Welcome to The Therapy Chronicles..

Today I started private therapy.

I’ve touched on this journey in a few blog posts before, the need to become emotionally stronger, wiser, and more aware of the red flags I have missed for what feels like my entire life. Not just to heal, but to understand. To finally make sense of the patterns, the pain, and the parts of me that have been shaped by surviving things I should never have had to survive.

Today, I told Nick the secret.

The secret I have been carrying like a rotting wound inside me for over four years. The thing that has sat in the pit of my stomach, keeping me awake at night. The thing that has eaten away at me from the inside out. The thing that has made me question how much darkness one person can force another to endure.

I said it out loud.

The very thing you told me would destroy me. The very thing you used for years to control me, intimidate me, and break me.

And the result?

You lost.

A few weeks ago, I had a realisation. Deep down, I always knew the truth: I never agreed with any of it. I never accepted it. I never condoned your abuse. I endured it because I was afraid. Fear kept me silent. Fear kept me trapped. Fear convinced me that surviving was the same as surrendering.

But it wasn’t.

And now I see that more clearly than ever.

You played a part and you played it well. The charming man. The family man. The one who adored his children and looked like a loving partner to everyone watching.

But behind closed doors, the real you emerged.

The man who could look me dead in the face and unleash relentless abuse without hesitation. The man who took the heaviest, most painful parts of my life and used them as weapons. The man who saw my empathy, my capacity to love, to understand, to forgive and treated it as weakness to exploit.

All the while, you kept up the performance. You made sure the world saw someone admirable, someone kind, someone dependable. And in that carefully crafted version of reality, I was cast as the problem. I was the unstable one. The difficult one. The one to blame.

The part that gets me, the part I do not think I will ever truly understand is that before you, I was happy. I was myself. I knew who I was.

Then you came along and picked apart every part of my identity, every trait, every feeling, every reaction, and told me it was a problem. Piece by piece, you created an image of me that was false, cruel, and distorted and over time, through the abuse you inflicted, I slowly began to resemble it.

Not because it was true, but because living under constant cruelty changes you. It wears you down. It leaves you distressed, emotionally exhausted, and completely dysregulated.

And then you told family and friends about me, about how I was behaving, how I was reacting — but you always left out the most important part:

Why.

Why would someone become so emotionally unregulated? Why would someone seem broken, reactive, or distressed? Why would someone begin to lose themselves?

You never told them what was happening behind closed doors. You never told them what you were doing to me. You never told them how much pressure, fear, manipulation, and abuse sat behind every reaction you later used against me.

That is how people like you keep power.

Because narcissists are often charming. If they were not, they would lose the very thing they depend on most: control. The image matters more than the truth. The mask matters more than the damage done behind it.

Imagine if you actually told people the truth. Imagine if you admitted what really happened. Imagine if you stopped rewriting the story to protect yourself.

It would set me free. But it would destroy the carefully crafted image you have built, wouldn’t it?

And then all that would be left is the reflection you spend your life trying to outrun: the bully, the abuser, the deeply insecure person who drains the confidence, identity, and self-worth out of others like a leech, because you have none of your own.

That is the truth, isn’t it? You did not just want to hurt me, You wanted to hollow me out so I would feel as empty as you do.

But that was always your greatest trick: distortion.

Every time you laughed in my face, every time you told me how much you hated me, how much everyone else hated me too, what you were really revealing was yourself. Because deep down, beneath the mask, beneath the manipulation, beneath the arrogance and cruelty, was someone filled with self-loathing so deep that the only way you could survive it was by projecting it onto me.

You handed me your shame and tried to make me wear it like it belonged to me.

But it never did.

It was yours. Always yours.

And no matter how convincing the act was, no matter how many times you tried to rewrite the story, the truth remains the same: you were never destroying me because I was worthless.

You were trying to destroy me because you could not bear what was broken inside yourself.

That fear consumed me for so long that eventually all I had left was hate. A deep, bitter, exhausting hatred for everything you did to me, for everything you took, and for the version of me I became just to survive you.

But the problem with hate is that it doesn’t poison the person who caused it. It poisons the person carrying it.

It hurts me. It drains me. It keeps me tied to the very thing I am trying to escape.

So today was not just about speaking. It was about releasing. It was about dragging something shameful and festering out of the dark and forcing it into the light, where it can no longer own me.

For years, you made me believe that silence protected me. That speaking would ruin me. That telling the truth would somehow be worse than living it.

You were wrong.

The truth did not destroy me. Keeping it inside did.

Today was the first step in taking that power back. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But honestly.

I am still healing. I am still angry. I am still carrying pain that I cannot neatly package into some inspiring ending.

But today proved something important: I can say it. I can survive saying it. And every time I do, your grip loosens a little more.

This is what healing looks like sometimes. Not graceful. Not clean. Not cinematic.

Just a woman sitting in a room, finally saying the thing that nearly swallowed her whole — and realising she is still here.

Still standing. Still fighting. Still mine.

And that is where this ends for me, not in silence, not in confusion, and not in the version of me you tried so hard to create.

I am no longer carrying your shame, your lies, or the weight of what you did to me as though it was mine to hold. I know now that my distress was not madness, it was a response to mistreatment.

My breaking was not weakness, it was what happened when someone kept pushing, bruising, and tearing at the soul of another person for far too long.

But I am still here. Still healing. Still finding my way back to the woman I was before you tried to erase her.

And this time, the truth does not belong to you. It belongs to me.