🎠What it means to have grown up with chronic manipulation and emotional abuse
Growing up with manipulation meant your parent constantly questioned and redefined your reality, making you doubt your own memories, feelings, and perceptions—leaving you without a GPS to navigate relationships and decisions.
You may have learned to watch your parent's moods constantly and adapt yourself to them before you got into trouble, developing hypervigilant threat detection that kept you safe but never let you rest. Your feelings were consistently dismissed, minimized, ignored, or turned against you, teaching you that expressing emotions was dangerous. In your household, adults never admitted responsibility—they blamed, deflected, counter-attacked or raged instead, showing you that accountability was weakness.
You may have discovered that even now, feelings are too dangerous to express because they'll either be weaponized against you or dismissed entirely. You freeze during conflicts because standing up for yourself feels uncomfortable and wrong, having learned that resistance often made things worse. You struggle to trust your own judgment because the disapproving voice inside your head constantly questions your decisions. A part of you expects manipulation, power games, or ulterior motives to surface sooner or later in every relationship, making genuine intimacy feel impossible.