enough, you don’t just get used to it.

You start to build an identity around it.

You become the person who

understands

forgives

stays

And leaving starts to feel like failure.

Even when your body is telling you something is wrong.

You feel it in your chest when something is off.

You feel it in the silence on the drive home.

You feel it when you hesitate before reaching out, already bracing for disappointment.

But you override it.

Over and over again.

At some point, it stops being about what they’re doing.

It becomes about what you’re allowing.

That’s the hardest part to accept.

you weren’t just hurt.

You participated in what hurt you

That doesn’t make you weak.

It means you were trying to love someone the only way you knew how.

But love without boundaries turns into self abandonment.

And the longer you stay in that, the more you start to disappear inside your own life.

I used to think love meant staying through anything.

Now I see it differently.

Love shouldn’t be something you survive.

It’s something that fills you with energy.

You don’t love people who hurt you because they’re special.

You love them because something in you is still trying to prove to yourself.

“I can be enough this time.”

“I can fix this.”

“I can make this work.”

But the moment you realize, that you were always enough,

is the moment the rope slips from your hands.

And for the first time, you stop falling.