If you express empathy, outrage, or comfort, they know they have you. You’ve proven you’re not a threat; you’re not someone who thinks too deeply or asks too many questions; you’re someone who protects, someone who absorbs, someone who can be trained. From that moment on, they know you’ll see everything through the lens they’ve handed you, and slowly, you stop seeing clearly. You stop asking if the story even made sense, if the timeline added up, if maybe, just maybe, the villain in the story wasn’t the other person at all.
By then, it’s too late. You’re no longer the listener; you’re the protector. You’re the believer. You’re the one defending a wound that may have never existed in the first place. They create a crisis just to see if you’ll drop everything for them. It doesn’t come with warning. One moment everything seems normal, and the next, they’re spiraling. They might go silent for hours; they might send a vague, alarming message that something terrible just happened. They might suddenly say they can’t do this anymore or that everything is falling apart.
While it looks like they’re falling apart, what they’re really doing is watching—not because they need support, but because they need confirmation. Confirmation that your attention belongs to them, that you will cancel your day, rearrange your schedule, abandon your responsibilities, and run toward their chaos before even understanding what’s real and what’s not.
It’s not about the crisis itself; it’s about your reaction. They create the storm just to see how fast you move into it. And the moment you do, they feel in control because now they know that all it takes is one emotional explosion to bring your entire world to a pause. They don’t need to say a word; they just need to collapse in front of you and let your guilt, your empathy, your wiring take over.
And once you respond that way, they keep coming back to that strategy. The chaos becomes a pattern; you begin to live in a constant state of emotional alertness, always bracing for the next breakdown, the next disappearance, the next cry for help. They’ve trained you to treat their pain as if it’s your responsibility to fix, and in doing that, they teach you to abandon yourself in the name of being good to them.
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