How I mistook emotional abuse for my own wounds to heal, and nearly lost myself trying to love someone into loving me.
Jessica Choate RN
It didn't start with yelling.
It didn't start with criticism, manipulation, or walking on eggshells.
It didn't start with me questioning my sanity, apologizing for having feelings, or wondering why I couldn't seem to do anything right.
It started with butterflies.
With laughter.
With someone who showed up.
With the overwhelming feeling that maybe, just maybe, after everything I had survived, I had finally found my person.
Someone who saw me.
Someone who wanted me.
Someone who wanted the life that came with me.
And for a woman who had spent most of her life carrying everyone and everything, the thought of finally having someone to share the weight felt like an answered prayer.
I was a single mother of seven children.
Seven.
I worked 48 hours a week as a nurse to provide for them. I coordinated appointments, managed schedules, kept food on the table, held together a household, and somehow found the strength to keep showing up.
I wasn't looking for someone to rescue me.
I was looking for a partner.
Someone who would stand beside me instead of watching me drown.
And in the beginning, that's exactly who I thought I'd found.
The Man I Fell in Love With
He was there.
Every day.
He built forts with the kids. He helped with doctor's appointments. He cooked. He participated in the ordinary, exhausting, beautiful chaos of raising a family.
He didn't appear frightened by my seven children.
He seemed to embrace them.
And I remember thinking, My God, this man is incredible.
Here was someone who seemed willing to step into a life that required more patience, more flexibility, and more responsibility than most people would ever voluntarily choose.
He made me feel wanted.
Our relationship was affectionate, exciting, playful.
We had what felt like an incredible connection, physically and emotionally.
I thought we were building something beautiful.
I thought I had found the man who would love me and my children through the storms.
And perhaps the most confusing part of this entire story is that some of those moments really were beautiful.
I don't have to rewrite every good memory as a lie to acknowledge what came afterward.
I don't know what was happening inside him.
I only know what happened between us.
And what happened between us eventually became something I could barely survive.
Looking back, there were small things I noticed but didn't understand.
He seemed to need a great deal of acceptance and reassurance.
Sometimes after sex, he would ask, "How'd I do?"
I remember finding the question strange.
But I brushed it off.
Wanting reassurance isn't inherently unhealthy. Asking whether your partner enjoyed intimacy isn't abuse.
What stands out to me now is how much reassurance seemed to matter to him, while my eventual requests for emotional reassurance were often treated as unreasonable.
I didn't recognize the contradiction then.
I was too busy falling in love.
Then Something Changed
It wasn't overnight.
There wasn't one dramatic event that transformed our relationship.
It was gradual.
The kind of change you don't always notice while you're living inside it.
At first, he seemed delighted by my children.
Then suddenly, they were a problem.
They were too loud.
Too messy.
Too undisciplined.
Their behavior was constantly criticized.
He told me their difficulties came from never having consistency, that the babysitters hadn't provided enough structure.
And I remember how deeply that hurt.
Because he knew my circumstances.
He knew I had been a single mother raising seven children while working long hours to provide for them.
He knew I was doing everything I could with the resources I had.
And instead of recognizing the extraordinary amount of work that required, his criticism left me feeling like I had failed them.
Like I wasn't a good enough mother.
Like the life I had spent years holding together was somehow evidence of my inadequacy.
I began questioning myself.
Maybe he was right.
Maybe I hadn't provided enough structure.
Maybe my children were harder than other children.
Maybe I needed to be stricter.
Maybe I needed to do more.
Always more.
When he lost his job, he blamed the children for being distractions while he worked remotely.
But I had watched him regularly spend portions of his workday doing things other than working.
Still, the children became the explanation.
And somehow, once again, the responsibility found its way back to me.
The children he had once embraced began to feel like an inconvenience he resented.
The family he had willingly joined became something he spoke about as though it had happened to him.
Eventually, I heard words I never imagined hearing from the man who had promised to build a life with us.
"They're your kids."
And something inside me broke.
Because I hadn't hidden my children from him.
I hadn't deceived him about my responsibilities.
He knew exactly who I was.
He knew what my life looked like.
He chose to become part of it.
Yet somehow, the children who had once been part of our beautiful beginning became the reason everything was so difficult.
And I began to feel ashamed of the very people I loved most.
The Isolation Didn't Look Like Isolation
Nobody locked me inside the house.
Nobody took my keys.
Nobody explicitly told me I wasn't allowed to leave.
It was subtler than that.
There was always some reason I needed to be home.
The kids couldn't be left alone.
They might destroy the house.
They would make a mess.
Something would go wrong.
And I was the one who needed to be there to prevent it.
So even when I wanted to do something for myself, there was an invisible weight attached to the decision.
Could I leave?
Would I come home to complaints?
Would I have to defend why I'd gone?
Would I be made to feel irresponsible for wanting time that belonged only to me?
Eventually, I started evaluating my own desires through the possibility of his reaction.
I wasn't physically trapped.
But I didn't feel free.
And that is something I wish more people understood about controlling dynamics.
Sometimes isolation happens through circumstances and guilt rather than explicit commands.
Sometimes you're technically allowed to do whatever you want.
You just learn that exercising that freedom comes with consequences.
And so you begin choosing the option that creates the least conflict.
Until one day, you realize you've stopped choosing yourself at all.
I Was Building Something Beautiful. He Couldn't See It.
This may be one of the things that hurts the most to revisit.
Because while my personal life was falling apart, something extraordinary was beginning to grow inside me.
I was writing.
Creating.
Building Plant Medicine Healing.
Pouring my lived experiences, my nursing background, my spiritual exploration, my understanding of trauma, and my desire to help others into something meaningful.
I was finding my voice.
For the first time, I wasn't creating simply because someone needed something from me.
I was creating because something inside me wanted to exist.
And I worked my ass off.
I wrote books.
I built a website.
I developed ideas for courses and an app.
I spent countless hours learning, researching, writing, and creating.
I was proud of myself.
God, I was proud of myself.
But the person whose encouragement I wanted most didn't share that excitement.
I cannot remember him once celebrating a milestone in that work.
Not once congratulating me for what I was building.
He never read a single page of my writing.
Not one.
And this wasn't some little hobby I picked up to pass the time.
This was my heart.
My pain.
My healing.
My purpose.
Hundreds of pages of my inner world laid bare.
He didn't have to share my spiritual beliefs.
He didn't have to understand every concept.
He didn't even have to agree with everything I wrote.
But I wanted him to care enough to be curious.
To ask what I was working on.
To read something because I had written it.
To look at something I created and say, "I'm proud of you."
Instead, I felt that my work was a waste of time to him.
And slowly, something devastating happened.
I began measuring my excitement before sharing it.
I stopped expecting encouragement.
I learned to celebrate my accomplishments alone.
In my own manuscript, I wrote about being afraid of visibility, of stepping into my power, of shining too brightly.
I interpreted that fear through my wounds.
But looking back, I can also see that I was trying to shine in a relationship where my light rarely seemed welcome.
I spent so much time wondering why I needed affirmation that I nearly forgot how natural it is to want your partner to be interested in your life.
I wasn't asking him to worship me.
I was asking him to witness me.
There is a difference.
When I Spoke, I Wasn't Heard
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from trying to connect with someone who is physically present but emotionally unavailable.
He could talk.
And talk.
And talk.
But so often, when I said something meaningful, he would move right past it.
I could share a feeling, express a concern, or attempt to begin a vulnerable conversation.
And he would simply jump to something else.
Like my words had never entered the room.
Sometimes, when I asked for acknowledgment, he would say things like:
"Why do you need so much affirmation?"
And suddenly, the conversation wasn't about what I'd said.
It was about why I needed a response.
Why I needed reassurance.
Why I couldn't just be satisfied.
The original issue disappeared.
Now I was defending the legitimacy of my emotional needs.
And because I was deeply invested in healing, I would turn inward.
Why do I need so much validation?
Is this my rejection wound?
Am I expecting him to meet a need I should be meeting within myself?
Is this my childhood trauma?
Sometimes those were worthwhile questions.
But they weren't the only questions that mattered.
I rarely stopped long enough to ask:
Why does expressing an ordinary emotional need so consistently end with me feeling ashamed for having it?
That's the question I needed.
Not whether I could learn to validate myself.
Of course I could.
But whether there was room for my feelings inside my own marriage.
And increasingly, it felt like there wasn't.
I Started Questioning My Own Reality
When I brought up something hurtful, I often left the conversation feeling like I was the one who had done something wrong.
Events were denied.
Details were disputed.
My reactions became the issue.
His behavior was explained away.
I would enter a conversation hoping for understanding and leave wondering whether I had imagined the entire problem.
Sometimes he claimed he was joking.
Sometimes I was too serious.
Sometimes I was too emotional.
Sometimes I was being defensive.
And when he lost his temper, he told me it was my fault.
I was responsible for my feelings.
And apparently, I was responsible for his, too.
I began carefully choosing my words.
Monitoring his mood.
Calculating how to approach conversations.
Trying to predict which version of him would receive what I had to say.
It was exhausting.
I felt like I was walking on eggshells.
And the cruelest part wasn't simply feeling afraid to speak.
It was how thoroughly I questioned whether I had any reason to feel that way.
In The Portal of Love, I wrote that I was walking on eggshells because of the unhealed places within me.
I genuinely believed that.
I believed my nervous system was reacting to ghosts from my past.
And sometimes it may have been.
But now I can recognize something I couldn't see clearly then.
There were also things happening in the present.
Real words.
Real dismissals.
Real contradictions.
Real moments when I expressed pain and was met with defensiveness instead of care.
I was so committed to understanding my reactions that I kept overlooking what I was reacting to.
It felt like drowning while someone stood on the shore insisting there was no water.
And eventually, I stopped trusting my own eyes.
I Thought Everything Was My Wound to Heal
This is the part of my story I most want other spiritually minded women to understand.
Because I wasn't someone who lacked self-awareness.
I was almost drowning in it.
I understood trauma.
I studied psychology.
I explored attachment patterns, nervous system regulation, Jungian shadow work, consciousness, manifestation, and the ways our earliest experiences shape our adult relationships.
I believed deeply in the power of looking within.
I still do.
But somewhere along the way, I began using that wisdom against myself.
If I felt abandoned, I searched for my abandonment wound.
If I felt rejected, I examined my rejection wound.
If I felt unheard, I questioned my need for validation.
If I felt unsafe, I searched for the childhood memory that explained my fear.
If I felt angry, I wondered what my shadow was trying to reveal.
If I wanted to leave, I questioned whether I was self-sabotaging.
I became extraordinarily skilled at examining myself.
But I was not giving his behavior the same honest examination.
I wrote about mirrors.
Soul contracts.
Sacred masculine and feminine wounds.
The alchemy of relationships.
How people enter our lives to reveal the parts of ourselves still waiting to be healed.
And those ideas brought me genuine insight.
But they also gave me an endless supply of explanations for why I should keep trying.
Maybe he was reflecting my unworthiness.
Maybe his withdrawal was teaching me to stop seeking validation.
Maybe his criticism was inviting me to become more secure in myself.
Maybe the loneliness was showing me that I needed to love myself more deeply.
Maybe I was resisting the very relationship that had come to awaken me.
I turned the relationship into a spiritual classroom.
And somehow, I became the only student expected to do the homework.
I could explain his behavior through his wounds.
I could understand his fears.
I could find compassion for his childhood.
I could imagine the hurt beneath his defensiveness.
But none of that changed how he treated me.
And that is the distinction I wish I'd understood sooner.
Understanding why someone hurts you does not make the hurt disappear.
Compassion does not require unlimited access to you.
Forgiveness does not require continued exposure.
And manifestation does not mean you created another person's harmful behavior because something inside you was unhealed.
My consciousness is mine to cultivate.
His choices were his to make.
My spiritual responsibility was never to become so healed that mistreatment stopped affecting me.
It was to become honest enough with myself to recognize when love was asking me to disappear.
The Woman Who Was Supposed to Feel Loved Began to Feel Worthless
I had always been capable.
Maybe excessively so.
I'd raised seven children.
Worked demanding nursing shifts.
Managed crises.
Built a life through circumstances that would have overwhelmed many people.
But inside my marriage, I began feeling incapable.
And he reinforced that feeling.
He told me I was incapable.
When I began understanding my autism, he dismissed it, telling me I wasn't autistic because I hadn't been autistic when we got together.
As though a lifelong neurodevelopmental difference could only exist if he had recognized it from the beginning.
Instead of becoming curious about my experience, he questioned it.
Instead of helping me understand myself, I felt compelled to defend myself.
And the more I struggled, the more inadequate I felt.
My confidence deteriorated.
I became increasingly anxious.
I felt guilty for having needs.
Guilty for wanting intimacy.
Guilty for asking for help.
Guilty for wanting time to myself.
Guilty for not doing enough.
Guilty for breaking under the weight of everything I was carrying.
And the criticisms weren't confined to one part of life.
I found myself defending my parenting, my emotional needs, my desires, my work, my perceptions, and my capacity to function.
There were behaviors toward animals that I experienced as cruel, too, and I found myself trying to make sense of things that disturbed me rather than fully acknowledging my discomfort.
I became accustomed to explaining away what hurt.
I was living in a constant state of emotional vigilance.
And the woman who could once handle almost anything began struggling to handle ordinary days.
Even My Desire Became Something to Apologize For
Sexual intimacy was another place where I began losing myself.
I wanted my husband.
I wanted affection.
Passion.
Playfulness.
To feel desired.
To feel like the woman he couldn't wait to touch.
And as our intimacy declined, I tried to understand why it hurt so much.
I examined my sexual shame.
My attachment wounds.
My relationship with pleasure.
My fear of rejection.
I wondered whether I had confused being desired with being loved.
And some of that exploration was meaningful.
But there was another reality.
I was in a marriage where my longing was often met with withdrawal, discomfort, or shame.
I felt guilty for wanting intimacy.
Like my sexuality was an inconvenience.
Like my desire made me demanding.
And the more I tried to communicate how painful the distance was, the more ashamed I felt.
No partner owes another partner sex.
A difference in libido is not abuse.
But there is a profound difference between respectfully declining intimacy and making someone feel wrong for having sexual needs.
I needed tenderness, not obligation.
I needed an honest conversation, not shame.
I wanted affection that didn't have to lead anywhere.
I wanted closeness that wasn't something I had to earn.
But eventually, I stopped feeling like a woman who was wanted.
I felt like a woman who was tolerated.
And that is a devastating place to live when the person beside you is supposed to be your partner.
Staying Wasn't the Same as Loving Me Well
This is where rereading my own work became almost unbearable.
Because I found passages where I praised him for staying.
For continuing to live beside me through illness, financial difficulties, and emotional upheaval.
I called him my safe place.
I wrote about how extraordinary it was that he hadn't left.
And I meant it.
There were moments when he stayed beside me in bed.
Moments when he was affectionate.
Moments when he helped.
Moments when he said something kind.
He once described me as one of the most selfless people he had known.
Those moments mattered to me.
They still belong to the history of our relationship.
But I can see now how much meaning I attached to his physical presence.
Because I had spent so much of my life fearing abandonment, I began treating the fact that he stayed as evidence that I was loved well.
Even while I felt profoundly alone.
I told myself that his staying meant he accepted my children.
Even as his complaints about them increased.
I told myself he was devoted.
Even as I carried responsibilities that were supposed to be shared.
I told myself he was my safe place.
Even as I dreaded difficult conversations.
I told myself he believed in me.
Even as my work went unread and uncelebrated.
I told myself I needed to heal my fear of abandonment.
Even as I was experiencing emotional abandonment inside the relationship.
And that is one of the hardest truths I've had to face.
Someone can stay in the house and still leave you emotionally alone.
Someone can occasionally show tenderness and still participate in a pattern that harms you.
The existence of good moments does not erase the bad ones.
And the fact that I loved him does not mean the relationship was healthy.
When I Needed Him Most, I Felt Like a Burden
Then my health deteriorated.
I experienced physical pain and limitations that changed what I could do.
The woman who had spent her entire life pushing through was reaching her limits.
I couldn't simply work harder anymore.
I couldn't keep carrying everything.
For once, I needed someone to help carry me.
And instead of feeling secure in my marriage, I became terrified that I was no longer worth keeping.
In Dark Night of the Soul, I documented conversations about money that shattered something inside me.
He expressed how difficult it was for him to financially support a woman and her seven children.
He spoke about the things he could have done with that money.
And I remember how those words landed.
Because I hadn't entered this marriage as a surprise.
My children weren't unexpected expenses that materialized after the vows.
They were my family.
The very family he had once seemed so eager to join.
And now, when my health made me more dependent, I felt like the cost of loving us had become something he resented.
I understood that money was stressful.
I understood the reality of financial responsibility.
I never believed love meant ignoring bills or pretending financial limitations didn't exist.
But I wanted to feel like we were facing those problems together.
Instead, I felt like we were the problem.
And I wrote pages trying to understand why I was so triggered.
My fear of scarcity.
My fear of being a burden.
My lifelong belief that I had to earn my place through work.
All of those things were real.
But so was the pain of hearing my family described as a financial burden by the man who had promised to build a life with us.
I didn't need to choose between those truths.
My past made that moment especially painful.
His words were still his words.
I Wasn't Innocent in Every Conflict. But I Wasn't Responsible for Everything.
There were moments when I became angry.
When I raised my voice.
When the frustration erupted because I couldn't find another way to make myself heard.
I documented an argument where I punched the floor in anger and he later punched a door.
Neither reaction was healthy.
Both deserved accountability.
But in my writing, I was so quick to explain the confrontation through two wounded nervous systems, two inner children, two people triggering each other.
I wanted to understand the rupture.
To repair it.
To find the lesson.
And understanding our individual reactions was important.
What I needed to understand more clearly was that shared conflict does not mean every behavior carries shared responsibility.
I was responsible for how I expressed my anger.
He was responsible for how he expressed his.
I could acknowledge my reactivity without excusing intimidation.
I could work on my communication without accepting blame for his temper.
I could recognize that my words sometimes came from pain without accepting that my pain caused his choices.
And I could stop treating my inability to communicate perfectly as a reason my needs did not deserve to be heard.
I did not have to become the perfect communicator to deserve basic empathy.
The Slow Disappearance of Me
By the end, I hardly recognized myself.
I had spent years studying healing.
Learning to regulate my nervous system.
Identifying my wounds.
Working to become more conscious.
Trying to love with compassion.
Trying to see the wounded human beneath behavior that hurt me.
But I was deteriorating.
My self-esteem had collapsed.
I felt worthless.
I developed severe anxiety.
I felt like I couldn't breathe.
Like I was suffocating.
I became deeply depressed.
There were moments of despair when I didn't want to be alive.
My suffering was complicated. There were enormous stressors, health challenges, and earlier wounds in my life, too.
But the relationship that was supposed to offer partnership had become another place where I felt unseen, criticized, and alone.
And still, I kept asking myself what I needed to heal.
What if I was projecting?
What if I was destroying something good?
What if this was my trauma?
What if I just needed to love myself more?
What if I needed to surrender?
What if I was failing the lesson?
I had become so afraid of unfairly blaming him that I repeatedly blamed myself.
So afraid of being the person who hurt someone that I neglected to acknowledge how deeply I was being hurt.
So determined not to abandon another person that I abandoned myself.
And perhaps the most heartbreaking realization was this:
I was trying to heal myself enough to survive a relationship that was continually contributing to my suffering.
The Book I Wrote Before I Understood What Was Happening
I recently began revisiting The Portal of Love.
A book I had written while still deeply in love with my husband.
A book dedicated to the man I believed had walked into the fire to find me.
A book filled with gratitude for his presence.
For the safety I believed he offered.
For the love I thought we were building.
And there I was, reading my own words from the other side of the relationship.
Seeing passages where I described loneliness, fear, withdrawal, rejection, and emotional pain.
Only to immediately explain those experiences through my wounds.
My shadow.
My programming.
My abandonment fears.
My need for validation.
I had written about the relationship as a sacred mirror.
But sometimes what I called a mirror was simply another person's behavior.
I had written about learning not to need reassurance.
But I had also been asking for acknowledgment from someone who routinely overlooked what I said.
I had written about releasing control.
But I had also been carrying a household where the responsibilities repeatedly defaulted to me.
I had written about healing my fear of rejection.
But I had also been experiencing rejection.
I had written about learning to feel safe in love.
But I hadn't consistently felt safe enough to speak.
And I began to wonder how many women have done the same thing.
How many of us have become so educated about our wounds that we no longer recognize when someone is actively hurting us?
How many have turned every painful experience inward?
How many have called emotional neglect an attachment trigger?
How many have called dismissal a difference in communication styles?
How many have called control concern?
How many have called chronic self-abandonment unconditional love?
And how many have stayed because they believed leaving meant they had failed to heal?
I don't regret learning about my wounds.
I don't regret becoming more self-aware.
But I regret how often I used that awareness to invalidate my own experience.
I had been writing a map back to myself.
I just didn't realize how far I'd wandered.
The Night I Finally Chose Myself
When I left, it may have looked sudden from the outside.
But it wasn't sudden.
I had spent more than a year trying to explain what I needed.
Compassion.
Connection.
Shared responsibility.
Emotional support.
Affection.
Partnership.
I wanted to feel like we were on the same team.
I wanted him to recognize how exhausted I was.
I wanted to know that my pain mattered to him.
I wanted him to take initiative instead of waiting until I broke and then criticizing the way I broke.
I wanted the man I fell in love with.
God, I wanted it to be him.
And I kept trying because I believed in us.
Because I loved him.
Because leaving meant facing something terrifying.
Seven children.
Nowhere permanent to go.
About $1,200 in my bank account.
Only part-time employment.
An uncertain future.
There was nothing convenient about leaving.
Nothing financially easy.
Nothing romantic about packing up your children and stepping into a future you cannot predict.
I was terrified.
But staying had begun to feel more frightening than leaving.
Because I could see what was happening to me.
And I could see what my children were learning.
I did not want my daughters to believe that love meant accepting chronic dismissal and carrying everything alone.
I did not want my sons to believe that a partner's pain was an inconvenience.
I did not want my children growing up believing that the person you love is the person whose feelings you must constantly manage.
And I didn't want to teach them that loving someone meant disappearing.
So I left.
Not because I stopped loving him overnight.
Not because every memory had become bad.
Not because I had become perfectly healed.
But because I finally understood that I could love someone and still recognize that the relationship was harming me.
I couldn't keep waiting for who I believed he could become while ignoring the pattern of how I was being treated.
I had to stop asking whether I could survive one more year.
And start asking whether this was the life I wanted to keep living.
Maybe the Real Awakening Wasn't About Healing My Wounds
I still believe in shadow work.
I still believe in spiritual growth.
In the power of consciousness.
In the sacred opportunity to meet the parts of ourselves that have been wounded and forgotten.
I believe relationships can reveal extraordinary truths about us.
But I no longer believe every painful relationship is meant to be endured until we learn enough to transform it.
Sometimes the lesson is discernment.
Sometimes the mirror reveals an old wound.
Sometimes it reveals an unhealthy pattern happening right in front of you.
And sometimes it's both.
Real spiritual growth requires the willingness to see what is happening, not just the ability to find a beautiful interpretation of it.
I can understand someone's wounds without allowing them to wound me.
I can forgive without returning.
I can love without sacrificing myself.
I can take accountability for the ways I abandoned myself without accepting responsibility for someone else's behavior.
And I can acknowledge the tenderness that existed without denying the suffering that followed.
I don't need to decide that every beautiful moment was false in order to accept that the relationship became harmful.
That, to me, is the deepest kind of discernment.
Not turning another person into a monster.
Not making myself a saint.
Not rewriting history into something simple.
Just finally allowing the whole truth to exist.
The love.
The hope.
The beautiful beginning.
The changing behavior.
The criticism.
The loneliness.
The fear.
The years of trying.
And the woman who almost disappeared while attempting to make sense of it all.
If You Recognize Yourself in This Story
Maybe your relationship didn't start with fear either.
Maybe it started with someone who made you feel chosen.
Someone who seemed different.
Someone who promised partnership.
Someone you believed was the answer to prayers you had whispered through years of loneliness.
And maybe, somewhere along the way, you began feeling smaller.
You stopped sharing your excitement.
You started carefully choosing your words.
You found yourself rehearsing difficult conversations before having them.
You began apologizing for feelings you hadn't even expressed yet.
You questioned whether you were too needy.
Too sensitive.
Too emotional.
Too demanding.
You started researching attachment styles.
Trauma responses.
Communication techniques.
Shadow work.
Anything that might explain why loving this person had become so painful.
And perhaps you've spent so much time trying to understand them that you've forgotten to ask how the relationship is affecting you.
If that sounds familiar, I want to offer you the question I wish someone had offered me.
Not, What wound is this bringing up?
But:
What actually happened?
What did they say?
What did they do?
How did they respond when you told them you were hurt?
Did they acknowledge your experience?
Did they take responsibility?
Did their behavior change?
Were your boundaries respected?
Did you feel free to have needs, relationships, interests, and a life outside of them?
Were you becoming more yourself?
Or were you slowly disappearing?
You can explore your wounds while still answering those questions.
You don't have to choose between spiritual awareness and discernment.
Between compassion and boundaries.
Between loving someone and believing yourself.
And please understand this:
Not every painful relationship is abusive. Not every misunderstanding is gaslighting. Not every emotionally unavailable partner intends harm.
But repeated invalidation, intimidation, blame-shifting, humiliation, and control deserve to be taken seriously, regardless of whether you can explain the other person's behavior.
You do not need a diagnosis for the person hurting you.
You do not need to prove that every moment was bad.
You do not need to become perfectly healed before you're allowed to recognize that something is unhealthy.
And you do not need someone else to agree with your experience before you're allowed to make decisions about your own life.
For a long time, I thought healing meant learning how to stop being hurt by things.
Now I understand that healing can also mean learning when something is hurting you and giving yourself permission to respond.
The Portal of Love was always meant to be a journey back to self.
I just never imagined that one of the most important parts of that journey would be discovering the difference between loving unconditionally and living without boundaries.
It didn't start as abuse.
It started like I'd found my soulmate.
And it ended when I realized that no matter how deeply I loved another person, I could not keep losing myself to prove it.
The portal wasn't the relationship.
The portal was the moment I finally chose to believe myself.
And walked through the door.
With love,
Jessica Choate, RN
Plant Medicine Healing
If this story resonates, know that you deserve support while making sense of your own experience. You do not have to label your relationship or make an immediate decision to begin exploring what emotional safety means to you.