Minimizing your pain doesn’t make you stronger — it only makes healing harder.
Dear Survivor,
How many times did you tell yourself, “It wasn’t that bad”? Maybe you stayed because you thought others had it worse. Maybe you believed love meant forgiving everything. Maybe your abusive partner convinced you that the harm wasn’t real. Gaslighting doesn’t just twist your memory — it twists your entire sense of what you deserve.
But hurt is hurt, no matter how it is disguised.
Minimizing the harm you survived is a survival tactic. It’s a way your mind protected you when you couldn’t fully face the truth. In abusive relationships, especially those marked by narcissistic abuse, survivors are often taught to doubt their instincts. You were conditioned to question yourself at every turn, and that self-doubt doesn’t simply vanish once you leave.
Healing from narcissistic abuse begins with honoring your own reality.
Your experiences are valid even if no one else saw the bruises. Emotional abuse leaves deep scars that no one can photograph. The absence of physical violence does not erase the harm. You don’t have to justify your pain. You don’t need to meet someone else’s definition of “bad enough” to deserve healing and support.
Your truth is enough.
If you’re wrestling with doubts about whether your relationship was really abusive, it can help to ground yourself with tools like the Types of Abuse worksheet. Seeing behaviors listed out clearly — emotional abuse, controlling behaviors, manipulation — can affirm what your heart has already known. You didn’t imagine it. You didn’t exaggerate it. And you don’t have to carry it alone.
Naming what happened is the first step toward freedom.
Today, I invite you to release the weight of minimizing your own pain. You don’t have to compare your story to anyone else’s. You don’t have to apologize for needing healing. Your story matters because you matter — not because it reaches some invisible threshold of “bad enough.”
Your survival is proof that it was bad enough.
Blessings and healing,
Catrina
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