The Abuse You Don’t See Until You’re Free
How covert abuse traps you in plain sight — and the first step to reclaiming your freedom is learning to trust your own decisions again.
You don’t spot it when you’re in it.
You call it help. You call it family. You call it therapy.
You only start calling it what it really is when the air hits your lungs for the first time in years.
The Hook They Bury the Deepest
Here’s the thing about covert abuse: you can’t measure it while it’s happening. There’s no bruise to show your friends. No broken bone to point to. The damage is in how your brain starts narrating the world to you — their voice inside your head telling you what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what’s true, what’s “all in your head.”
And if you’ve survived real hell, you’re even more vulnerable to it. Not because you’re weak — but because you’ve been trained to normalize pain, to work through it, to keep showing up.
Abuse wrapped in kindness is still abuse. It’s just harder to leave.
What It Looked Like in My Life
I’ve lived through the obvious abuse — the kind strangers would call abuse without hesitation. Childhood sexual abuse. Violence at home. Addiction.
But the one that almost killed me didn’t look like that.
It looked like a licensed mental health professional with degrees on the wall and a soft voice in her office. It looked like five years of therapy sessions where I bled my history onto her notebook, trusting her with the deepest wounds of my life.
It looked like her using my ADHD diagnosis like a roadmap for control. It looked like “unconventional support” that blurred into dependency. It looked like being told which people in my life were “dangerous” until my entire support system was gone and she was the only one left.
It looked like contracts disguised as protection, designed to keep me paying her and obeying her.
It looked like “I’m the only one who understands you” whispered right after she threatened to ruin my career.
The Red Flags I Didn’t See Until I Was Out
When you’re in it, you don’t see red flags. You see what they tell you to see.
Looking back now, here’s what stands out:
Isolation disguised as care. “They’re toxic. They don’t understand you like I do.”
Boundaries blurred until they didn’t exist. Home visits. Gifts. Trips together. All under the power dynamic of therapist–patient.
Fear as currency. Threats of exposing my past, leveraging my grief, using her own child as emotional blackmail.
Control over my reality. Who I talked to, where I went, how I spent my time.
Financial entanglement. Contracts with payment schedules designed to dodge federal reporting, bleeding me dry.
If someone controls your choices, they control your life. That’s not support. That’s captivity.
Why Covert Abuse Works So Well
You can’t escape what you can’t name. And covert abuse works by keeping you just functional enough to question whether it’s abuse at all.
They give you moments of relief — a kind gesture, a compliment, a night you don’t feel under threat — so you doubt yourself. They spin elaborate justifications for every boundary they cross, often framed as “for your own good.”
And because you’ve already survived worse, your threshold for “unacceptable” is higher than most people can imagine.
The Day I Knew I Was Done
Leaving didn’t start with courage. It started with exhaustion.
One day I realized I was too tired to keep defending myself, too tired to keep justifying why I deserved to make my own choices. And something in me broke — not the part they’d been trying to break, but the part they’d underestimated.
I stopped asking for their version of events. I started writing down my own. Every receipt. Every text. Every transfer.
And when the dust cleared, I saw what it was: not a friendship, not help, not care. It was calculated exploitation — psychological, financial, and emotional.
If You’re In It Right Now
If your gut is screaming but your brain keeps saying “they’re just trying to help,” here’s what I wish someone had told me sooner:
Support doesn’t require isolation. If they’re cutting you off from people who care about you, it’s not support.
Boundaries go both ways. If they can cross yours whenever they want but you can’t cross theirs, that’s control.
Fear is not a treatment plan. If you’re afraid of what they’ll do if you say no, you’re already in danger.
You don’t need proof to leave. You don’t need them to admit it. You don’t need the perfect exit plan. You just need to start stepping away.
The Freedom You Don’t Know You’re Missing
When you get out, your body notices before your brain does. The tension in your shoulders eases. You start sleeping through the night. You realize you haven’t flinched at a notification in days.
Then your brain catches up.
You look back and think, How did I not see it? But that’s the wrong question. The right question is, How the hell did I survive it?
And the answer is: you already knew how. You’d been surviving long before they showed up.
One Thing That Helped Me Stop Second-Guessing
When you’ve lived in chaos long enough, even freedom can feel disorienting. Every choice feels loaded. Every decision feels like it might be the wrong one.
For me, one of the hardest parts after getting out was learning how to trust my own judgment again. I’d spent years having every choice questioned, overridden, or controlled.
That’s why I created a decision-making tool that strips away the noise and gets you to clarity fast — especially when your head is spinning and you can’t tell if you’re making the “right” move or just reacting to fear.
It’s the same process I wish I had back then — something to cut through the second-guessing and remind me I could act without apologizing for it later.
If you’re ready to start making decisions without feeling like you need permission, you can grab it here:
—Cody Taymore
Kill The Silence