Maybe You’re Not Confused. Maybe You Just Don’t Like the Answer.

What if you already know something is wrong in your relationship, but you’re not ready for what knowing might mean?

In this episode of Pattern Breakers Collective, Lisa explores why women can spend months searching for answers about emotional abuse, gaslighting, coercive control, and unhealthy relationships, even when part of them already knows something isn’t right.

Sometimes confusion is real, especially after years of having your reality questioned. But sometimes we keep asking because we’re hoping someone will eventually give us an answer that hurts less.

We talk about the difference between understanding someone’s behavior and acknowledging its impact on you, why accepting the truth does not mean you have to leave today, and how to begin rebuilding self-trust when you’ve spent years doubting yourself.

Whether you’re not ready or able to leave, quietly preparing, or already know it’s time to go, there are steps you can take to get support, strengthen your sense of self, understand your options, and move forward safely. And if you do leave, loving, missing, or grieving that person does not mean you made the wrong decision.

You don’t have to know what comes next to tell yourself the truth about where you are now.

If you’re ready for support breaking unhealthy relationship patterns, rebuilding self-trust, and learning how to stop abandoning yourself to preserve relationships, visit PatternBreakersCollective.com to learn about the 12-week program and individual support.

If this episode resonates, share it with a woman who may need it and leave a review to help more women find these conversations.

Topics: emotional abuse, gaslighting, coercive control, toxic relationships, trauma bonds, self-abandonment, people-pleasing, leaving an abusive relationship, staying in an abusive relationship, rebuilding self-trust, boundaries, healing after emotional abuse

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

What if you're not actually confused? I want to sit with that question for a moment before we get into anything else. Because I think for a lot of women who are in the middle of a difficult or unhealthy relationship, women who have been searching late at night, saving reels, listening to podcasts, Googling things like, is this emotional abuse? Or am I overreacting? Or can someone love you and still treat you this way? I think under all of that searching, underneath all of those questions, a lot of women already know the answer. They're just hoping someone will eventually give them one that hurts a little less. Now, before you hear this as, come on, you know better. Why are you still there? That is not what I'm saying at all. Because there is a kind of confusion that is completely real. If someone has spent years denying your reality, telling you that things didn't happen the way that you remember, convincing you that you're too sensitive, blaming you for their behavior, hurting you, and then becoming the one who comforts you afterward, of course you're confused. That is what gaslighting does. That is what emotional manipulation does. That's what living inside an unpredictable relationship does to a person. That confusion is not a character flaw. It is the result of someone working very hard to make sure that you couldn't trust yourself. But there's another kind of confusion that I want to talk about today. And this one happens later. It happens when you start waking up, when you've learned enough that the patterns are beginning to look familiar, when you're starting to trust yourself again, and suddenly the confusion isn't really about what's happening anymore. The confusion is about what you're supposed to do with what you know now. Because sometimes we keep asking questions because we're hoping someone will eventually give us an answer that changes things. And maybe that's where you are. Maybe you don't need another answer. Maybe you need support in accepting the one that you already have. That is what today's about. Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. Before we get into it, this same disclaimer that I always give throughout today's episode, I'll use he when talking about the partner causing harm and she when talking about the person experiencing it. That reflects my own experience and most of this community. But I recognize these dynamics are not exclusive to one gender. Women can be abusive, men can experience abuse. These patterns happen in same-sex relationships and families and friendships. Take what applies to your situation. Now I've been thinking about this episode for a long time because when I first started talking publicly about emotional abuse, course of control, and unhealthy relationship patterns, I genuinely believe that the main thing women needed was information, education, the ability to name what they were experiencing. And I still believe that that matters. Being able to name what's happening to you can be life-changing. It really can. But after spending more time in this space, after reading thousands of comments, after opening message after message from women describing what's happening behind closed doors in incredible detail, I realized something that surprised me. A lot of women eventually reach a point where information isn't actually what they're missing. They know. Maybe they don't know what they're gonna do about it, but they know what they're experiencing. And those are two very different things. I see women describe behavior that would make most people's jaw drop. Oh, well, he just calls me names when he's angry. Oh well, he just monitors everywhere that I go. Oh well, he just gives me the silent treatment for days when I do something he doesn't like. Oh, he controls all the finances completely. Well, he tells me I'm crazy when I confront him. Well, he promises to change every single time I get close to leaving. Oh, yep, everybody loves him, but behind closed doors, he's a completely different person. And then at the end of describing all of that, they'll say, I just don't know if this is abuse. And I understand why. Because accepting that word, accepting what it means, can feel enormous. Because once I call it abuse, what happens then? Do I have to leave? Do I have to tell people? Does that mean that my marriage failed? What happens to my kids? How would I afford it? What if I'm wrong? What if he changes? What if I regret it? Suddenly I'm confused feels so much safer because confusion keeps all of the possibilities alive. You don't have to close any doors yet. And that's what I want to explore today. Not how to identify abuse. We've talked about that extensively. I want to talk about what happens when you're beginning to recognize the truth, but you're terrified of accepting what it might require. But sometimes confusion isn't a failure of understanding. Sometimes it's a door that your brain is leaving cracked open because closing it feels too painful. And I don't mean consciously. I don't think women are sitting around thinking, I'm just gonna pretend I don't understand this, so I don't have to deal with it. I mean something much more human than that. I mean that as long as you're still confused, maybe he'll change. As long as you're still confused, maybe you misunderstood. As long as you're still confused, maybe the therapist was wrong. Maybe that podcast didn't apply to your specific situation. Maybe yours is different. Maybe there's a nuance that nobody is seeing. And sometimes there could be a nuance. Relationships are complicated, human beings are complicated. I am never gonna sit behind a microphone and pretend that I can assess your relationship from one Instagram comment. But sometimes, and I want you to hear this very gently, we aren't looking for nuance anymore. We're looking for an exception, and those are different things. Here's what I mean. Maybe you've watched 10 videos about emotional abuse. Nine of them describe your relationship almost perfectly, but then the 10th one mentions something that your partner doesn't do, and suddenly you grab onto that. See, he doesn't do that. Or you take one of those quizzes and you answer yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and then you get to one question and the answer is no. And somehow that single no becomes louder than all 12 yeses. Why? Because the no gives you somewhere to hide, it gives you another small piece of uncertainty, and uncertainty means that you don't have to decide anything yet. Or maybe you've talked to three friends. The first one said, This is not okay. The second said, I'm a little worried about you. The third said, I think you need to talk to someone who specializes in this. And so you call a fourth friend, sometimes because you genuinely need the support, and that's completely valid. But sometimes you're quietly hoping that that fourth friend says, Oh, that's just marriage. Mine does that too. And when she does, you feel relief, not because anything changed, because someone gave you permission to keep questioning what you already felt. I have done versions of this in my own life, not just in romantic relationships and other situations too. I have tolerated things far longer than I should have because I could explain them. I could understand where someone was coming from, I could see their trauma, their stress, their good intentions. And because I could understand it, I kept thinking that I needed to keep absorbing it. But those are not the same thing. Understanding someone's behavior does not create an obligation to keep living with its consequences. That's something that I'm still actively learning and working on. And I think women are especially good at this particular kind of explaining. Oh, he's stressed, he's depressed, he's scared, he had a difficult childhood, his father never showed affection, he doesn't know how to communicate. All of those things may be completely true, but at some point the question has to stop being, can I explain why he's doing this? And become, what is living with this doing to me? Because explanations tell you about him. Impact tells you about your life, and your life is what actually matters here. And if you're constantly anxious, constantly monitoring his mood, constantly trying to prevent the next conflict, constantly shrinking your needs, constantly wondering if you're asking for too much, that is information. You don't have to know exactly what you're gonna do with that information yet, but you do have to stop pretending that it isn't information. And I think that's actually the first step. Not leaving, not confronting, not making some enormous decision, just telling yourself the truth. This is hurting me. Full stop. No explanation appended to it, no, oh, but he's stressed, or but he's a good dad, or but when things are good, they're really good. Just this is hurting me. And let that sentence exist without immediately arguing with it. Because maybe that's where clarity actually begins. Not with knowing exactly what comes next, but with finally being willing to acknowledge what's happening now. Understanding someone's behavior does not create an obligation to keep absorbing it. Explanations tell you about him. Impact tells you about your life. And at some point, the question has to shift from why is he doing this to what is this doing to me? And this is where I think I need to go next, because I know exactly where some women's mind went the moment I said, tell yourself the truth. They thought, but then what? If I admit that this is abuse, do I have to leave? If I admit I'm miserable, do I have to file for divorce? If I stop giving him the benefit of the doubt, what am I supposed to do tomorrow morning? I think this is one of the main reasons women stay inside confusion for so long. We've unconsciously connected acceptance with immediate action. As if the moment we stop questioning, we're obligated to also start packing boxes. But that's not how this works. You're allowed to acknowledge that this relationship is unhealthy and not know yet what you're gonna do. You're allowed to say, I don't trust him, without deciding today whether trust can ever be rebuilt. You can accept that what happened to you was emotional abuse while also knowing clearly and honestly that you're not ready to leave yet. You can love someone and also not want to keep living this way. Both of those things can be true simultaneously. You don't have to solve the contradiction today. And for many women, leaving isn't simply an emotional decision anyway. There are real, concrete, serious barriers: finances, housing, children, custody concerns, safety, health insurance, employment, years of completely intertwined lives. And in physically abusive relationships specifically, leaving can actually introduce additional risk, which is why I will never reduce this to just leave. That is not responsible and it is not helpful. But what you can begin doing now, right now, wherever you are, is get support. Not necessarily support to leave, support to think, support to hear yourself again, support from someone who isn't invested in keeping you confused. Because there is an enormous difference between looking for someone to give you an answer and finding someone who can help you trust your own. If you have spent years being taught to doubt yourself, if your perception of reality has been consistently questioned, corrected, or dismissed, that kind of support doesn't just feel helpful. It can feel genuinely life-changing and it's available to you whether or not you've decided anything else yet. And I want to say something about the word support because I think it gets misunderstood in exactly this context. When you've been confused for a long time, you might think that getting support means finding someone who will finally tell you the answer. Oh yeah, you should leave, or no, that's not that bad, you should stay. But that's not support. That's asking for someone else to make one of the biggest decisions of your life for you. And especially if you've spent years in a relationship where your own voice has been minimized, where your judgment has been consistently questioned, where you've been conditioned to look outside of yourself for confirmation of what's real. The last thing that I want for you is to replace his voice with mine, or a therapist, or another coach's. The goal is not to help you trust me, the goal is to help you trust yourself again. Real support gives you somewhere to untangle things without someone immediately rewriting the story. Somewhere that you can describe what happened last week in detail. And instead of being told what it means, someone simply helps you just to slow it down. What happened? What did you feel in that moment? What did you need? What happened when you expressed that need? Was there repair afterward? Was there real accountability? Was there retaliation? Is this a one-time thing, or have you seen this pattern a hundred times before? None of these are asked as an interrogation, but as an invitation to hear your own story without someone else's interpretation pasted over the top of it. Because after enough gaslighting, something really specific happens. You start carrying his voice into rooms he isn't even in. You hear, mm, you're too emotional when you're sitting alone. You think, I'm probably overreacting, before you've even finished feeling the thing that upset you. You're impossible to please. Nothing I do is ever enough. You're the difficult one. Hear those things long enough and eventually they start sounding like your own thoughts. That's not weakness. That's what prolonged emotional manipulation does to a person's sense of reality. Good support gives you other mirrors, not mirrors that reflect back what you want to hear. That's not useful either, but accurate ones. People who can sit with you in the complexity without rushing you toward a conclusion. People who can say genuinely and without an agenda, no, what you're describing is not okay, and mean it and have you believe it, not because they told you, but because being seen clearly by someone who has no reason to distort the view can slowly help you start seeing yourself clearly too. I want you to hear this as clearly as I know how to say it. Knowing does not obligate you to make a decision today. And staying right now does not mean that you have to keep participating in the relationship exactly the way that you have been. What I don't want you to do is let I can't leave yet become so there's nothing I can do. Because that's not true. And I have watched it keep women feeling completely powerless in situations where they actually had more options than they realized. You can start rebuilding your support network. Maybe there's a friend you've slowly pulled away from over the years, a sister, someone you used to be close with who got filtered out of your life for reasons you couldn't quite name at the time. You don't have to tell them everything. You don't have to give a speech. Sometimes you can just start with a text. Hey, I've been thinking about you. Can we get coffee? That's enough to begin. You can start creating a life that exists outside of managing the relationship. Go to the class, return to the thing that you stopped doing because it was easier to make yourself smaller. Join the group. This isn't frivolous. You're rebuilding your world. You're practicing existing as a full person again, and that matters more than it sounds. You can start paying attention to your own reality in a concrete way. A journal doesn't have to be pages of processing. It can be as simple as this happened, this is how I felt, this is what I needed, this is how he responded. Because when you're living inside a confusing dynamic, patterns can be genuinely difficult to see while they're happening in real time. But written down over weeks, they become very hard to argue with. You can also start practicing small boundaries. And I want to be specific about what I mean here because this looks different depending on the situation. I am not talking about dramatic ultimatums. I mean things like, I'm not going to continue this conversation while I'm being yelled at. When you stop accommodating and watching how someone responds, that tells you something important about who you're actually dealing with. But I want to add real caution here because it matters. In coercively controlling or actively abusive relationships, even small changes in your behavior can sometimes trigger escalation. This is why individualized safety planning matters, because start setting boundaries sounds straightforward, but the way that you do that when someone is dangerous is very different from the way you do it when someone is simply difficult. Please don't apply generic advice to a situation that requires specialized support. Your safety matters far more than any particular step. Some pattern breaking is loud, and some of it is very, very quiet. Sometimes it looks like privately gathering information, quietly strengthening connections, understanding your options and your rights before anyone else knows you're even paying attention in a new way. There is no prize for doing this dramatically. And I think there is one more thing that you can do while you stay, which I actually think is the most important. You can stop making your healing contingent on whether or not he participates. You can work on yourself, on your own people pleasing, your own self-abandonment, your own relationship with conflict without his involvement and without his permission. And something really interesting tends to happen when women do that. They become clearer, not because someone handed them an answer, because they're no longer making decisions from the same frightened, exhausted, disconnected versions of themselves. The clarity develops as the self comes back. Staying today does not mean participating in the relationship exactly the way that you have been. Knowing does not obligate you to act immediately, and healing does not require his cooperation. Your work belongs to you, and it can begin right now, exactly where you are. Okay. And then there's the other woman listening. Maybe you're not asking, is this bad enough anymore? Maybe you're past the point of questioning what's happening. You've done the reading, you've had the conversations, you've spent a very long time being honest with yourself. And now you're thinking, I know I need to go. That's a different season and it requires a different focus. At that point, I don't want you spending your remaining energy trying to get him to finally understand why you're leaving, especially if you've already explained the same things in every possible way for years. I know why we want that conversation. We want the closure of being understood. We want someone to acknowledge, really acknowledge the depth of what this has cost us. And in a healthy relationship with a partner who's genuinely capable of that kind of honesty and accountability, maybe that conversation is possible. But we're here, so in an emotionally abusive or controlling relationship, that conversation very rarely gives you what you're hoping for. Instead, it can become another opportunity for denial, blame, promises, love bombing, threats, or most confusingly, suddenly, becoming everything that you spent years asking him to become just in time for you to wonder whether this time might actually be different. So if you're preparing to leave, your focus needs to shift from convincing to preparing, from explaining to supporting yourself, from how do I make him understand? To what do I need in order to do this as safely as possible? That may mean talking confidentially to a domestic violence advocate before anyone else knows, understanding your finances, thinking through housing, gathering important documents when it's safe to do so, creating a plan that fits your actual circumstances, not a plan that makes for a satisfying ending to a movie, but one that accounts for a specific situation that you're in. And please don't assume the safest way to leave is a face-to-face announcement followed by walking out the door. For some women, that is genuinely the most dangerous moment. Your plan should be built around your safety, not around what feels emotionally satisfying. But I also want to talk about the emotional part of leaving because logistics are only half the story. You may know with complete clarity that leaving is right and still grieve. You may feel enormous relief on Monday and desperately want to go back on Tuesday. You may spend Wednesday remembering every terrible thing and Thursday remembering everything you loved about him. You may leave someone you still love. You may cry over a relationship that you know you cannot return to. None of that automatically means that you made the wrong decision. It means you're human. It means you didn't only leave the painful parts, you left the hopes too. The future that you had imagined, the version of him you kept believing might eventually show up, the family you wanted, the life you thought you were building together. Of course, there's grief. Grief doesn't require the thing that you're mourning to have been good, it requires it to have mattered. And it did. And this is the other place where support becomes so important because you need somewhere to take that grief where it won't immediately be interpreted as, see, you should go back. Sometimes grief simply means this mattered to me. That's all. And you deserve somewhere safe to feel that without someone using it as evidence against you. You do not need to arrive at support with a perfectly defined problem. You do not need to know whether you're staying, you do not need to know whether you're leaving, you don't need to have crossed some imaginary threshold where you're finally enough of a victim to be allowed to ask for help. You can show up saying, something doesn't feel right, and that is enough. You can say, I'm not ready to leave, and that is enough. You can say, I think I'm ready, but I'm terrified, and that is enough. You can say, he isn't physically abusive, but I'm afraid of him and I don't fully understand why, and that is enough. You can say, I don't even know what I'm afraid of. I just know that I've stopped feeling like myself, and that is enough. So many women wait until they're in absolute crisis because they're thinking, well, other women have it worse. He doesn't hit me, maybe I'm exaggerating. I should be able to handle this. But you don't have to wait until your life is falling apart to become curious about why you're so unhappy inside of it. You don't have to prove abuse before you're allowed to say, I need help understanding what's happening to me. That sentence alone is enough to begin. One of the hardest parts of this whole journey is that we want clarity to arrive with a plan attached. We want to finally understand what's happening and immediately know exactly what to do about it. But that is rarely how it works. Sometimes clarity arrives first, and courage takes a little longer. Sometimes you finally admit this is emotional abuse, and then you go make dinner, you get the kids ready for school, you sleep next to the same person that night. Your life looks exactly the same from the outside, but something inside of you is completely different because you know now, not just intellectually, you know. And once you stop fighting yourself about what you're experiencing, you have somewhere entirely new to begin. Maybe your next step is leaving. Maybe it's preparing, maybe it's getting professional support, maybe it's quietly rebuilding your finances or reconnecting with people you've lost touch with. Maybe it's simply keeping a promise to yourself that you're not gonna explain away the next thing that happens. That might not look like transformation from the outside, but it is. Because every time you believe yourself, every single time, you're rebuilding self-trust. And self-trust is what makes everything else eventually possible. So to the woman who isn't ready to leave, please don't use that as evidence that you're weak. Readiness is genuinely complicated, especially when you've built a life with someone, especially when children are involved, especially when you've been conditioned for years to believe that you cannot do this without them. You can know something is unhealthy and still need time. You can know that you're being harmed and still love him. You can know that you deserve something and still be afraid of what different looks like. Your job right now doesn't have to be making the biggest decision of your life. Maybe your job is simply becoming strong enough, supported enough, and trusting enough of yourself that when you do make a decision, it genuinely belongs to you and to the woman who is ready. You don't have to wait until you stop loving him. I think that's one of the most painful lies we tell ourselves. Oh, I'll know I'm ready when I don't care anymore. But you might leave someone you still love. You might grieve someone that you know wasn't healthy for you. You might cry over a relationship that you know you can't go back to. Love doesn't always disappear when clarity arrives. Sometimes love and clarity have to coexist. And sometimes the most painful and most honest thing a person ever says is, I love you and I cannot keep living like this. That's not failure. That is finally accepting that loving someone does not require you to sacrifice yourself indefinitely. I think that's one of the biggest shifts in how I understand this work now. I used to think pattern breaking was about making the right decision, leaving the wrong person, setting a boundary, saying no, and yes, all of those things matter enormously. But the deeper work happens before any of that. Pattern breaking starts when you stop abandoning yourself and the conversations that you're having inside of your own head. When something hurts, and instead of immediately saying, I'm probably overreacting, you pause and say, let me actually listen to that. When someone crosses the line, and instead of asking, how do I explain this so they don't get upset? You ask, why am I more concerned about their reaction than what just happened to me? When your body tells you something doesn't feel safe and instead of overriding it, you stop treating your own nervous system like an unreliable witness. Those small internal moments eventually change everything, not all at once, but they compound and over time they become the foundation of a woman who trusts herself. Pattern breaking starts when you stop abandoning yourself in the conversation inside your own head, when something hurts, and instead of immediately arguing with it, you let yourself know it. That is where it begins. What if you're not confused? Maybe the answer you already have hurts. Maybe it changes the story you thought you were living. Maybe it means grieving the years you can't get back. Maybe it means acknowledging that someone you love is also someone who has harmed you. Maybe it means accepting that the relationship you kept waiting for, the one you kept believing was just around the corner, may never exist. Of course you don't like that answer. Who would? You are completely allowed to actually hate it. You're allowed to grieve it, you're allowed to wish that things were different. You're allowed to take some time figuring out what you're gonna do with it. But you don't have to keep confusing not liking the truth with not knowing the truth. Those are different things, and you know the difference. And if you're genuinely still in the I don't know stage, that's okay too. That's not failure. That's where you begin, not with pressure, with curiosity. Get support. Talk to someone who understands these dynamics, pay attention to your own experience instead of constantly trying to understand his. Write things down, reconnect with yourself, give yourself enough space to hear your own voice without someone constantly rewriting what your experience means. You don't need to manufacture certainty. You need enough safety to let clarity develop on its own. This is really what I want Pattern Breakers Collective to become for women, not another voice screaming, leave him, not another person telling you what your relationship is based on 30 seconds of information, not someone making your decisions for you. I want this to be a place where you learn how to make those decisions for yourself, where you understand emotional abuse, coercive control, trauma bonds, self-abandonment, boundaries, not so I can tell you what to do, but so you become increasingly able to say with your own voice, I know what I'm experiencing, I trust what I'm seeing, I know what I need, and I can get support figuring out what comes next. If you're realizing while you're listening to this that what you actually need is real support, not another reel, not another quiz, not another late-night search, that's exactly why our programs exist. It's not about deciding whether to stay or leave, it's about understanding the patterns that brought you here, rebuilding self-trust, learning boundaries, understanding why you abandon yourself to preserve relationships, and ultimately building the relationship with yourself that you refuse to sacrifice again. All the details are on my socials or at patternbreakerscollective.com. There are options to work individually or as a group. It's all dependent on what you need. And if this episode made you think of someone who's been saying, I just don't know for a very long time, please send it to her. Not because you know what she should do, but because maybe she needs permission to start listening to herself again. And if you haven't already, a rating, a review, wherever you listen, genuinely helps other women find these conversations when they're sitting alone somewhere at midnight searching for answers that they can't quite put into words. I'll leave you with this. You don't have to know what comes next to tell yourself the truth about where you are now. You don't have to leave today. You don't have to stay forever. You don't have to make your whole life make sense by tomorrow. You can simply start here. This is what I'm experiencing. This is how it's affecting me. And I'm not going to talk myself out of knowing that anymore. Because maybe the opposite of confusion isn't certainty. Maybe it's finally trusting yourself enough to stop arguing with what you already know. And that is where the pattern starts to break.