For a long time, I never asked myself, Am I being abused?
I was asking completely different questions.
Why am I creating so many problems? Why can’t I keep my marriage peaceful? Why does everything somehow become a fight? Why can’t I make her happy?
And eventually, the question became:
What is wrong with me?
Looking back, this was one of the biggest reasons I couldn’t recognize what was happening. I knew something was wrong. I was just looking for the problem inside myself.
I Didn’t Think an Abusive Relationship Could Have So Many Good Days
I had a very simple picture of abuse in my head.
Someone is cruel. The victim suffers. The relationship is obviously terrible. Surely the person being abused knows that something terrible is happening to them.
My marriage didn’t look like that every day.
There were genuinely good periods. We could laugh together, talk normally, feel close and behave like a very loving couple.
Sometimes, after days of fighting, we would suddenly have a few peaceful days. During those periods I would think, This is the real us. We just need to stop fighting.
That hope mattered enormously.
If somebody had asked me during one of those good periods whether my marriage was abusive, I might genuinely have said no. I wasn’t looking at the relationship as a whole. I was looking at that particular day.
And today was good.
That was often enough to make yesterday feel less important.
My Own Mistakes Made Everything Harder to See
This is one part of abusive relationships that I think can get oversimplified.
I wasn’t perfect.
I had alcoholism in my history. I had made mistakes. I had hurt people. There were things about myself that genuinely needed to change, and eventually I did take responsibility for them.
The problem was that because some criticism of me was legitimate, I gradually started assuming that almost every criticism of me must be legitimate.
That distinction disappeared.
If I had done something wrong years earlier and it was being used to justify controlling me today, I focused on what I had done years earlier.
If something happening to me felt unfair, another thought immediately appeared:
But look at what you did.
So instead of asking:
Is what is happening to me now reasonable?
I kept asking:
Do I even have the right to complain after the mistakes I’ve made?
Those are two completely different questions.
It took me years to understand that.
Accountability Slowly Became Permanent Guilt
Taking responsibility for something you’ve done is healthy.
Living permanently on trial for it isn’t.
But I couldn’t see where one ended and the other began.
I thought accountability meant accepting whatever consequences came afterwards. If someone was still hurt by something I had done, perhaps they had the right to keep checking, questioning, accusing or controlling me.
And because I desperately wanted to prove that I had changed, I kept cooperating.
One more explanation. One more reassurance. One more compromise. One more piece of privacy surrendered.
I believed there would eventually be a point where I had proved myself enough.
There wasn’t.
Accountability had quietly become permanent guilt.
And when you feel permanently guilty, it becomes very difficult to recognize when somebody else is crossing a line.
I Kept Explaining Her Behaviour for Her
I could almost always find a reason for what was happening.
Maybe she was insecure. Maybe she was afraid of losing me. Maybe something I had done had damaged her trust. Maybe she had her own pain. Maybe she genuinely believed she was doing the right thing.
One thought returned again and again:
She isn’t doing this intentionally.
That thought kept me stuck for a very long time.
Because if she didn’t intend to hurt me, how could I call what was happening abuse?
Eventually I had to understand something much simpler: intent and impact are not the same thing.
A person can have reasons for behaving the way they do. Those reasons do not automatically make the behaviour healthy.
I could have compassion for what she felt while still acknowledging what the relationship was doing to me.
But at the time, almost all my compassion went into understanding her.
Very little went into understanding myself.
The Signs Didn’t Arrive as a Checklist
Today, if you search for signs of narcissistic abuse, you’ll find words like gaslighting, control, isolation, blame shifting, criticism and walking on eggshells.
Those descriptions can be useful.
But that wasn’t how I experienced them.
I didn’t wake up one morning and think, Today I am experiencing gaslighting.
I experienced an argument.
Then another argument.
Then a few peaceful days.
Then an accusation. I defended myself. I explained. I apologized. Things became loving again.
Then something else happened.
You don’t live a relationship as a checklist. You live it one day at a time.
That’s part of what makes these patterns so difficult to recognize while you’re still inside them.
One incident can be explained away.
So can another.
And another.
The pattern becomes harder to explain only when you manage to stand far enough back to see all of it together.
I Was Waiting for One Incident That Would Prove Everything
Part of me wanted certainty.
I wanted one incident so extreme that nobody, including me, could explain it away.
Something that would finally allow me to say:
There. Now I know.
But much of my experience wasn’t like that.
It was accumulation.
Things I stopped saying because they might create another fight. People I spoke to less. Topics I avoided. Privacy I surrendered. Feelings I suppressed. Questions I stopped asking.
I slowly learned to read another person’s mood before deciding what I was allowed to say or do.
None of those changes looked dramatic on their own.
But when enough of them accumulated, I wasn’t living the way I once had.
I kept waiting for one huge sign while hundreds of smaller signs were changing me.
The Most Useful Question Wasn’t “Is She a Narcissist?”
I spent enormous amounts of time trying to understand her.
Why does she do this?
Does she know she’s doing it?
Is she intentionally manipulating me?
Does she have NPD?
Is she really a narcissist?
I understand why I became obsessed with those questions. A label promised an explanation for years of confusion.
But eventually another question became much more useful:
What is this relationship doing to me?
Was I becoming more confident or less confident?
Was I more connected to the people I loved, or increasingly isolated?
Could I disagree without being afraid of what came next?
Could I express ordinary needs without calculating the consequences first?
Did I trust my memory? Did I trust my judgment?
Could both of us be wrong? Could both of us apologize?
And when things were peaceful, was I actually experiencing peace?
Or was I simply experiencing relief because the fighting had stopped?
I could debate someone’s diagnosis endlessly.
It was much harder to deny what I had become inside the relationship.
I Didn’t Need a Diagnosis to Take My Experience Seriously
Discovering narcissism eventually gave me language for things I couldn’t previously explain.
But it also created another trap.
I wanted certainty about the label.
Does she definitely have Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
Does every behaviour fit?
Can I prove what she is?
I don’t think those are the most important questions anymore.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a clinical diagnosis. I am not qualified to diagnose another person, and an internet checklist cannot do that either.
But I eventually understood something that seems obvious to me now:
You don’t need to diagnose someone before you’re allowed to take seriously what their behaviour is doing to you.
I didn’t need a diagnosis to notice that I had surrendered privacy.
I didn’t need one to recognize isolation, endless accusations or fear of ordinary conversations.
And I certainly didn’t need one to recognize that I had started doubting my own mind.
The label helped me understand a pattern.
My experience was real before I found the label.
“How Could I Not See This?”
I have asked myself that many times.
Even now, reading some of my old conversations can be uncomfortable.
Things sometimes look painfully obvious in hindsight. I can read something I wrote years ago and think, How did I not see what was happening?
But that’s the privilege of knowing the ending.
The person reading those conversations today already knows where the story goes.
The person living them didn’t.
At the time, I had history with her. I had love. I had guilt. I remembered the good periods. I knew every mistake I had made. And I desperately wanted my marriage to work.
After many terrible periods came enough normality for me to question my own conclusions.
Maybe I exaggerated.
Maybe things aren’t really that bad.
Maybe this time will be different.
Maybe I just need to try harder.
Confusion wasn’t something happening beside the relationship. It had become part of how I experienced the relationship.
That’s why something can look obvious from outside and remain incredibly difficult to understand from inside.
Maybe You’re Doing What I Did
Maybe you found this article because you recently heard the term narcissistic abuse.
Perhaps you’ve watched a few videos. Maybe someone mentioned narcissism to you. Maybe something you saw online sounded frighteningly familiar.
But another part of you is resisting it.
My partner isn’t like that all the time.
We have really good days.
I’ve made mistakes too.
Maybe I’m just being influenced by things I’m reading online.
Maybe I’m actually the toxic one.
Maybe this is just a difficult relationship.
I understand those thoughts because I had versions of almost all of them.
I can’t tell you from a blog post whether you’re being abused. And I don’t think a stranger on the internet should diagnose your partner.
But I would suggest looking somewhere else for a moment.
Look at yourself inside the relationship.
Are you increasingly second-guessing yourself?
Do you rehearse ordinary conversations before having them?
Are you frightened of reactions that haven’t happened yet?
Do you routinely accept blame because continuing the argument feels worse?
Do you feel an enormous sense of relief when your partner is simply being kind to you?
Have things you once considered unacceptable gradually become normal?
Do you repeatedly find yourself thinking:
Maybe it’s me?
None of those questions diagnoses anybody.
But your answers may tell you something important about what the relationship is doing to you.
Recognition Didn’t Immediately Solve My Life
Understanding the pattern didn’t suddenly make everything easy.
Knowledge didn’t remove attachment. It didn’t erase guilt. It didn’t take away grief. And it certainly didn’t make every decision obvious overnight.
But something fundamental began to change.
Instead of automatically putting myself on trial whenever something happened, I slowly began examining the situation itself.
That was the beginning.
Not leaving.
Not winning.
Not proving anything.
Seeing.
And once I started seeing the pattern rather than experiencing every incident as something isolated, it became increasingly difficult to return completely to the old confusion.
Why I Left the Confusion in My Book
When I eventually decided to publish Doubting My Own Mind, I could have rewritten everything.
I could have cleaned up my thinking, removed the repetition and deleted the parts where I defended her or doubted myself.
I could have made myself look much stronger.
But doing that would have destroyed the reason I wanted the book to exist.
Someone who is still inside an abusive relationship may not need to meet a narrator who already understands everything.
They may need to meet someone saying:
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe this isn’t abuse.
Maybe I need to try harder.
And then watch what happens as those questions slowly begin to change.
That’s why the conversations stayed raw. That’s why they sometimes repeat. That’s why parts of the book can still make me uncomfortable when I read them today.
It isn’t a record of what I know now.
It’s a record of what it felt like before I knew.
And if you’re currently somewhere inside that confusion, perhaps that’s the part that will matter.
Sometimes the first sign that something is wrong isn’t that you hate your relationship. It’s that you’ve stopped trusting yourself inside it.
You don’t need to make a life-changing decision because you recognized yourself in one article.
You don’t need to diagnose anybody today.
You don’t even need to know exactly what is happening yet.
But if you’ve spent a long time asking “What is wrong with me?”, perhaps it’s worth allowing yourself to ask one more question:
What if I’m not the only thing I should be examining?
If you want to see what this process looked like while I was actually living through it, Doubting My Own Mind contains the real-time conversations I had during that period.
They weren’t reconstructed later to make the story cleaner. The confusion, repetition, rationalization, hope and gradual recognition are all still there.
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