25/08/2025
ABUSE ISN'T JUST SOMEONE PUTTING THEIR HANDS ON YOU.
Abuse wears many masks. It isn’t always loud, and it isn’t always visible. Sometimes it’s not the kind of wound people can point to, but the kind that slowly eats away at your spirit until you don’t even recognize yourself anymore.
It’s gaslighting, where someone twists reality so much that you begin to doubt your own memory, your own feelings, your own truth. It’s triangulation, when they pull other people into your relationship to make you feel insecure, unwanted, or like you’re competing for the love that should already be yours. It’s lies, both big and small, that pile up until trust feels impossible to rebuild.
Abuse is when their actions never match their words—when they tell you they love you but treat you like you’re disposable. It’s cheating, betrayal that cuts deeper than any weapon. It’s smear campaigns, spreading rumors and half-truths about you, so that even when you try to speak up, people already doubt you.
It’s in the way they make you feel less than, chipping away at your self-worth until you start believing you’re the problem. It’s the silent treatment that punishes you without explanation, making you desperate for a crumb of attention or affection. It’s manipulation, subtle but constant, turning everything back on you so that somehow, you’re always to blame.
It’s humiliation, those cruel words or mocking tones that sting long after they’ve left the room. It’s the disrespect that becomes a habit, a daily reminder that they don’t value you the way they should.
Abuse isn’t always bruises on skin—it’s bruises on the soul. It’s invisible scars, the ones people can’t see but you feel every single day. It’s the way you stop laughing the same, stop trusting the same, stop looking at yourself the same in the mirror. It’s the way you learn to shrink, to walk on eggshells, to silence your own voice just to keep the peace.
And the hardest part? Many people don’t realize it’s abuse until they’re broken, until they’ve lost pieces of themselves trying to love someone who was destroying them the whole time.
Abuse is not just about fists. It’s about control, power, manipulation, and cruelty in all its forms. And none of it is love.
