[This post mentions abuse and discusses painful mental experiences. I am currently safe.]

A couple of weeks ago I found out someone I love was being abused. Had been for months or years. By a trusted person. How did I not know? Blind. Does it make me as bad as the abuser if I didn’t know? That’s just one of their tricks so you won’t tell, a distant part of me says, but it doesn’t make a difference.

Today I found out my fiancé has been much more ill than I knew in recent weeks. How didn’t I know? We’ve been with each other a significant part of each day. How could I not know? How stupid and blind am I? Insensitive, I must have been too selfish to notice. Spoiled, bad, ugly, brat, greedy, you haven’t said sorry enough, no one has done as little as you, the voices join in.

Today, in a way (too personal to him to write about) a point of security we had counted on for our future is gone. He’s / We’ve been tricked again, lied to again, lost again. Probably what is lost can’t be got back. Stupid me. Stupid me for trusting again. Every security I’ve counted on has been pulled from under us. Stupid. How could I not know this was just a dream and would be the same?

But I did really need it to have any chance of coping, the sick broken me says.

I’m watching my dad be put down, manipulated, knocked back by my step mum. Whilst she is emotionally abusing me, and doing what she can to confuse and control my relationship with my dad. And I believe she is hurting another vulnerable member of the family too. My dad appears blind to what she is doing to him and to me. A frightened but angry child in me is screaming, how can he not know?! Why won’t he do something? Look what she’s doing to him… and why won’t he help me?(That last part I’m so ashamed of.) Which is ironic and hypocritical of me, given what I too have been blind to. I should not be surprised at least, as he remained blind to my mother’s far worse behaviour.

I feel as if I’m fragmenting into too many pieces.

Too many voices are screaming in my head, repeating my guilt, to make me doubt and paralyse me. They will kill me with their screaming and the noise and pain and reliving, unless I cut myself. There are too many parts of me and they all have voices too and it’s dangerous. There’s another voice too though, and she’s saying, never again. This stops now. Act. Make it different this time. Get help. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to choose when I and the people I love have always been used or tricked or abandoned in the end. But I have to stop this somehow.

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