Content Warning: This post discusses domestic violence, emotional abuse, childhood trauma, and near-lethal situations. Please read with care, and only if you feel grounded and safe enough to engage with these themes.
I don’t remember much of my childhood in detail, but I do remember the overall environment. My parents were emotionally volatile, always fighting, and constantly hurting each other. That became my baseline for what relationships looked like.
I didn’t grow up seeing healthy conflict or emotional safety, so I didn’t recognize the early red flags with a particular boy. To me, intensity and instability felt normal, even if I didn’t understand why at the time.
Without even realizing it, I became a match for the one man whose instability mirrored my own wounds.
I was tender, intuitive, and endlessly understanding, often in ways most people can’t imagine. I thought my compassion could heal him and change him.
Men with unhealed trauma gravitate towards that energy. They always gravitate toward women who feel deeply, women who forgive quickly, women who see the potential in them.
I am a domestic violence survivor. He tried to take my life a few times, not because he hated me, but because his ego would get severely bruised.
Whenever he hurt me with other women, I knew exactly what to say to bruise his ego, My mother used to do this with my father all of the time.
Sometimes I wasn’t even being intentional. There was a moment where I joked with a male bartender in front of him at a nightclub, or when an extremely handsome male waiter took our order and I gave him more eye contact than he liked.
Those tiny, harmless things would trigger him instantly. He was filled with rage. And what’s really crazy is that my father was the exact same way with my mother… the jealousy, the insecurity, the overreaction.
I grew up watching that dynamic, thinking that it was passionate love, without realizing it was shaping what I eventually tolerated.
We were two wounded people hitting each other’s deepest insecurities, but only one of us ever responded with violence.
It just shows how chaotic and dangerous things become when unhealed trauma, attachment wounds, and emotional immaturity collide.
Men with unhealed trauma don’t hurt women because they are weak, they hurt them because they have no control over their own wounds.
He oscillated between loving and harming, not because he was evil, but because he never learned regulation, accountability, or emotional maturity.
And because his own mother enabled his behavior and called it love, repeating the same patterns she suffered through herself. His ego injuries turned into verbal attacks. His pain turned into physical volatility.
His instability became my responsibility. And I rationalized it. He had a lot of childhood trauma himself. I knew he was hurting too. I saw the little boy beneath the anger. I understood him more deeply than he understood himself.
But understanding someone’s trauma doesn’t protect me from the harm of it.
Eventually, I learned that a man’s pain is not my purpose and my big heart was never the problem.
I started meditating, intensely, relentlessly, chanting until something inside me shifted. I did it day and night, sometimes out of desperation, sometimes out of faith, until one morning I woke up and felt a stillness I had never known.
The attachment was gone. The bond had dissolved and this destroyed him when he learned that he no longer had a strong hold over me. I was finally free. I finally chose peace.
But for a while after that, I lived with constant fear. It wasn’t paranoia out of nowhere, he was calling me a hundred times from a blocked number every single day. And there were times he would show up outside my mother’s home and just sit there waiting for me.
After everything he had already done, of course I thought he might try to hurt me again, maybe even kill me for leaving him. My body had every reason to stay on high alert.
But as time passed and he never acted on it, I understood then that his violence had always come from ego, not psychopathy.
He was unstable, insecure, and reactive, but not necessarily homicidal. He escalated in moments of ego injury, not as a planned act.
My story isn’t about the man who hurt me, it’s about the woman I became after surviving him. A woman who trusts her intuition, protects her peace, and will never again mistake instability for love.
Honestly, Vanessa 