I honestly don't know how I got here.

Q: When you first started dating, weren't there signs?

I used to say no, but honestly, when I think about it, I guess there were.

Q: Why did you ignore the signs?

When I look at it now, I don't actually think I ignored them, I think I rationalized them. I guess I saw red flags, but they made sense to me. This person made them make sense to me.

Q: How did they make them make sense?

Oh, there's so many examples I don't even know where to start. They told me that they were abused their whole life, that they had the worst upbringing. So then I would always ask myself: "Are they abusive or are they just reacting to their childhood trauma?" Maybe they don't know how to be in a healthy relationship. Maybe this is all just a result of what they've seen, what they've experienced. Maybe I could love them through it. Maybe I could show them what love is really like.

When I realized it was abuse, it felt like I was in too deep. I physically could not leave them.

-Lisa Sonni, excerpted and adapted from YouTube

excerpted and adapted from comment (trigger warning: eating disorder)

"Did you bring me down here to make me feel sorry for you?" Quibli asked incredulously.

Darkstalker's mouth quirked into a small half smile. "Well, that empathy spell of yours was so effective on my subjects," he said. I figured it couldn't hurt for you and I to understand each other a little better."

"It wasn't my spell," Quibli said, tracing [along the tiny holes].

"Let's be serious," Darkstalker nudged the floating sun a little closer to him. "That was your spell. You lack the magic, but you have the ideas."

Quibli didn't answer.

"You have the brains to be a great animus dragon, but Turtle has the power instead," Darkstalker observed. "I know that's frustrating for you."

There was a pause.

"I've noticed something," Darkstalker said a little more quietly. "You're just like me, Quibli. Maybe even as smart as me; certainly smarter than everyone else. You have big ideas and lots of them, not just one or two of them in a lifetime like some dragons. You want to change things - all the things that are wrong in the world. You know you could do it if you had the chance."

"I'm not like you," Quibli interrupted. "I'm not a murderer."

"Oh, but you would be, under the right conditions," Darkstalker said, waving this off. "To protect your queen, save your tribe, or if it would make Moon love you."

"That's not true," said Quibli. "She wouldn't love a murderer."

Darkstalker pointed a talon at him. "There's one crucial difference between us," he went on. "You want to be loved so desperately. I think it lies underneath everything you do. Will this make that dragon like me better? What should I do now to turn all these dragons into friends? If I can convince this cold, standoffish IceWing to like me, surely that'll prove I'm a dragon worth liking."

"Excuse me," Quibli said. "I'm not the one who literally enchanted the entire world to like me. That was you, if you've forgotten."

"But I got the idea from you," Darkstalker said, now immensely amused. "Your first day at Jade Mountain. Oh, if only I could magically make everyone like me! Don't you remember? That comes from the holes in your heart that your family never bothered to fill. My first thought was, how tremendously sad. What a tragic well of need that dragon is. And then I thought, but my, that would be a useful spell. How easy life would be if everyone liked and trusted me. No one scheming against me, sending assassins to kill me, or getting irrationally upset over perfectly harmless enchantments." He frowned, as though a part of him was locked in an endless argument with someone long gone.

Then.

"Let me tell you about the best future," Darkstalker said dreamily.

"You'll adore it. Everyone loves us. We share the continents and rule all the tribes wit benevolent wisdom - you and Moon, me and Clearsight, once I get her right. Our dragonets play together in the palaces of Pyrrhia. There's no more war. There's no more sickness, thanks to us. No more sadness or worry, no more hunger, no more starving dragonets scrabbling for food in back alleys. No more terrible parents, because we could fix them. You could make your mother a dragon who loves you. I could have healed the scars on my father's soul. I know that's what I should have done, to make him a father that Whiteout and I could." He bowed his head for a moment.

Quibli didn't want to give him ideas, but he had to ask. "But you could do all that by yourself. So why would you share your power with me when you could simply kill me right now?"

"Because I don't just want power, Quibli," Darkstalker said a little impatiently.

"That's what so many dragons get wrong about me. Even Clearsight thought that way, toward the end." He selected a pair of perfect diamonds from his treasure cloud and set them spinning on their own axis with the ruby. "I also want to make the world a better place. I want to have real friends that I care about. I want my happily ever after."

"You think I could be your real friend?" Quibli asked.

"You're funny and not boring," said Darkstalker. You can keep up with my conversation, unlike pretty much all my subjects except Moon. You have ideas that I haven't already had myself, which is fascinating and rare. I like to be surprised - I mean, unless the surprise involves betrayal and involuntary comas, of course. Yes, I think we'd get along really well."

Quibli wondered about that. Was Darkstalker right? Were there really futures where they were friends, even co-rulers?

"And you'd be a good influence on me!" Darkstalker said charmingly. "I can see that, too."

"You steer me through some pretty rough times and save a lot of dragons from my mistakes. We all end up on much better paths if we're friends. I mean, consider my alternatives. If you're not my friend Moon won't be either, and then who do I have? This lizard?"

He snapped his claws and with a startling popping sound, Vulture suddenly materialized in the air beside him.

Quibli's grandfather let out a yell of surprise. "Where am I?" he shouted. "What did you do?" He craned his neck to look up at the speck of sky far above them. His talons pressed against the sheer rock walls, and Quibli knew the SandWing claustrophobia was snaring him, too.

And yet, even though he could see Vulture's fear, Quibli's heart still tried to make a run for it. He couldn't stop himself from crouching, trying to make himself smaller until perhaps he'd be invisible, and then Vulture wouldn't be able to hurt him. He wouldn't be able to worm inside Quibli's ears and make him doubt everything that was real.

"Enchant this dragon to obey my every command," Darkstalker said off-handedly. He tapped Vulture on the forehead. "Stop talking and stay where you are."

Vulture's eyes bulged as he tried to snap something furious and failed.

"I can't believe you're so terrified of this salamander," Darkstalker said to Quibli with a chuckle. "He's so easy to manipulate, even without magic. Thin scales, loves treasure, lies about everything until he doesn't even know what's true, not that he cares. He's a dragon made of paper who has never been happy one day in his life."

"If you accept my gift," Darkstalker said, "you never have to worry about him or anyone else like him ever again."

"Watch." He tapped Vulture's head again. "Enchant this dragon to have the mind of a new-hatched dragonet. You may speak."

Vulture's head slowly lolled sideways and a goofy grin spread across his face. "Urple," he chirruped at Quibli.

It was one of the most horrifying things Quibli had ever seen.

Perhaps, reading Quibli's expression, Darkstalker hastily reached over and tapped Vulture again. "Go back to the way you were before the last spell," he said.

"Now I enchant this dragon to feel guilt for all the terrible things he's done."

Vulture's face collapsed into grief. "I'm a monster," he whispered. "All those deaths...all the cruelty to my family...how can I ever make up for it all?"

"See how easy it is?" Darkstalker said to Quibli.

"Let's see - now be a grandfather who loves Quibli more than anything else in the world," he ordered Vulture.

"Quibli!" Vulture cried, reaching his talons toward his grandson. "Dearest of dragons! Have I ever told you how proud I am of you? You've grown now into such a fine young dragon."

"Stop it, stop it," Quibli said, covering his ears. "It's not real. It's not real."

"Of course it is!" Vulture cried exuberantly.

"Shush," Darkstalker said to him, and Vulture instantly fell silent. "But of course it's real," he said to Quibli. "We just made it real. He really feels that way with all his heart right now."

"Because you put a spell on him," Quibli said. "That's not what real means."

Darkstalker looked skeptical. If magic can improve a dragon," he said, "I don't see what the problem is. We could turn your grandfather into the kindest dragon in the Scorpion Den. Wouldn't it be fun to watch him give away his entire treasure to orphans and homeless dragons?"

'Yes, whispered a small but unavoidable part of Quibli's soul.

"So...why didn't you do that?" Quibli asked Darkstalker.

Darkstalker's eyes narrowed. His jaw worked silently for a long moment, as though he was grinding his teeth.

"Because I haven't forgiven them," he admitted finally. "For what happened to my mother." He took a deep breath. "All right, I see your point. I thought I was protecting the tribe...but it was about revenge, too. I can see that." He spoke as if each word was a tooth being yanked out of his mouth.

"Maybe you need to put a kindness spell on yourself," Quibli suggested.

"This is what I mean," Darkstalker said slowly. "How you can keep me on the better paths. You'll suggest peace spells instead of plagues. You'll help me see the things I don't recognize about myself." He paused, and Quibli could tell that Darkstalker wasn't entirely convinced that was what he wanted.

Is that what I want? To be Darkstalker's conscience? To spend my life telling him all the things he doesn't want to hear?

"So what do you think?" Darkstalker asked. "Are you ready to become an animus dragon?"

He drew a circle in the air around the floating gemstones, and they all whirled into one another until they became a crown, glowing with gems from all over the world. Darkstalker nudged the crown to set it floating gently toward Quibli.

Who would say no to their secret dream come true?
Why would I ever say no?
Say yes to the magic.
Say yes to the bright future.
Say yes.

Quibli looked up into Darkstalker's eyes and said, "No."

He continued. "I like you but I can't trust you. I don't know what you'd put in the spell on me, but if there's a chance it could turn me evil, I don't want to risk it."

"I don't want to turn into a dragon who plays with other dragons like toys."

-Tui T. Sutherland, excerpted and adapted from "Wings of Fire: Darkness of Dragons"

excerpted and adapted from comment

Toxic families, friend circles, and work environments tend to dance around the most toxic person.

**You can spot a toxic person by how they react to being challenged or given feedback.**⁠

If they respond with high reactivity, revenge, passive aggression, or profound victimization, it's a perfect clue about their toxicity.

As childhood trauma survivors, we can miss such clues due to our shame or toxicity being so familiar.

As a result, we also may never have seen healthy accountability.

Examples -
Don't rock the boat with mom. You know how angry she gets.
Don't rock the boat with dad...you know how neurotic he is.
Don't tell that to your brother right now. He's got too much going on.
Don't tell your mother about that. She'll lose it.

Our tolerance for such systems diminishes as we grow, mature, and heal.

As we become safe.

-Patrick Teahan, excerpted and adapted from Instagram

One of the most horrific stories of abuse I've ever come across involved a little girl who had been removed from her abusive family, lived with her foster family for several years, and then was returned to the abusive family over the objections of the foster family.

The abuse she experienced was horrific.

What happened was that when they took her out of the abusive home and placed her in a healthy, functional home, she lost all of her maladaptive coping mechanisms. She lost the freeze response to an adult's anger, and the understanding that this anger means she was in danger. She forgot that she can't be too happy with an unsafe adult, because that only draws their attention to you.

When she tried to operate according to the 'rules' she'd learned with her foster family, her biological mother found her 'stuck up' and entitled.

It essentially enraged her biological mother. And once her biological mother started hitting her, apparently the 'mother's' thought process was that since she was hitting the girl, the girl deserved to be hit.

And once that barrier was broken in the family, the little girl became the family effigy.

I was trying to articulate the concept - whipping boy, scapegoat, black sheep don't work because they're blamed for someone else's failings - where here, the little girl was chosen to be destroyed out of rage for who or how she is.

I went to workshop the concept with Claude A.I., but it wasn't coming up with the right thing either, and then I said: "She's like the family effigy - an effigy is something you burn in rage."

And the reason I'm explaining all of this is so that I can put in context what the Claude A.I. wrote in response:

Yes - "family effigy" is a powerful and apt metaphor. An effigy is something created specifically to be destroyed, to have rage and hatred poured into it. And like a literal effigy, the more it resembles what the angry person hates (in this case, emotional health and normal human responses), the more it draws their destructive impulses.

The term captures both the ritualistic nature of the abuse and how the victim becomes a symbol that the abuser feels entitled - even compelled - to destroy. It also captures how, like an effigy, the victim isn't seen as a real person but as an object created for the purpose of absorbing violence.

The fact that she became more of an "effigy" specifically when she showed signs of health and normal human responses makes the metaphor even more fitting - like how an effigy is often made to look more like its target specifically to justify its destruction.

And I could let this stand here, because the concept of "the family effigy" has not ever been articulated in an abuse concept, as far I am aware.

And it is one of the most powerful tragedies I have ever been able to articulate.

But even more important than that - for victims of abuse - is understanding that people give themselves permission to mistreat you.

As soon as you cross an specific line, you are marked as someone who is deserving of 'punishment' and torment. (If it happens on a societal level, you can get 'swarming' mob behaviors.)

Abusers often (mis)believe that the victim has 'given' them permission to punish/torment the victim.

Thieves will believe that if you leave your car or house unlocked that you are 'asking to be stolen from'. One well-known murderer said he believed victims were 'inviting him in' if they left their front door unlocked. (This was in the 70s when, depending on where you lived, you did not lock your door.) I had a low-level superior bully me at work because I was 'too nice' and so they decided I was 'fake', which is how she self-justified her behavior.

You see a similar thing, in my opinion, in 80s college culture with men who wouldn't consider themselves rapists would rape a drunk or passed out woman because 'she was asking for it by getting drunk'.

I want to be clear that this does NOT mean a victim has given 'permission' for the abuse. But there's a reason why a lot of abusers tell on themselves at the beginning - why they explain they're a 'bad person' or that they've hurt people before - because they transform that into "you knew what you were getting into", e.g. you 'gave them permission'.

And once they have 'permission' to hurt you, the punishment always escalates.

Because - in their minds - if you are being punished, then you deserve to be punished.

And the more the abuser breaks down social or personal norms about harming another person, the easier it becomes.

Abusers construct their own permission to destroy, pretending you gave it; and breaking that first barrier against harming another person makes each subsequent act of cruelty easier than the last.

That's why they think it's your fault.

'You' gave them permission. You crossed the line and deserve to be punished. They wouldn't treat someone else this way, because that (fantasy) other person doesn't cross the line, doesn't 'deserve' to be hurt, therefore - ipso facto - they would never treat another person this way.

If you hadn't been 'bad', they would still be 'good'.

And the more they destroy you, the more they want to destroy you.

Because they make you into an effigy of what they want to destroy to justify your destruction and their actions.

• Making you feel unreasonable or always pushing back when you communicate needs or boundaries.

• Constant criticism, sometimes described as jokes or 'banter' that you can't push back on.

• You feel solely responsible for their happiness or well-being.

• Inconsistency: alternating between showering you with attention and becoming cold.

• Lashing out or ignoring you instead of communicating.

• You feel like you are walking on eggshells - even the tiniest mistakes can upset or anger them.

• You feel like you're expected to change something fundamental about yourself.

• They aren't happy for you when you success - or aren't there for you when you struggle.

• Inability to apologize or take accountability without criticizing you, too.

-@igototherapy, adapted from Instagram

With recent comments, I realized that there are many new people here who don't understand something critical about the healing process, and it's because no one articulates the healing process correctly.

A lot of what we see in terms of healing is prescriptive (forgive! let go! move on!) tends to actually be DESCRIPTIVE.

Additionally, there are different resources for people at different stages of the healing process. When you are in the crisis stage, for example, you do NOT need resources for people who are further along in their healing journey. Those resources, in fact, could potentially be harmful.

A lot of the conflict we see in recovery spaces happens because people do not realize this.

So you might have well-meaning people giving advice or information such as "look at yourself and your actions: how did you get in this relationship? why did you let this person abuse you?" and that is extremely harmful to someone who is actively being abused. What that person needs to hear is that they are NOT responsible for the abuse and only the abuser is responsible for abusing.

There comes a point later, however, where the same information is helpful, not harmful.

Where someone - who is safe, working on themselves, and not in an easily triggered place emotionally - starts looking at the dynamic as a whole because they don't want to repeat what happened, and they want to address whatever was going on for them internally.

For this person, this information is descriptive and not an admonition.

How can you tell where you are in your healing process? How the phrase "take responsibility" makes you feel. For someone further in their healing process, they recognize that they are "response-able" even if they are not responsible. (This is, of course, trickier for people who experienced moral injury - those who, as a result of being abused, engaged in behavior that is against their own moral code - because they may actually feel 'responsible' for the abuse or abuse dynamic.)

Victims of abuse go through different distinct stages mentally.

At first, they don't think they're being abused at all, and consider their relationship to be good or loving, if volatile. They don't see that the other person is being controlling through their anger, their money, their willingness to escalate, sex, emotional manipulation, etc. That is because their concept of reality is off - they think they are in a relationship with someone they love - and they often go to relationship resources to try and fix it...which only makes an abuse dynamic worse because using healthy relationship tools with an unhealthy person only gives them more power and leverage over you.

Once they start to realize something is wrong, and start to look up resources, they're trying to figure out if they are indeed in an abusive relationship.

People may have been telling them that their significant other is 'bad' or treating them badly, but they didn't want to listen because they love this person and are emotionally attached to them. In this stage, as the dawning realization of the reality of the situation comes over them, they start to research abuse and (often, not always) share it with the abuser. They are unintentionally teaching the abuser how to be a better abuser, because now the abuser has more tools to use against the victim, tools the victim is in agreement with. Because the victim doesn't understand the underlying issue with abuse (someone's entitlement to control you and force you to think what they think, believe what they believe, act how they want you to act: they don't intrinsically respect your autonomy) they think it is just a matter of educating the abuser. Like "Oh, I had no idea! If only I had known this was abusive, I wouldn't have done it. I am sorry, I will stop and not do it anymore."

When you educate the abuser on abuse, they simply switch to a different method of abuse...but the underlying pattern of not recognizing your autonomy, of trying to control you, or 'logic you into submission', is the same.

So the victim of abuse realizes that they're in an abusive relationship and may legitimately be in danger. And then they start trying to figure out how to get out. And this is hard because the whole point of abuse is that it happens in the context of a relationship, whether parent or 'partner' or friend. Here's where the victim of abuse often starts trying to figure out how to leave the abuser without fundamentally changing their life. How do I leave the abusive friendship without leaving the friend group? How do I leave this abusive job without loss of pay? How do I leave this abuser without losing everything I have? How can I go low or no-contact with my parents while keeping my relationships with the rest of my family?

And what's hard with this is that it is different for every single victim of abuse.

Victims of abuse are often also struggling with a desire to be rescued, and feel helpless when the rescue does not materialize. What makes it especially hard is that escaping from domestic violence often requires the exact opposite strategy you use to survive it. To survive, the victim stops asserting their power, but to escape, the (adult) victim generally has to assert their power.

So victims at this stage are shackled with the chains of learned helplessness, and don't even realize it.

In order to abuse you, they make you into a dependent they have power over and control, and it is extremely hard to see that in the midst of it, and break free of it.

Once on the other side of getting out, a victim often first spends a lot of time trying to figure out the abuser.

"Can abusers change?" is almost the number one thing I hear from victims of abuse.

And then that shifts to trying to figure out themselves and the context of their life experience.

At some point, the focus shifts to "How can I make sure this never happens again?" What once was victim-blaming is now empowering, what once felt blaming now feels like the key to triumph - because if it is in your hands, then you can protect yourself.

People then start focusing on what healthy relationships are and look like, and identifying green and red flags.

We start looking at other people, developing our discernment, as to whether they are a safe person or not. We're trying to figure out the system to never get stuck in that situation again, to filter out abusers before getting emotionally attached to them, before being in a relationship with them.

We learn that we can't, and shouldn't, fast track relationships.

That all the old, boring advice was actually right. Because you have to see how someone behaves over time, and that instead of dating (and vetting) people, we've been jumping right into relationships with people we aren't actually compatible with. So we're consuming relationship advice and tools that - earlier in the process - would have kept us stuck, and then we realize we really need to look at dating advice and tools, and then you're back trying to figure dating out again.

And this whole process unfolds over time, over and over, with us coming back to tools and dropping other tools and picking up new ones, trying to understand.

And then we get to a point of peace, a point where we no longer feel paranoid about people because we realize that we can rescue ourselves. That we are out of the fog of fear, obligation, and guilt because we have built healthy boundaries for ourselves. Things that used to attract us are now things that repulse us. And learning how to distinguish between safe people and unsafe people so that we can keep our distance from unsafe people.

And this is triggering to people earlier in their healing process

...because they're often unintentionally 'unsafe people' who then are like "wait, but I'm not trying to hurt people, it's not my fault, people shouldn't abandon people who need help, that's not fair". And yet when they become healed, they themselves will keep their distance from unsafe or tricky people, they will need this information.

And so what we're really doing in the abuse community is we are convincing each other to rescue ourselves.

Or that we even need to be rescued in the first place, that we are not safe.
Or that we're unsafe and are unintentionally abusing others.
Or that we can't rescue the abuser.
Or that it's okay to let go.

There are so many different permutations of what people need, and that changes depending on where you are in the process.

Resources and tools are helpful and harmful, victim-blaming and resources: it depends on where you are.

What is poison at one point is medicine at another.

While watching this video on the impacts of climate change, this point on systems jumped out at me:

One piece of evidence comes from a 2023 paper that looked at temperature fluctuations in the Atlantic. The idea is that if the AMOC gets closer to collapsing, deviations from average get more extreme and they show correlations between each other. This is a general behaviour of systems near a critical point which has also been observed, for example, in stock markets close to a crash, or in Bose einstein condensates near the critical temperature, and so on.

and Sabine Hossenfelder made me realize something about abusive relationship dynamics: this systems theory applies to abuse dynamics.

An abuse dynamic reaches 'near a critical point' as it oscillates more between relationship extremes.

So while victims of abuse are looking at abuse/violence as an aberration - as something atypical to the relationship - the increasing abuse/violence is a "deviation from the average" that gets more extreme as the relationship reaches the point where it no longer practically functions as a relationship at all.

When someone is being abused, they often see each violent incident as an unusual event - something that's "not normal" for their relationship.

And they might justify or overlook the bad because of the good. But in reality, these violent outbursts are getting worse and more extreme as the relationship moves closer to failing as an actual relationship. But the good may seem to increase in extremes at first...however, the honeymoon part of the abuse cycle eventually disappears.

The escalating abuse shows the relationship (the system) is intrinsically unstable.

Just as with a 'system' collapse, a relationship collapse due to abuse is marked by increasing intensity, with events happening closer and closer together.

And the 7 signs/patterns of abusive thinking are intrinsically de-stabilizing to a relationship:

1. their feelings ('needs'/wants) always take priority

2. they feel that being right is more important than anything else

3. they justify their (problematic/abusive) actions because 'they're right'

4. image management (controlling the narrative and how others see them) because of how they acted in 'being right'

5. trying to control/change your thoughts/feelings/beliefs/actions

6. antagonistic relational paradigm (it's them v. you, you v. them, them v. others, others v. them - even if you don't know about it until they are angry)

7. inability see anything from someone else's perspective (they don't have to agree, but they should still be able to understand their perspective) this means they don't have a model of other people as fully realized human beings

Abusers always end up destabilizing relationships through their abuse, because their abuse turns their partner into a puppet, and therefore no relationship can exist.

For a relationship to exist, two people have to be in relation to each other. The abuser erases the other - slowly at first - escalating as the dynamic is more entrenched, the victim more trapped, and the abuser has more emotional blackmail against the victim.

Abuse destroys the very possibility of what it claims to be: a relationship.

When one person erases the humanity of another through escalating abuse and emotional blackmail, they're not creating a relationship - they're creating a hostage situation.

And so the relationship 'system' has escalating 'deviations from the average' that become more extreme as the abuser escalates in their abuse.

And the honeymoon phase of the cycle completely disappears.

Reading through the various types of boundaries below you may notice they are intertwined and interrelated. Healthy boundaries mean you understand your individual choices and how you feel in each of these areas.

You understand where you end and others begin.

You are responsible for you, and only you.

• Physical boundaries - your most basic physical boundary is your skin, your body. From infancy one begins to understand where he or she ends and others begin. That we are individuals. Other examples of physical boundaries are your personal space and physical privacy. Who is allowed and not allowed to touch you and how? What do you wish or not wish in your physical space and what you consider private and personal?

• Sexual boundaries - define your personal comfort level with sexual touch and activity. You define and decide as an individual what is acceptable, where, when, and with whom.

• Material boundaries - define what you do or don't allow regarding your property, what you gift or lend such as money, car, clothes, food, etc. Who is allowed in your home? Which rooms of your house are private? What can others do or not do with your belongings? Do visitors remove their shoes or not? Can others eat or drink in your car?

• Mental boundaries - define your thoughts, values, opinions. You own your thoughts. Each individual decides what is private, what they wish to share or not share. What do you believe? Can you listen with an open mind to others thoughts or opinion without becoming rigid while at the same time not compromising core beliefs?

• Emotional boundaries - mean you are responsible for your feelings and others are responsible for their own feelings. You own only your feelings, no one else's. How others choose to feel about your choices is their decision. This leaves everyone free make their own choices and decisions. Healthy emotional boundaries prevent one from giving unsolicited advice, blaming or accepting blame. Emotional boundaries protect you from feeling guilty for someone else's negative feelings or problems, from taking things personally. Becoming highly emotional, argumentative, or defensive may indicate weak emotional boundaries. Do you feel your emotions without judgement? Do you feel a full range of emotion - sad, mad, glad, scared - and can you readily and calmly respond to your emotions? Ignoring these emotions at a low level means the body will push them to a higher level until we respond. Can you make decisions without Fear Obligation Guilt (FOG)?

• Spiritual boundaries - define your attitudes and beliefs, what you choose to accept as true is yours alone to decide. What are your core values? What is important to you and your life? How do you define your beliefs in connection a higher power?

Other types of boundaries and things you own are your words, your time. Your words are yours, "no" is the most basic boundary and is a complete sentence. Your time belongs to you, what you choose to do, how you spend it and with whom is your decision. How we live our life is our choice. Your choices are yours to make, we sometimes feel stuck and feeling stuck is often basically a boundary problem. Holding others responsible for us or others holding us responsible for them.

-excerpted from the Out of The Fog website (content note: not a context of abuse)

For many of us, the love we received growing up felt transactional, contingent on achievement, behavior, or appearance.

Unfortunately, this dynamic often doesn't stay confined to childhood.

Instead, it operates like a shadow, shaping our relationships, self-worth, and even how we define love as adults.

Conditional love mirrors a concept from behavioral psychology called intermittent reward

—the idea that sporadic, unpredictable reinforcement can create [gambling] behaviors that are almost impossible to break. It's the reason people get addicted to slot machines: The occasional jackpot keeps them coming back, even after countless losses.

When a parent's affection is doled out inconsistently—after a perfect test score, a championship win, or exemplary behavior—we learn to associate love with performance.

Over time, we internalize the belief that love is something to earn, not something we inherently deserve. Unconditional love is an exclusive relationship based on ideal parenting when love is not predicated on transaction.

This pattern doesn't disappear with age.

As adults, we're often drawn to relationships that recreate the emotional dynamics of our childhoods. The highs and lows of intermittent reward become familiar—even comforting. We tolerate inconsistency because we've been conditioned to believe it’s just how love works. Freud called this behavior repetition compulsion.

Take love bombing, a manipulative tactic where someone showers you with excessive affection and praise to establish control.

For someone accustomed to conditional love, love bombing feels like winning the ultimate jackpot. Many people I see in my practice report feeling "special" when someone quickly praises them specifically for who they are. This was the feeling they got when a parent only occasionally doled out love and acceptance.

But just like an intermittent reward, love bombing comes with a catch.

The affection is often withdrawn as quickly as it’s given, leaving the recipient confused and desperate to return to the initial high. They begin working harder to 'earn' the love they felt initially, trapped in what ends up being both a thrilling and heartbreaking dynamic.

The good news is that recognizing these patterns is the first step toward change.

Here's how to start:

• Name the pattern: Reflect on your relationships—past and present. Are there parallels between the love you received growing up and the dynamics you experience now? Awareness is the first step. This is not an easy step because seeing our parents as anything but idealized can often be hard. It can be uncomfortable to realize you experienced conditional love growing up or that your parent(s) were selfish or narcissistic.

• Redefine love: Challenge the idea that love must be earned. [Research what love actually is and redefine it in a healthy way.]

• Prioritize consistency: Healthy relationships are steady, not dramatic. Seek out people who show up consistently—friends, partners, or mentors who make you feel safe, not uncertain. Slow and steady may win the race, but it does not create the highs associated with the thrill of intermittent reward. It can be tough letting go of the emotional high of feeling special.

• Mourn that you may never receive unconditional love: Yes, it’s a bitter pill to swallow. However, accepting that unconditional love is primarily parked in parent-child relationships is a critical step toward healthier romantic and friend relationships. The potent feeling of getting love bombed must be recognized for the emotional drug it certainly is. We can be loved and cherished, but as adults, we have conditions in our partnerships. That doesn't mean we don't love the other person. It just means we must also find a place of unconditional self-love.

The most profound reward isn't found in love from another that feels like an addiction—it's in learning to love ourselves, no strings attached.

-Keven Duffy, excerpted and adapted from When Romantic Attention Feels Like a Drug

The Instagram post:

"The abused will often speak highly of their abusers during the time they are oppressed. This is because they create pretty, wondrous narratives in order to survive. It's a survival technique. It does not contradict the story they will later divulge when they have escaped." - Heather O'Neill

and comments:

• "We're taught culturally to look for the positives in every situation, forced to for acceptance or to avoid being labeled 'bitch' or 'complainer'...I obeyed and named the positives - negatives too! - but no one cared about that. Think in the end I was desperately hoping seeing the positive would make them behave positively toward me (didn't happen)." - @nieceebird (adapted)

• 'Boy, do I despise myself for always and still justifying the abuse I experienced because I still empathize with my abusive ex. I've even told them I love and forgive them after the abuse, and their 'no response' got me into a spiral.' - @togrowagarden (adapted)

• 'This and the struggle to speak fully your truth once you reach your breaking point then feeling trapped in your own web of lies/false idolization of abuser, especially if the abuser is family/parent(s) because there's often still some level of protection of the abuser/guilt of hurting them/disrupting the family.' - Paige Ayame (excerpted and adapted)

• " I think maybe a lot of people dont want to accept the fact that they've been abused. And it is complicated. It's hard to see it when you're inside the spiderweb an abuser weaves, especially a sophisticated abuser..." - Williem Mäy (excerpted

• "And because once the abuser knows someone is on to them, they'll isolate you from them. I had to make sure everyone I cared about loved him or I knew I'd lose them." - Jess Paige

• "Especially when encouraged to do so by the other parent. Makes for very disorganized thinking/beliefs that’s very tough to sort out later." - Janine Wilkinson (excerpted)

• "Especially when they were feeding you lines to begin with. Eventually their puppetry becomes so ingrained that you speak as if those strings are still attached." - @chancey_coyote (adapted)

• "Also the abuser creates a narrative and gaslights you if you question it… they are amazing, you are the problem. Until you know better (which is also incredibly painful) you are doing as you’re trained." - @yo_phoenix_

...in college I was dating a girl and while we were together I was hired as an RA. As part of training to be an RA, we learned about several things, but one thing was about recognizing abusive relationships (to be able to help residents if they were in one). But I remember sitting through the session and them going through points, and I kept going to myself 'Hey, my gf does that to me!'."

After a few times, I determined to myself that I needed to dump her.

In my case, it was financial control (buy me a dinner while I'm at work or you don't love me), use of cell phone as an "electronic leash", verbal abuse and consistent put-downs, manipulation (trying to control my friends/other relationships).

-u/Beeb294, excerpted and collated from comment and comment

If you grew up in a chaotic or unpredictable home, nighttime may have become your only moment of control and quiet. Nighttime may have been the only time things felt calm or safe. You weren’t getting interrupted, judged, or expected to be 'on'. Staying up became your way of claiming peace and control.

Over time, you learned to rely on those late hours for safety and comfort. what might appear as a 'bad habit' is often a deeply ingrained survival strategy to reclaim a sense of calm.

-Nadia Addesi, excerpted and adapted from Instagram

adapted from comment

He flip flopped a lot with being really desperate for my approval to being super transactional and was eerily good at ignoring me when we were in the same space.

-u/gummotenenbaum, excerpted from comment

Why did I want to understand the economy?

Because I wanted to make money. What does that mean? What would you do? So around about that time, late 2010, early 2011, I was starting to understand that nobody had any idea what they were doing. See my job was to predict interest rates: to summarize quite aggressively, interest rates go down when the economy is weak and up when the economy is strong.

By the beginning of 2011, I had witnessed markets predict interest rates completely incorrectly for three years.

See cutting interest rates to zero is supposed to stimulate the economy, that's what we are taught at university. Due to the massive interest rate cuts in 2008, economists all expected the economy to bounce back sharply in 2009. It didn't. After that, economists expected the same thing to happen in 2010. It didn't. I didn't know at the time, but this pattern would actually continue for 13 years: economists in the UK predicted economic and interest rate recovery every single year from 2009 to 2020.

In 2020 they finally agreed that interest rates would actually never go up again.

What does that mean? Anyway, look I didn't know this at that time what I knew then was that the Traders and the economists had been wrong for three years: they were predicting economic recoveries that won't happen. Why?

In my opinion, the reason those traders and economists thought the economy would get better every single year from 2008 up till now is because for them we did get better.

For the rich, life got better and better and better pretty much every single year from 2008 up till now. So why did interest rate stay at zero that whole decade after 2010? I had an idea: the reason interest rates are supposed to stimulate the economy is because they're supposed to get you spending, but people weren't spending. And I asked a few of the traders why and they said - you know - there's problems with the banking sector which are fixed, now there's problems with confidence that are fixed now.

One time I asked an Oxford economics professor, 'why did you think spending was so weak after 2008'?

He said 'there was an exogenous shock to consumption savings preferences', so I decided to do something radical in the world of Economics. I went out and I started asking people 'have you had an exogenous shock to your consumption savings preferences?'

I'm going to read you a passage from my book because my publicist be delighted

This is what people said when I asked them why they weren't spending more money:

I asked Harry Sami - Harry was still just a kid. Harry had holes in his shoes, and he was jumping over the barriers on the tube to save costs: that's why he didn't spend money.

I asked Assad - Assad said his mom had sold the family home to support him and his sisters, and now he was sleeping on the sofa to try and save up a deposit: that's why they didn't spend money.

I asked Aiden - Aidan's mom had lost her job and hadn't been able to get a new rate on the mortgage, now the monthly payments were sky high, and Aidan was having to pay them himself: that's why they didn't spend money.

They were losing their homes.

I hadn't even noticed.

So you realize that the hundreds of billions of pounds they imported into the economy by governments and central banks aren't doing anything to protect ordinary people. Wery shortly after that, you recognize that basically every government in the world is bankrupt: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, but also the UK, the US, Japan. At that time early 2011, all of these governments had massive deficits that were growing: they were selling off their assets, they were going into debt they were losing their homes.

But if the government is losing its assets and going into debt, and the people are losing their assets and going into debt, then where are the assets going? and who's on the other side of the debt?

Then I look to the right of me and I look to the left of me, and I realized I was surrounded by millionaires: it was us, wasn't it? We were the balance. We were the boys who would be richer than our fathers in a world full of kids who'd be poor.

It was us.

We were the ones on the other side of the Italian government debt; we were the ones on the other side of Aidan's mom's mortgage; we would buy Assad's mom's house and rent it back to Assad's kids, and then we would have the house and the debt, too - would lend it back to them - and it would grow and it would grow and it would compound and it would compound.

The situation wouldn't get better, it would get worse.

It wasn't confidence, it was cancer. It was never going to get better. What does that mean? I knew what it meant: it meant I had to buy a green euro dollar futures - that's a bet on interest rates. At that time everybody thought interest rates would go up, but they wouldn't. I put that bet on a massive size, and by the end of the year I was City Bank's most profitable trader in the world and City Bank paid me $2 million and said, "Well done mate, do it again." What does that mean? What would you do?

I did it one more year, I am not going to lie to you.

The next year I was sitting at my desk and I said to one of the young traders who I worked with, 'do you think we should do something?' He said to me, 'what do you mean?' I said, 'you think we should do something about the collapsing economy?' He said, 'what do you mean?' I said, 'do you think we should do something?' He said, 'we bought the green euro dollars, what do you want?' I said, 'I don't think this is about the green euro dollars - you know - do you think we should do something about the collapsing economy?' He said to me, 'sorry, I don't understand, what do you mean?'

I tried to explain to him that maybe we as wealthy people with an understanding of the problematic economy should do something to make it better, and he said to me, 'Gary, that's impossible'...and I knew, of course, that he was right, but for some reason I quit my job anyway.

And I would love to tell you it's because I'm a good person, because I'm a nice guy, but the truth is it's because I was sick: I wanted to sit there and make more money, but I was losing weight every single day. I'd bought a new luxury apartment and I'd ripped all of the furnishings out, but for some reason I couldn't buy more, and I used to sleep on a mattress on a bare concrete floor with white plaster walls

...and every day I trade a trillion dollars and be City Bank's most profitable trader in the world.

First, I tried to work for a think tank, and I made a website called Wealth Economics - it's still up, you can look it if you want - explaining that if you don't fix wealth inequality, the economy will collapse.

This theory made me millions of dollars...nobody looked at the website.

You can still look it if you want, but of course nobody's going to look at the website. Nobody knows who you are, so what do you do? So you go back to university - you go back to university, you go to Oxford - the best university in the world (pretentious) - and you go to your first lecture on interest rates.

And at this point you've just stopped being the world's most profitable interest rates trader.

And you go to the lecture and you say, 'hey, can we talk about why we've been so wrong about interest rates for the past 10 years?' And he says to you, 'oh, we always knew interest rates would stay zero.' And you say to him, 'no, you didn't - you predicted it wrong for 10 years in a row', and he says, 'no, we knew we knew'. And you say to him, 'okay, well, I'll go home and I'll send you the data', and he says, 'oh yeah, you're right, we were wrong for 10 years', and it don't go no further.

And you go to your midyear review, and you sit there with your college professors, and they ask you what you think of the course.

You told them it's not very good...and they say, 'why don't you like it?' and I say, 'why don't you talk about people's economic problems?', and they turn around and they say 'what do you mean? the economy is good'. And you sit there with these three men in capes, in this wood paneled hall, and you hear these two unspoken words reverberate back from the walls: it's good for us.

So you decide you have to leave university and you have to try and do something more active.

You have to go out and you have to speak to people directly. You have to tell them if things don't get better, if there's no action on inequality, that their lives are going to get worse and worse.

Then immediately there's a pandemic and the government gives out 800 billion pounds, and you can see from the analysis right at the beginning that that money will be accumulated by the rich.

And nobody at the universities, in the opposition party, in the government, in the Civil Service, in the central banks even asked the question of 'who's going to accumulate this 800 billion dollars?' So you put a massive bet on increasing asset prices and you make 3,000 pounds. ...but you also make a YouTube channel when you try and tell people: this is going to happen. You write in The Guardian that there's going to be a massive crisis of inequality, falling living standards. At the same time, Larry Elliot - chief economics correspondent of The Guardian - predicts that house prices will collapse.

3 years later, you were right and Larry Elliot was wrong; obviously, nobody remembers.

...and you work and you work and eventually you manage to build up a following, you put up videos every week. People turn around to you and say, 'there's no point, there's nothing you can do, there's no way to stop it'. So what do you do?

I want to speak to you about an event I spoke at

...and I sat on the stage and I told them in a much shorter version what I just told you, that the economy will collapse and it will get worse and worse - I'm not just saying it, I'm betting on it - I make hundreds of thousands pounds on it every year. I've made millions of pounds on it in my life. And the woman next to you, who by all accounts seems like a very nice woman, says, 'what gives me hope is that the economy is like nature: sometimes it gets better, and sometimes it gets worse'.

And what I heard when she said that was 'my life's comfortable, I ain't going to do nothing'.

And you start thinking it's impossible, isn't it, because the poor are struggling to put food on the table, you expect them to stand up and defend themselves? And the rich have got kitchen renovations to worry about, so they're too busy to help. The problem is: people are inherently selfish, right? Maybe there's no way out. Maybe this is just inevitable, it's the way things work in society.

And then I got sent to do a story in Colban?? which is in Northern Yorkshire.

It was about how Rishi Sunak is the richest MP ever, and I was going to go to a food bank and I was going to ask them 'how do you feel about having the richest ever MP in history?'. And just coincidentally it happened that Russia invaded Ukraine the previous weekend before I went up there, and the food bank that I was visiting had been converted into a place to sort the donations that were going to be sent to Ukraine. And it was full of people sorting clothes and medicine and food into different bin bags, and there were three guys there with vans that were going to drive the stuff all the way there to Ukraine themselves.

And I started asking the people, 'who are these people doing this?' and you find out: it's the users of the food bank.

Maybe people aren't inherently selfish after all.

There's a story in the Bible it's called "The Widows Mite"

...and it talks about all the people who give money extravagantly to charity, to religion, and it talks about one widow who just put two small copper coins in the box. And apparently - I never met him - Jesus said,

'She's given more than everybody else, for all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God, but she of her penury have cast in all the living that she had.'

Maybe people are inherently selfish, I don't know: what do you think?

I wanted to read a little bit from a book that I like ??? from Camus: this book's called "The Plague", and he talks about what people do in society that's collapsing - apparently it's about the Nazis, but I didn't know because it's a metaphor or something - and what he says is that basically when society collapses most people go crazy, but some people don't.

"And there's a group of people that started trying to fight the plague. Camus says they started work the very next day and must be the first team that was to be followed by many others. However, it is not the narrator's intention to attribute more significance to these health groups than they actually had. It is true that nowadays many of our fellow citizens would, in his place, succumb to the temptation to exaggerate their role, but the narrator is rather inclined to believe that by giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men. The narrator does not share this view. The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and good will can cause as much damage as ill will if it is not enlightened."

Camus thinks that when you are in a society that is collapsing, your job is to stop it from collapsing.

Camus thinks that's how you be human. But there are a lot of people in this town that don't agree, and he speaks about this as well. In Camus' words,

"A lot of new moralists appeared in the town at this moment, saying that nothing was any use and that we should go down on our knees. Tarru, Ryu, and their friends could answer this or that, but the conclusion was always what they knew it would be: one must fight in one way or another, and not go down on one's knees."

I found that very moving when I read that.

Now in Camus' story, most people, when society collapses, go crazy.

They become extremely religious, or they become extremely hedonistic, or they become extremely greedy and they try to make money. They become really angry and try to find people to hate. And I think this is natural, you know.

I think this is what happens when societies collapse, and I don't think we can blame people for doing this.

Disaster is a hard thing to face. And look, I see, I see the madness: if you got a social media platform getting a thousand comments every day, you'd see the madness in society. I don't blame people for falling into madness.

Some of you will fall into madness too, maybe you already have done - into selfishness, into greed, into nihilism.

But I can't blame you. It's very human.

And society will tell you you have a choice in the face of disaster: to turn away, to tell yourself a story that it's not real, that it's not going to happen, that it's only natural

-the changing of the seasons. And if you do that, you can probably do what you wanted to do all along. You can be selfish, you can ignore it. You can get that kitchen renovation and you can tell yourself that the poverty that is growing in society, that the plague that is infecting everybody else, may never darken your door. And you don't have to do what the biblical widow did. You don't have to give everything in the face of chaos. You have a choice to make, right?

You have to choose either yourself or others.

You know, I worked in Japan for a couple of years, and at that time I lost my mind. I fell into a deep depression. And I spoke to my Japanese junior and I told him how watching these millionaires obsess about money as the world collapsed around them made me sick, and how I couldn't eat and how I couldn't sleep. That kid, his name was Kos, and his English wasn't good.

He said to me, "Yes, yes, I understand. The problem is these men have very small hearts."

You know, sometimes I wonder, sometimes I wonder why it's me up here from a broken home, broken family, from poverty, struggling often with my mental health, sometimes struggling to get out of bed every day. Sometimes I wonder where all the good kids are - all the nice kids with the nice families that go home to lovely big houses and have lovely meals and lovely dining tables. Where are they? Why is it me?

What are we? What are we as humans?

Are we people who have to choose between ourselves and others? Do our hearts have only room for one of these ideas, or can we be something more? Can we be bigger? Can we be people who care not only for ourselves, our immediate families, us as individuals, but those around us, society as well? Can we fit both of these things into our hearts?

Can we take what we need but also more than that - after that find something left to give, even if it's only two copper coins?

I believe that we can. No, I don't believe that. I believe that we have to. If we don't, the thing will collapse. But to finish, I would like to answer the question for me - and you will have your own opinions - what does it mean to be human in a time of disaster? What does it mean to be human in a collapsing economy?

And me personally, I agree with Camus: the job of a human in face of a disaster is to try to prevent that disaster.

That's what I'll be trying to do, and I hope you'll try to. Good luck. Thank you.

-Gary Stevenson, excerpted and adapted from How to live in a collapsing economy from his speech at Cambridge in March 2024