I’ve gotten a whole range of questions about why I was in an abusive relationship, even as a psychologist, from the curious to the sympathetic to the dogmatic. When I was younger, I used to make the excuse that I was practically a child and didn’t know better.

But the truth is that anyone at any age, at any level of professional success or educational achievement, can find themselves there. From board-certified doctors to CEOs to lawyers, people have found themselves trapped. And the shame is stifling.

If you’re someone who’s been in such a relationship or is struggling to understand what’s happening to someone you love, I wrote this for you.

Note: This is written from the context of a heterosexual relationship, where the man is the abusive person and the woman is the victim, for the sake of easy wording. It’s important to note that women can certainly be abusive, men can certainly be victims, and all types of relationships can be at risk of becoming toxic.

If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. For anonymous and confidential help, you can call the National Domestic Violence Helpline (1-800-799-7233 or TTY 1-800-787-3224) and speak with a trained advocate for free as many times as needed. They’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can also talk to them through a private live chat on their website.

1. You’ve had the good times and know they’re not just a pipe dream.

Most toxic relationships start like this: He bombards her with so much affection and attention that she feels like she’s from another world. For anyone who’s been neglected or bullied, it can feel like you’ve finally met your soulmate. He might play on your similarities — or even create similarities — and tell you that he’s never met anyone as wonderful as you. Or he might tell her how terrible the world is to him, and he’s so grateful he finally found her.

But the purpose of this emotional bombardment is to prevent her from getting the space and clarity to think about what’s going on. She gets swept up in these avalanches, and if she has a penchant for saving or caring for someone, she may feel connected to the relationship.

Of course, things eventually change. He does little things, then bigger things, to erode her boundaries and lower her standards while making her feel worse. He can become moody—shifting between the roles of victim, rescuer, and persecutor, so she never knows who she’s dealing with, and she’s always walking on eggshells. He’ll even blame her, so she’s been trained to always be on her best behavior. And because she’s had a taste of the magical beginning of the fairy tale, she knows she wasn’t dreaming. Instead, she’s been told that she’s the one responsible for changing things, so she’ll do her best to bring back those good times.

2. She’s been fooled again.

The average woman takes seven attempts to leave a domestic violence situation for good, and during those attempts, she may be killed or put in danger.

Why is she being fooled so many times, you ask? It’s simple. A toxic person knows which buttons to push and when to play nice.

Related : Think You’re In A Toxic Relationship? Here Are The Signs To Look For + What To Do

It could be a message like “I’d like to meet you to apologize and/or thank you for all the good times,” where she feels she probably owes him the chance to be decent. Or it could be a birthday or holiday message, where he uses nostalgia and sentimentality to weave his web to lure her back. Even if it’s to punish her for daring to leave, and break her.

3. You’ve misread the traumatic attachment as destiny.

What’s unique about trauma is that your nervous system is dormant most of the time, only activating when you’re in danger. This means that your feelings of pleasure and pain are mixed, and while one part of you feels terrified, the other part of you feels like a zombie coming to life. If you were abused as a child or in previous relationships, this becomes even more ingrained. The brain unconsciously tends to take us back to similar situations to try to fix what went wrong, in what’s known as “repetitive compulsion.” But with toxic people, you can never fix it because they can’t and won’t change.

Repeat this in multiple relationships, and you will feel frustrated – as if this type of relationship is your destiny. Having such a belief coupled with such a nervous system makes you feel like you have no other choice.

4. She believed she was “just a housemaid.”

If that’s what the police say, and if that’s what everyone rejects, it’s hard for her not to doubt herself. After all, she’s already been trained to blame herself for everything she’s done and not done.

Then I remember the words of Sir Patrick Stewart: “There’s no such thing as ‘just a housemaid.’”

5. She didn’t want to give up on him.

Many toxic people compare themselves to abandoned animals if they’re left behind. They may even talk about how if they fail in their current relationship with you, it’s proof that they’re just failures in life. A lot of drama like this is staged cinematically in a context where they drink their sorrows away and look at you with puppy dog ​​eyes.

Somewhere along the lines of his sad stories and accusations of persecution, while she claimed to be wiser than him, she became his guardian. She became afraid of provoking him, and monitored her behavior only in case he provoked her. She also learned that if she criticized him for bad behavior, or simply needed time off to reset after an abusive episode, those same actions would lead to worse behavior because they made him feel bad.

Everything she did was potentially hurting him. If she walked away, she would truly disappoint him.

She didn’t see that she was letting herself down in what she was doing.

6. She blamed herself.

That self-critical voice in her head, whether it was about the relationship or anything else, was getting louder. But really, it was disguised as her voice, like that line in The Phantom of the Opera that says, “I am the mask you wear, I am the one they hear.”

It lists a long list of her faults and terrible traits, from her instability to how difficult she was to deal with. Except for him projecting her, tarring her with the brush that is truly his.

Even if she realized he was toxic, the blame game was already too strong by then.

She would blame herself for not seeing it in the first place. For being abused. For not resisting enough. For being with him. For not being able to love him away. For always bringing it up. For staying. For coming back. For being with him.

Anything.

7. He got more sophisticated at his craft over time, and the more exhausted she became.

The more information she told a toxic person about their behavior, the more they learned to tick the boxes of “right behavior” and even appear to be empathetic. As she got more and more exhausted, anything went.

And what does one do when you get to that point? You feel like a gambler, desperate at the table. All logic and knowledge of the odds go out the window. You tell yourself, “One more, one more, and everything will change,” while quoting clichés from the fairy tales you grew up with. Love wins all, eternal salvation after a life of martyrdom, and they lived happily ever after.

8. She was isolated and alone.

It’s not just someone who is lying to you that is emotionally manipulating you. It’s someone who is constantly manipulating your sense of reality, so that black becomes white, and white becomes pink—if they say so. You become disconnected from your gut, your moral compass, and your values. Part of this is systematically orchestrated to bring you down; part of it is also the autopilot mechanism by which you survive because questioning too much can drive you crazy.

And you’re not just isolated from yourself; you’re also isolated from the people you love.

He may not have said outright, “I don’t like your friends and family; don’t hang out with them,” but he may have said out loud, “I do,” and played around with them like he was the greatest magician in the world. But when he sleeps, he may whisper about them in her ear, belittle them, or do whatever it takes to subconsciously influence her. Or he may have subconsciously “trained” her to avoid them, for example by having a paranoid episode every time she sees them, so that she learns to associate “going out with others” with “danger to my relationship.”

The longer she is away from her loved ones, the harder it is to reach out again. How do you find the words to explain her absence without sounding stupid? Or how do you dance around the fact that he was exhibiting some annoying behavior, even if “he didn’t mean to, he had a traumatic past, and I caused it”?

Some toxic people even play the “us against the world” card, planting these seeds, especially during that dizzying whirlwind of a love bombing phase. And because you’re soulmates in a crazy world, and you’re the only one who understands him, why not escape to an alternative lifestyle or a new place where you can start a whole new life together?

At the heart of it all, it sounds romantic, doesn’t it?

9. She had no resources.

A common tactic is to live together quickly, get pregnant, and then ask her to quit her job. She becomes completely dependent on him; she may have signed her bank account over to him together, or he may have wiped it out entirely because of an addiction he claims he can’t shake. Over time, she doesn’t quite know how to get back into the business world.

What’s even more disturbing, however, is the phenomenon where women are deemed indebted to their abuser because they are sponsored immigrants on their visas. A study in Cambridge found that the threat of deportation—along with being alone in a new country, sometimes without knowing how to speak the official language—is another factor used to keep her quiet.

If her abuser is a charming, caring person within the community, no one will believe her. He might even stage situations where he pushes her buttons in public, and then makes her look unstable until people eventually think she’s crazy.

Related : Are You an Emotional Vampire?

The scene has been set. She has no social capital and much less financial capital.

10. She’s been told it’s too late.

She’s probably a shadow of her old self. Her youth is gone, and her body isn’t as fit as it was when they first met because who has the mental space to take care of themselves in a relationship like that?

He might tell her a lot about how grateful he is that he’s still with her. No one will ever want to be with her again. People will laugh at her if she tries to look for a relationship again; after all, she’s unstable, she’s damaged goods, she’s nothing without him, and she has nothing without him.

It’s her only option.

11. She doesn’t know how to deal with danger.

If you live in a state of stress every day, you’re exhausted physically, emotionally, spiritually, cognitively, everything. You can’t deal with it anymore. It’s easier to give in.

She knows—from the indirect and direct threats he’s made—that she’s in danger. The dog might die. The kids might be taken away. He’ll fight her to the last penny and tarnish her reputation. He’ll probably choke her, slap her, or kick her on multiple occasions, and she knows that’s just a taste of what’s to come if she dares to leave.

Because a person in an abusive relationship is at their most dangerous when they’re ready to leave.

12. She wanted to (help) them take responsibility.

Dark personality types are the pinnacle of those who promise change. Even evolved people will tell you they know all about their toxic behavior while pinning it down to old patterns like a difficult childhood, abusive exes, or their battles with substances. They may even ask you to hold them accountable.

What if she’s the type who is always working harder to be a better version of herself? She automatically assumes that everyone else is capable of and willing to grow.

Ascribing this mentality and determination to a toxic person is what makes her addicted. Even if they sometimes laugh and pretend they never said it, or say they can’t promise they’ll succeed in changing.

13. She suffers from a positivity bias.

The human brain is wired to remember losses and negative memories because this prevents us from repeating the same mistakes to survive. In the case of toxic relationships, I’ve noticed a strange case of the exact opposite, which I call the positivity bias.

She remembers the intermittent times when he changed and even praises his efforts. She will ignore the times when he regressed more than he changed, and justify it with any excuse she can. She will also selectively remember and replay the good times, rather than the bad times. Most importantly, she will say that he’s not 100% bad. Or that he doesn’t meet all the criteria for being a “psychopath,” a narcissist, or a sociopath.

Part of this is due to what we call confirmation bias — we ignore evidence that contradicts what we believe (want to believe), and we replay times that align with our views with force. In neuroscience terms, keep rehearsing and reviewing that memory, and it will get stronger and stronger.

Worse, she may have false memories because he gaslighted her over and over again.

Conclusion

After many years, I no longer resort to the “I was young then, in a foreign land” excuse.

It can happen to anyone.

The dynamics of a relationship like this are designed to trick people and trap them. Add to that the personal vulnerabilities that make us attracted to them, desperate to please them, or feel responsible for their bad behavior, as well as the complex machinations perpetrated by dark personalities who have spent their entire lives perfecting their craft, and you have a Molotov cocktail of danger.