Counting What Couldn’t Be Counted
At first, it looked like he was giving something up. He said the new contract meant fewer hours and less pay — that he was doing it for the family. But later I learned the truth: in that plant, there were ways to hide money, to move deposits into secret accounts. What looked like sacrifice was actually control.
This is how emotional abuse often hides — not in yelling or threats, but in quiet deceit and financial manipulation. I carried the stress and guilt while he secretly built his own safety net. When I finally saw it, the betrayal wasn’t about money; it was about trust.
Emotional abuse doesn’t always leave bruises. Sometimes it’s hidden in pay stubs, passwords, and missing hours. It’s the slow unraveling of truth until you doubt your own reality. But awareness is where healing begins. Once the fog lifts, you start to see that what felt like love was actually surveillance — and what felt like security was a cage.
This moment marked the beginning of my becoming — the shift from confusion to clarity, from silence to strength.
The Truth Always Comes Out —
“I survived years of coercive battery, living in a state of confusion he created over and over until his yelling began, I then, finally woke up. When I found out he’d been cheating for years, I expected devastation — but what broke me wasn’t just the betrayal. It was the gaslighting, the financial betrayal, the lies, and the way my pain was dismissed and pathologized. In Bruce County, victims like me are punished for finally reacting, resistance reacting they call it, after living through years of covert control, and while predators stay hidden and protected by a system that blames and re-traumatises survivors. But the truth will come out. It always does.”