They’re testing your threshold for shame. They want to see if you’ll sacrifice your reputation, your relationships, your truth—all to keep the illusion alive. Because once you’ve done it, once, they know you’ll keep doing it. Slowly, it becomes your job to explain their moods, their disrespect, their lies, their disappearances. You become the one smoothing everything over; you become the one carrying the weight of their behavior. And with every defense you make, a piece of you disappears. Your voice becomes quieter; your instincts become blurred; your boundaries soften. You stop reacting to what’s real and start reacting to what they want you to see, because to keep defending them, you have to convince yourself they’re worth defending.
And in that process, you stop trusting yourself. You start living in their version of reality—not because you’re weak, but because they’ve trained you to feel responsible for their consequences. They’ve made their shame yours to carry.
They confide in you with a dark secret right away. It sounds like intimacy, but it’s actually bait. At first, it feels like trust; it feels like closeness, like you’ve unlocked a part of them that no one else ever has. They’ll look at you with tired eyes and tell you something heavy—maybe it’s a story about a toxic ex who destroyed them, a friend who betrayed them, or a family member who never loved them right. They place themselves at the center of that story as the wounded, the misunderstood, the one who gave everything and got nothing in return.
And just like that, you’re pulled in—not just emotionally but psychologically—because now, without realizing it, you’ve taken a side. You’ve chosen them. You’ve silently promised to never become like the people who hurt them. You’ve already passed their first test—not because you love them, but because you believed them without question. And that was the goal. It was never about vulnerability; it was bait—carefully planted to see if you’ll take their version of reality and make it your own.
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