9 Ways Survivors Gaslight Themselves After the Abuse Ends

You learned their tricks too well.

When you finally escape an abuser, everyone expects you to celebrate.
They think you’ll feel free.
They imagine you dancing around your apartment, grateful to have survived.

But that’s not how it works.
You don’t feel free. You feel haunted.
You feel like you’ve been dropped in a quiet room that suddenly got too loud.
Your heart keeps racing even though the threat is gone.
You wait for the next hit that never comes.

That’s what nobody talks about — the fact that after the abuse ends, you start doing the abuser’s job for them.
They don’t have to gaslight you anymore. You keep doing it yourself.
Their voice becomes your inner narrator.
You argue with it. You beg it to stop. You defend it.
And somewhere in that mess, you start believing the same lies they taught you.

Let’s name them. Let’s drag them into the light and burn them one by one.

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1. “It wasn’t that bad.”

That sentence is poison dressed as perspective.
You tell yourself that to survive.
You minimize it because admitting the full truth feels like opening a wound that never stopped bleeding.

You remember the good moments. The apologies. The calm nights. You try to balance the scales in your head because the weight of reality feels too heavy to carry.

But your body knows the truth.
That shaking in your hands, that pit in your stomach, that flash of panic when you hear their name — that’s not exaggeration. That’s evidence.
Your nervous system remembers what your mind is still trying to bury.

It was that bad.
And you don’t have to keep pretending it wasn’t.

2. “Maybe I overreacted.”

No, you finally reacted.
You reached your breaking point and called bullshit on the person who built an entire world out of it.

When someone has trained you to believe that calm equals safety, anger feels like danger.
But your anger wasn’t destruction. It was resurrection.
It was the moment your voice returned.

They called it overreacting because they lost control the moment you stopped apologizing.

You were not crazy. You were finally awake.
And they hated that.

3. “If I were stronger, I’d be over it by now.”

People love to tell survivors to “just move on.”
They say it like healing is a to-do list you forgot to finish.

But trauma doesn’t run on a schedule.
Your brain is still untangling years of manipulation, fear, and adrenaline. That takes time.
You don’t heal by forcing it. You heal by giving your body permission to feel safe again.

Strength isn’t pretending you’re fine. Strength is waking up every day and choosing not to disappear.

You’re not behind. You’re rebuilding from rubble.

4. “They’re probably doing better than me.”

Of course they are. They’ve been rehearsing it their whole life.
Predators don’t process pain. They perform through it.
They reinvent themselves every few months because they can’t sit still long enough to face what they’ve done.

Don’t confuse speed with healing.
Don’t confuse silence with peace.
Don’t confuse an Instagram post with a conscience.

You’re not supposed to look like them. You’re supposed to outgrow them.
You’re building a life from the ashes they left behind. That takes longer, but it lasts forever.

5. “Maybe they didn’t mean to hurt me.”

Stop grading their intentions like that makes the pain hurt less.
They knew what they were doing. They just knew you’d forgive them faster if they acted confused about it.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it” is not an apology. It’s a reset button.
It’s how they wash their hands without ever touching the mess.

Impact matters more than intent.
If it broke you, it was real.
If they saw you cry and kept doing it, that was not an accident.

They meant to protect their power. That’s all that matters.

6. “Other people have it worse.”

This is how you silence yourself while thinking you’re being humble.
You tell yourself to be grateful, to stop complaining, to toughen up because someone else might have scars you can see.

But trauma isn’t a competition. There’s no medal for suffering quietly.
Pain is pain.
And the fact that you survived doesn’t mean you deserved it.

Your story deserves to exist even if someone else’s looks louder.
You’re allowed to take up space.
You’re allowed to need help.
You’re allowed to say, “This broke me,” without following it up with, “But others have it worse.”

7. “I should have seen it coming.”

You couldn’t have.
They built an entire performance to make sure you didn’t.

Abusers don’t come in shouting. They come in whispering.
They mirror your dreams. They memorize your fears. They present as exactly what you’ve always wanted.
By the time the mask slips, you’re too invested to run.

Stop calling that blindness.
It was trust. It was hope. It was humanity.

You didn’t fail to see it. You refused to believe someone could be that cruel on purpose.

That’s not stupidity. That’s innocence. And innocence is not a crime.

8. “I still think about them, so maybe I’m not over it.”

You will think about them for a while. That’s not obsession. That’s the brain trying to make sense of something senseless.

You replay conversations because your mind is still running diagnostics.
It’s trying to figure out how something that looked like love turned into harm.
That’s not weakness. That’s processing.

Thinking about them doesn’t mean you want them back. It means your brain finally has the safety to remember what it couldn’t before.

You’re not stuck. You’re integrating.

9. “Maybe I’m the problem.”

Every survivor eventually lands here.
Because the human mind would rather blame itself than accept that someone who said they loved you wanted to break you.

But self-blame is just control wearing your face.
It’s the echo of their manipulation bouncing around your skull.

The moment you start asking, “Wait, why do I keep apologizing for things I didn’t do?” is the moment the spell starts to crack.
That’s the moment your voice returns.

You were never the problem.
You were the one who kept trying to fix things that were designed to stay broken.

You were surviving in a rigged game.
And the fact that you’re still here proves you already won.

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The hardest part of healing isn’t getting away from them.
It’s getting away from the version of you they programmed.

The people-pleaser. The explainer. The overthinker.
The one who bends reality just to feel safe.
The one who apologizes for existing.

That version of you was a survival tool.
It kept you alive.
But it’s not who you are anymore.

You are not crazy. You are recalibrating.
You are not broken. You are remembering who you were before the conditioning.
You are not behind. You are finally free enough to rest.

You are not overreacting. You are finally reacting in real time.
You are not dramatic. You are detailed.
You are not weak. You are healing.

You were never exaggerating. You were surviving.

If this hit somewhere deep

That means you’re ready to stop apologizing for your story.
You’re ready to see yourself clearly, without their voice narrating over it.

If you want to keep digging into what real healing looks like — the kind that doesn’t sound like a TED Talk — consider becoming a paid subscriber to Kill The Silence.

It keeps this movement raw, independent, and untouchable.
And it helps me keep writing the kind of work that tells survivors the truth, not what they’re expected to say.

Subscribe. Speak. Heal.
Because the silence ends when you start telling the truth — even to yourself.
You can recognize someone else’s suffering and still honor your own.

You do not heal by invalidating yourself.
You heal by telling the truth about what happened to you.

Saying “others have it worse” is another way of saying “my pain doesn’t matter.”
It does.
Your pain matters. Your story matters. You matter.

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7. “I should have seen it coming.”

This is survivor guilt disguised as insight.
You replay every red flag and think, “How did I miss that?”

You didn’t miss it.
They hid it. They disguised it as love, as vulnerability, as soul connection.

Abuse doesn’t start with cruelty. It starts with charm.
Predators know how to study empathy. They mirror what you crave.

You could not have seen it coming because you were never supposed to.
They designed it that way.

Stop punishing yourself for not predicting manipulation you’d never experienced before.
You were surviving, not naive.

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8. “I still think about them, so maybe I’m not over it.”

That thought is not longing. It’s the mind trying to make sense of unfinished chaos.
Intrusive memories are not proof of love. They’re the body’s attempt to file trauma into order.

You’re not weak for remembering. You’re processing.
Healing doesn’t mean forgetting.
It means remembering safely.

You don’t have to delete them from your brain. You just have to delete their influence from your choices.

You were surviving. And your brain is still catching up to your freedom.

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9. “Maybe I’m the problem.”

No, you’re not.
That’s the oldest trick in the book.
They conditioned you to question your perception so you’d never trust it again.

That internal voice that second-guesses everything—that’s not intuition. That’s programming.
You don’t need to silence it. You need to recognize it for what it is: a leftover echo of manipulation.

Every time you pause before apologizing for things you didn’t do, you’re breaking that pattern.
Every time you say, “No, that actually did happen,” you’re reclaiming your reality.

You were never the problem. You were the target.
And you survived.

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The hardest part of recovery isn’t getting away from the abuser.
It’s getting away from the version of yourself they trained you to be.

You learned their language. You learned their logic. You learned their rules.
Now you’re unlearning all of it.

That’s not weakness. That’s evolution.
You didn’t become like them. You became fluent in their tactics.
And now you’re teaching yourself a new language — one built on truth instead of control.

You are not crazy. You are deprogramming.
You are not broken. You are rebuilding.
You are not behind. You are becoming.

You were never exaggerating.
You were surviving.

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If this resonated with you

If you caught yourself in any of these thoughts, that’s not a setback. That’s awareness.
And awareness is the first sign that you’re not under their spell anymore.

If you want to keep unpacking the psychology of survival, self-trust, and healing from people who weaponized care — consider going paid on Kill The Silence.

It keeps this platform independent, honest, and impossible to silence.
Your support helps me keep creating work that exposes the truth and gives survivors language for what they lived through.

Subscribe. Speak. Heal.
Because the silence only ends when we stop gaslighting ourselves.

—Cody Taymore

Kill The Silence

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