There is a story I do not tell often, but I want to tell it here, because I think it matters - not despite being a therapist, but because of it.
I was twenty-five. Successful, focused, independent - the version of myself I was proud of. That version got shattered in one afternoon, when I found out my fiancé of six years - the man I thought was the love of my life - had been cheating on me.
While I was heartbroken, I met someone through a mutual friend. Charismatic, well-connected, always surrounded by excitement and spontaneity - a completely different world to anything I had known. I was swept off my feet before I understood what I had actually stepped into.
What I had stepped into was a possessive, controlling, and eventually violent relationship. I learned what it meant to be genuinely afraid for my life. I learned what panic attacks were. Xanax and Prozac became part of my daily routine, alongside other things that helped me feel numb enough to get through a day. I lost my career, my friends, the people who mattered to me. I was hit. I was covered in bruises I hid from everyone. I tried to leave more than once, and was always found.
I felt worthless for allowing it to happen to me at all - which is its own particular kind of damage, layered on top of everything else. I still held onto the memory of who I used to be, and the gap between that and where I was now felt unbearable.
Getting Out
I became someone I did not recognise. Numbed, guarded, wearing a version of myself that could survive each day depending on his mood. He was eventually imprisoned - and even then, I visited him. I waited outside for hours because he said he was lonely. I wrote him letters. Looking back, I can see how completely this had taken hold of me, but at the time, it felt like love, or at least like the only thing I had left to hold onto.
The nine months he was inside gave me something like distance, and a promise to myself: if it happened again, I would leave, whatever it cost. I did not have to wait long to test that promise. Two weeks after his release, I was on the floor again. That was the moment something in me finally, fully understood: I was done.
Leaving was not simple or immediate. There were threats. There was fear that did not disappear just because I had made a decision. Eventually, I left the country entirely and started again, somewhere new, with almost nothing familiar around me.
What I Know Now
That was well over a decade ago now. I have since built a life, a marriage, and a career I am genuinely proud of - one that exists, in part, because of what I went through, not in spite of it. I understand things about fear, control, and the slow work of getting yourself back that I could not have learned any other way.
I am not sharing this for sympathy, and I am not sharing it as some tidy redemption story either - it is not tidy, and parts of it still land heavily when I think about them. I am sharing it because I know there are people reading this who recognise some part of themselves in it: the shame, the fear, the disbelief that this is your life now, the sense that there is no way out. There is a way out. It rarely feels like it at the time, and it is rarely quick or clean, but it exists.
If any part of this is familiar to you, please know that you do not have to carry it alone, and you do not have to have it figured out before you reach out.
With love,
Agatha x