You Are Not Imagining It

A Few Words on What Covert Abuse Looks Like

Nobody hit you. Nobody screamed. The relationship looked fine from the outside — maybe even good. So why do you feel like you’ve been slowly bled out?

This is the question people can’t bring themselves to ask, because asking it means admitting that something happened — and without a clear incident to name, the mind keeps filing it under maybe I’m being unfair.

But the body doesn’t negotiate like that. The body just registers: I am not safe here. I have to be careful. I have to be smaller.

The self-editing starts so early you stop noticing it. You just become someone who thinks before they speak. Someone who reads the room. Someone accommodating.

Some people never develop the capacity to sit with their own emotional weight. The shame, the rage, the grief — it has to go somewhere. So it goes outward. Into the air of the relationship. Into you. Not through cruelty, necessarily. Through projection. Through criticism that never fully lands and never fully stops. Through an emotional climate so dense with the person’s unprocesed inner landscape that yours starts to feel like an imposition.

You end up managing two people's psychological reality. Yours, and theirs. Except you only get credit for one.

The degradation is cumulative. A comment here. A reframing of what you just said. A sigh. The sense that your joy is somehow naive, your anger disproportionate, your needs inconvenient. None of it rises to the level of an event. All of it lands in the body as a verdict.

You are not too sensitive. You have become exquisitely calibrated to an environment that required it.

This is what covert relational abuse does. It doesn't leave you with a story you can tell. It leaves you with a self that has been reorganised around someone else's unprocessed pain — and a deep, disorienting uncertainty about what you actually think, feel, or want anymore.

The difficulty of naming it is not evidence that it didn't happen. It is evidence of how sophisticated this particular erosion is. Overt abuse leaves marks. This kind leaves fog.

Recovery doesn’t begin with leaving — though it may include that. It begins with the moment you stop explaining away what your body has known for years. With the decision to believe your own account, even before anyone else does.

You are not imagining it. You were not too much. What you were carrying was never yours.

— Sigourney Belle