Author: Jen

The essay arrived like a pressed wildflower—pretty, flat, already dead.

Someone forwarded it to me because they were worried about the man inside it. In a town like ours, worry travels by screenshot. Names don’t need to be written for a body to recognize itself in the outline.

I opened the link on my phone and felt my throat tighten, the way it does when a sermon starts to sound like marketing.

Outside, morning was doing its Wyoming thing: pale light, wind that never asks permission, the sky stretched thin as gauze over whatever you’re trying not to remember.

Inside the essay, there was the familiar arc: a woman returns from a bad love and climbs toward “trust again,” one clean insight at a time. Boundaries. Courage. Vulnerability. The tone was tender in that curated way—like a porch swing photo staged for a brochure.

Then a line: I wish he had shot me in the leg so people would believe me.

I stared at it and the room changed temperature.

Not because I doubted her. I didn’t. I don’t. Abuse is common; it’s just rarely described honestly.

But that line—sweet as a slogan, sharp as a pin—told me she’d never watched belief evaporate after a weapon was real. It told me she still thought the world was a courtroom where injury earns credibility. It told me she still believed in proof-as-salvation.

And the worst part is: I knew why she wanted to believe that.

Because if a gunshot would “fix” disbelief, then disbelief would be rational. Then the world would be coherent. Then you could stop asking the question that eats women alive: What did I do to make him do that?

I know that question. It’s the house I lived in for a while.

In 2022, when I was trying to get out, a man microwaved my phone.

It sounds absurd until you’ve lived in the kind of fear that makes the absurd practical. He took the one object that could tell the truth outside the room. He didn’t need to break my bones; he only needed to break my witness.

When I picked up the phone afterward, it was warm in a sick way—like a fever you can hold. The plastic smelled wrong. Chemical. Burnt-sweet. My stomach flipped because my body recognized the tactic before my mind could name it: isolation, sabotage, control.

That’s the part a lot of glossy “healing” essays don’t touch—the way abuse isn’t one scene with a villain, it’s a long, quiet campaign against your access to reality.

There’s a phrase for it: technology-facilitated abuse—using devices and digital access to monitor, harass, isolate, threaten, impersonate, destroy evidence, or cut off help. It’s documented, studied, and common enough to have its own research literature now.

And it’s close kin to what the law calls, in plain language, interfering with getting help. Multiple states explicitly criminalize preventing someone from calling 911 or seeking medical aid—Washington’s statute says it directly. Texas does too, down to “preventing or interfering” with someone’s ability to make an emergency call. California has a specific law about damaging a communication device to prevent someone from calling for help.

So when I read that line about wishing for a leg wound, I didn’t just feel anger.

I felt the old chemical smell rise in my throat, and with it, the memory of what it’s like to be brave in a world that calls you dramatic.

Because here’s the grim truth: people do not automatically believe you when you have “proof.” They measure you first. They scan for likability. They check whether your terror is convenient for them. They ask if you “led him on,” if you “stayed,” if you “made him mad,” if you “could have left sooner.” The drama triangle is not created by abused women—it’s created by spectators who need a simple story so they can go back to brunch.

The essay wanted an enemy. Not the man—he was already positioned for that role. The real enemy in that piece was ambiguity: how messy it is when a person can be charming and dangerous, wounded and predatory, tender on Tuesday and terrifying on Thursday. The essay wanted a clean moral: here’s what happened, here’s what it means, here’s how to heal, and here’s how to date again without getting hurt.

But danger doesn’t care about your personal growth plan.

Danger cares about access.

And access is what coercive control is built from: a pattern of tactics—surveillance, intimidation, isolation, sabotage, threats, financial pressure, social pressure—stacked over time until a person’s freedom shrinks to a narrow hallway. Governments and researchers define it that way because survivors kept insisting, for decades, that the story wasn’t just bruises—it was a system.

So here’s the antithesis:

Healing isn’t learning to “trust again.”

Healing is learning to tell the truth without needing anyone’s permission to believe you.

And vulnerability—God, that word—vulnerability is not a virtue you perform on Instagram. It is not a leadership hack. It is not a cashmere throw blanket draped over the ugliness of power.

There are real critiques of the Brené Brown universe that finally say the quiet part out loud: when vulnerability is framed as a choice and a personal practice without accounting for power, money, race, safety, and institutional cruelty, it becomes a privilege sermon—most usable by people already protected. Black feminist critique makes the point even sharper: for many women, especially Black women, “being vulnerable” in public doesn’t reliably produce empathy—it can produce punishment.

Which is why “be brave, be open, trust again” can be not just shallow, but dangerous advice—because it treats the world like it’s mostly safe and occasionally unlucky, instead of acknowledging that some environments are optimized for predation.

And therapy—real therapy—has to be able to look at that without flinching.

Not with moralistic scripts. Not with a Pinterest checklist. With craft. With ethics. With a willingness to say: sometimes the system is the abuser. Sometimes the “support” network is a hallway of closed doors. Sometimes your own community will smile at the man who harmed you because he’s charming, or because he’s useful, or because everyone has already decided you’re “a lot.”

That’s what made me remember why I blocked that clinician back in 2022.

It wasn’t personal drama. It wasn’t me being “too sensitive.”

I reached out because a man had pulled a gun on me, and my world had narrowed to survival math: who will answer, who will help, who will believe me without charging me an emotional tax.

She didn’t.

And later—later—her essay shows up in my inbox with its soft lantern language and its curated pain, and I can’t help noticing the collision: she can write about abuse, but when a real woman asks for help, she can vanish.

Maybe she was overwhelmed. Maybe she had no openings. Maybe she froze. I can grant that without turning her into a villain.

But I will not grant the lie underneath it: that telling a pretty story about trauma is the same thing as responding to it.

In small towns, therapists don’t get to play pretend about impact.

When you write publicly about “a man” in a way your community can decode, you may think you’re just being brave—but you are also shaping the social weather. You are putting someone on a map. You are inviting people to speculate. You are encouraging the public to pick sides, to label, to hunt for a moral.

Ethics doesn’t only live in paperwork. Ethics lives in whether a survivor can walk into a grocery store without becoming a plotline.

The professional codes say confidentiality is a cornerstone. The ACA even publishes specific guidance on social media because confidentiality risks spike the second clinicians start posting stories for attention.

And then there’s the porch.

I’ve heard the porch stories too—therapy on a porch like it’s a frontier romance. Maybe it’s just branding. Maybe it’s true. But privacy isn’t an aesthetic; it’s a safeguard. The federal guidance on telehealth privacy is blunt: reasonable steps to prevent being overheard matter.

A porch is not automatically unethical. But the posture—the performance of cozy accessibility while the real world’s risks are minimized—that is where harm sneaks in wearing linen.

Because if you are going to write about abuse, if you are going to invite readers into the room, you have to tell the harder truths too:

That leaving is often the most dangerous time.

That abusers don’t always look like monsters; sometimes they look like men you once loved.

That “proof” doesn’t guarantee belief.

That safety is logistical, not inspirational.

That the nervous system doesn’t care how empowered your caption is.

When I finished the essay, my phone sat on the table like a small animal—alive, vulnerable, necessary. I thought of the microwave again. I thought of how quickly a person can be cut off from the world. How quickly your story can be stolen and rewritten by whoever has the louder voice.

And I thought: if I were going to write about abuse, I would not write toward hope as a product.

I would write toward clarity.

I would write the part where the body learns the smell of chemical plastic and calls it danger.

I would write the part where the silence after honesty isn’t empty—it’s architectural, walls rearranging to keep you out.

I would write the part where you don’t get saved by evidence, you get saved by one person who believes you without making you earn it.

And I would write the part no one wants to sell:

Sometimes you don’t “trust again.”

Sometimes you learn to trust your own perception so completely that you stop negotiating with anyone else’s disbelief.

That’s not a healing arc.

That’s a survival skill, sharpened into a kind of mercy.

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⚠️ Reader Support & Content Notice

This essay includes reflections on experiences of coercive control, isolation, and intimate partner harm that some readers may find emotionally intense, distressing, or triggering. If you are currently in a situation where you feel unsafe, coerced, or under threat — or if this writing brings up past trauma — know this without sugar-coating: your safety matters more than anyone’s story.

You don’t have to endure harm alone.

If you are in immediate danger:

📞 Call 911 (U.S.) right now — your life and wellbeing are priority one.

National and Confidential Support (U.S.):

📞 The National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 or Text START to 88788 — 24/7 confidential support, safety planning, and referrals to shelters and advocates near you.

💬 RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE (4673) or online chat/text options — trained listeners available 24/7.

Find Local Help:

🏠 DomesticShelters.org — searchable directory of shelters and support programs across the U.S.

Emotional and Mental Health Support:

📘 To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) — hope and connection for people struggling with depression, trauma, or crisis.

💛 Reach out to a trusted therapist, counselor, or mental health provider who uses trauma-informed care principles, which recognize how power, fear, and control shape survival responses.

If you’re supporting someone else:

Listen without judgment, believe what they tell you, and help them connect to professional resources at their pace.

You deserve support and safety. If this piece resonates, take a breath — and take the next step toward care that feels right for you.

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