I was sitting on the floor when she threatened to push me down the stairs.

I had always sat on the floor. I thought it was comfortable, told myself that it was a preference, my body had been making itself small without me choosing it – trained into diminishment so gradually it had stopped feeling like a choice.

I stood up.

Got in her face.

“Go on then.”

And walked down the stairs in front of her.

This is the story of how I got there.

Photo credit: Edwin Rodriguezo Virgilio

The Set Up

She told me she was depressed and hinted she might hurt herself.

I had already lost someone to suicide. I couldn’t do it again.

I moved in, donated everything I owned, moved from a house into a bedroom and got rid of it all – because I chose to. I showed up. I kept showing up. I didn’t stop showing up.

She ignored the people she lived with.

Daily coffee at her door, checking in with no pressure and no expectations – for months. I paid her rent. Having given up everything I owned.

Wounds do what they need to do to feel safe. Hers needed control. Mine couldn’t leave. Neither of us chose that, and neither of us could see it from the inside.

I actually told her: “In the back of my head I keep hearing – she’s manipulating you. But I’m choosing to ignore it.” I told her exactly what was working and how far I was willing to let it go.

The grief was genuine. The love was genuine. What grew inside all of that was real too – regardless of what either of us intended.

Everything that followed happened inside a life I had already emptied out for her.

Photo credit: Liana S

Empathy is Dangerous

My empathy is now dangerous, and the person it endangers is me.

The part of me that shows up, that stays, that gives without agenda and asks for nothing back – the part that waited outside a closed door with coffee every morning because someone hinted they might hurt themselves.

That part got used. Used with precision, by someone who knew exactly where to poke it.

Checking in on someone now sets my nervous system on fire. My body expects a trap. It doesn’t matter what my mind knows. The moment I move toward someone with genuine, agenda-free care, something ancient activates, braces, and waits for danger.

That’s what this did. It reached into the most intact part of me – the part that shows up, that gives without needing anything in return, that stays – and taught it to be afraid of itself.

The List

She paused. “Is there another way to respond?”

The question stopped me completely. I didn’t know. I had spent my entire life choosing to absorb it or escape. I didn’t know there was anything else. She asked me to make a list of other responses.

I went home and made the list.

I had been seeing a counsellor. I was trying to make sense of the madness. I didn’t know then that I was going to need it in three days.

Photo Credit : engin akyurt

Seven

The candles blew out, I turned around to ask where we should eat the cake.

She launched forward and yelled “If you get crumbs on the cushions I’ll fucking cut you.”

I froze mid-movement, and everything went empty.

Then my child’s face.

I remembered why I was there. I remembered the list.

I had been studying for months by this point. I was starting to see the shape of what she did, starting to recognise the moves as they happened. This was a move. I knew what to do.

“Well we better not give her the knife then,”

One person laughed. Awkwardly. Because that’s what people do when they don’t have another option.

We ate the cake.

I held it together for my child, for the room, for the wish that had just been made in candlelight. But I felt every second of it sitting in my body long after the plates were cleared – the effort of staying present when everything in me wanted to run, the specific weight of smiling through something that had no business being in that room.

My child was seven. It was their birthday. They deserved better than what just happened in that room.

So did I.

Photo Credit : Tim Mossholder

Plausible Deniability

In coercive control a threat that’s laced with doubt is called plausible deniability.

It was a joke. Can’t you take a joke. You’re so sensitive.

In psychoanalytic terms it’s a defence mechanism – humour used to discharge something that would otherwise require accountability, to say the unsayable and hide behind the laugh.

The threat lands in your nervous system exactly as a threat, your body knowing before your mind catches up. Then comes the joke – three words that make your response the problem before you’ve even had one. Now you’re defending your reaction instead of the original violation. The threat has disappeared and you’re holding something that apparently never happened.

Part of me believed it. Part of me wondered – again – if I was the problem.

Two people were in the room that day. He heard what she said.

He laughed.

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Spiritual Warfare

That morning she slapped me on the ass. My body filled with panic before I had words for why. She wanted to go out. I told her I needed to calm down first.

She got in my face.

“Harden the fuck up.”

That evening I did the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done and came out to her anyway.

What followed I have called spiritual warfare and I don’t have a better word for it. Watching someone’s shadow detonate in real time. I had been reading Jung, reading Freud, studying the mechanics of it – and then I had a front row seat to the live version.

“You only came out for you, didn’t you.”

It was an accusation, not a question. My truth reframed as something I did to her. My authenticity as aggression.

I felt the urge to apologise and take it back, to make her comfortable at the expense of my truth. It was overwhelming. Sixteen years of conditioning doesn’t disappear because you’ve done some healing work.

She Loved It

She had him in her room one evening while I was doing the dishes. She kept coming out – removing a bit of clothing each time, standing next to me, going back in. She loved it.

I had just told her I had feelings for her.

That night my entire room shook. The house was on stilts and there was no getting away from it.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was the past repeating itself. Back then, I filed it deep and told myself I was fine.

But this time I was exposed and I cracked.

The pain was the kind that takes your legs out and sits on your chest until breathing becomes something you have to remember to do. Every version of this I had ever pushed down came to the surface simultaneously and it had nowhere to go. I was alone. I just had to feel it – all the way through – because the alternative was worse.

She loved watching me break. And I knew she loved it.

Photo Credit: noah eleazar

DARVO

I told her I would move out. She told him that I said they couldn’t have sex.

My boundary became the violation, my limit reframed as control, my pain reframed as aggression, and suddenly I was the one who had done something wrong.

Then she kept going, watching, waiting for the collapse she was certain was coming. There were moments I genuinely didn’t know if I was going to survive it.

Staying regulated meant carrying the loneliness of someone standing close enough to watch your face for cracks, the exhaustion of seeing clearly in a room full of people invested in a different version of reality, of holding the truth alone because naming it would only be used against me. It cost everything I had.

The Extinction Burst

“Things would be different if you said you would kill yourself.”

She literally asked me to threaten suicide. She used my life as leverage because that, apparently, was the ransom for being treated with basic decency.

She had watched me prove more than once that I would give up everything when someone I loved burned everything down. She had been inside my head the entire time, and now she wanted total control.

“That’s not going to happen,”I replied.

An extinction burst is what happens when control stops working. It looks like a child bashing a toy that won’t do what it’s supposed to – escalating, getting louder and more frantic, until they hurl it across the room. The tactics don’t stop, they just drop the pretence. She wasn’t trying to manipulate me anymore. She was asking me outright.

And I was done.

Photo Credit : Daniel Dan

Screenshots

“Even the best spiritual teachers do it.”

I had clocked him and he knew it.

“Well they aren’t very spiritual then.” I countered.

She already knew, or wasn’t surprised when I told her. Either way she had been working with the full picture while handing me fragments.

She suggested I start dating men, not women, so I arranged a date.

The day I was due to leave he said something as I was heading out the door. I don’t remember the exact words. I remember the feeling – something in my gut pulling me back. I sat at the beach for hours meditating instead.

When I got back I heard him say quietly – “I don’t think she went.”

That night I sent her a message. I told her I hadn’t gone on the date because my intuition told me I shouldn’t – because of her. I cracked myself open and handed it to her because I still believed – despite everything – that she was someone I could trust.

She had been waiting for this. I had just handed her what she needed.

Screenshots. In them she performed indifference – cool, uninvolved, uninterested. The same person who had said “what is this, our wedding”, who had said “I’m running out of lube” in passing and watched me absorb it in silence – who had made her interest felt in private, never quite enough to name – who had drawn out the very feelings she was now using as evidence against me.

She tried to use the screenshots to triangulate me. She had them on her computer, prepared in advance, ready to present as evidence that I was the problem.

The moments I had been most open, most honest, most myself – weaponised.

Photo Credit: Bennett Frazier

I’m Not Playing

Emotional regulation looks calm from the outside. From the inside, you’re feeling the full force of the pain – the crack, the excruciating weight, the loneliness of carrying the truth alone – and still choosing what you do next.

The joke is the tactic. The aggression is the enforcement. Your nervous system needs to be ready for both – because they arrive in the same room, sometimes minutes apart, sometimes on your child’s birthday.

Plausible deniability works by splitting your attention. You’re managing the threat and the social script simultaneously. The confusion is the point. While you’re deciding whether it was a joke, the violation has already landed and the moment to call it out has already passed.

The witnesses froze. They didn’t have another option loaded. The tactic doesn’t just work on the target – it works on everyone in the room.

Preparation is the only counter, and it can’t happen in the moment – it has to happen before. A question someone asks you days earlier. A list you make without knowing you’ll need it. Months of building capacity to stay in your body when everything in you wants to run.

Is there another way to respond?

There is. But you have to find it before the room goes silent.

My child doesn’t remember that birthday.

Anna Roters

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