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Contradictory Truth | Why Survivors Stay and How Healing Begins
- Jun 16
- 10 min read
People often ask survivors:
"Why didn't you leave?"
For years, I believed that was the question I needed to answer. It became the question I had to answer not only to the people around me, but to myself.
Why didn't you leave?
It hung over my head like a halo of shame.
A question that seemed to prove every fear I already carried.
The strong, capable and independent woman everyone saw on the outside felt worlds away from the woman I saw when I looked in the mirror. The woman who had begun to believe everything he said about her. The woman whose sadness hid behind a smile and whose eyes no longer held the spark they once had.
As I began my healing journey, I slowly realised that this was never the question anyone should have been asking — myself included.
Hidden within it was an assumption. The assumption that leaving was simple.
The assumption that if I was still there, I must somehow be choosing it.
The assumption that understanding abuse and escaping abuse are the same thing.
They are not.
The people who asked that question were asking it from a place of safety.
From a place of certainty.
From homes where they felt secure, valued and loved.
They were looking at my situation from the outside and judging it by what they believed they would do. But nobody except me was living my reality.
Nobody else was carrying the fear, the confusion, the self-doubt, the hope, the guilt and the exhaustion that had become part of my everyday life.
Over time, I began to realise that the question we should be asking is this:
"What was happening inside your head while you were trying to decide whether you could?"
For many survivors, that is where they live.
Not in certainty.
Not in clarity.
But in contradiction.
Two Truths At Once
One of the things I have learnt in the last few years is how big an impact the idea of two truths at once can have on
someone already in distress.
Reflection can be painfully difficult, but it becomes a vital part of the healing process, and as I reflected on my own experiences, I realised that many of the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that had caused me so much confusion shared one thing in common.
They were all contradictory truths.
Contradictory truth - though not an official term can help to explain a lot of choices that victims and survivors make whilst in an abusive environment and often for quite a while afterwards.
It may seem simplistic but it helped me to begin to understand that the choices were never as simple as why didn't you leave or why did you choose to stay?
Contradictory Truth is the existence of two seemingly opposed truths existing at the same time and occupying the same space.
It is not as simple as one is true and therefore the other must be false.
It's not because we are confused.
Human experiences are often far more complicated than we would like them to be. No matter who we are or where we come from, contradictory truths form part of our story.
The difference is that within abusive relationships, those contradictions can become so overwhelming that they begin to shape our decisions, our beliefs and our sense of self.
How can that look to someone navigating an abusive environment?
For me, contradictory truths looked like this:
I loved him, and he hurt me.
I knew something was wrong, and I didn't fully understand what was happening.
I wanted to leave, and I genuinely believed I couldn't.
I knew the abuse wasn't my fault, and I still blamed myself for it.
I missed him, and I never wanted to go back.
I believed the horrific things he said about me, but I knew that none of it was true.
The list could go on and on. Each of these truths existed side by side. Not taking turns. Not replacing one another. Existing together, often within the very same moment.
For years, I believed these contradictions meant there was something wrong with me.
How could I love someone who hurt me?
How could I know I needed to leave but still stay?
How could I understand it wasn't my fault whilst carrying so much guilt and shame?
The truth is, these contradictions were not evidence of my weakness. They were evidence of the impossible situation I was trying to navigate.
We have been taught to look for simple answers.
Work smarter, not harder.
Good people and bad people.
Right and wrong.
Leave or stay.
Victim or survivor.
Truth or lie.
For those who know abuse intimately, it rarely fits neatly into any categories. The reality is much more difficult, often messy and complicated and deeply confusing.
When two truths exist side by side, it can leave survivors questioning their own judgement, their own memories and even their own identity.
The contradiction is not the problem.
The contradiction is the reality.
The Shame of Staying
If contradictory truth was the reality I was living, shame was the price I paid for not understanding it.
For years, I carried an overwhelming sense of shame about my inability to leave.
I didn't want to stay.
I remember night after night lying in bed and saying to myself, I am done, and yet being paralysed with doubt and uncertainty, and the overwhelming belief that I was no longer capable of independance.
I would wake the next morning with that familiar feeling of dread knowing that I was there for another day and feeling the familiar trickle of shame move slowly across my skin because the courage I had in the quiet of the night had disappeared with the morning light.
I didn't stay because I enjoyed the chaos.
The chaos was exhausting and overwhelming, loud and invasive and could explode at any moment turning a rare moment of solitude or peace into a cacophony of noise, raised voices and the fear that something was coming.
I didn't stay because I believed I deserved what was happening.
I stayed because I couldn't understand why I was still there, and that single question became a crippling tsunami that drowned everything else out.
The question, "Why didn't you leave?" wasn't just asked in judgement by other people with pitying glances that made me feel small and ashamed of what I had allowed myself to become.
It became a question I asked myself. Again and again.
Every argument.
Every broken promise.
Every tearful apology.
Every time I found myself wondering how my life had become something I no longer recognised.
Why didn't I leave?
The more I asked the question, the more shame I felt. Because if leaving was as simple as everyone seemed to think it was, then surely there must be something wrong with me.
Surely I was weak.
Surely I was failing.
Surely I was choosing this.
I remember someone saying to me, "You're choosing to be there." And whilst I understand now that those words came from frustration rather than cruelty, they reinforced every fear I already carried. Because from the outside, it looked like a choice. From the inside, it felt impossible.
That is another contradictory truth that many survivors carry.
Other people can see a door.
You can only see everything standing in front of it.
The fear.
The financial uncertainty.
The loss of confidence.
The hope that things might change.
The belief that perhaps things are not really as bad as they seem.
The guilt.
The responsibility.
The exhaustion.
The love.
When people asked why I stayed, they were looking at the door. I was trying to navigate everything that stood between me and that door.
The shame came from believing I should have been able to do something that, at the time, felt impossible.
It came from comparing my reality to other people's expectations.
It came from believing that if I couldn't leave, then perhaps everything he said about me was true.
But shame thrives in misunderstanding. And for years, I misunderstood myself.
The more I began to understand abuse, trauma bonding, coercive control and the impact they had on my thinking, the more I realised something important.
The fact that I struggled to leave was not proof that I wanted to stay.
It was proof of how much I had been carrying while I was trying to find a way out.
Choosing Abuse vs Not Knowing How to Leave
Perhaps one of the most damaging assumptions made about survivors is that staying and choosing are the same thing. They are not.
For a long time, I believed they were. After all, if I was still there, surely I was choosing it.
If I remained in the relationship, surely that meant I wanted it.
If I didn't leave, surely I had accepted it.
That logic seems simple enough, but the problem is that abuse is rarely that simple.
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides they would like their confidence dismantled piece by piece.
Nobody chooses to question their own judgement.
Nobody chooses to live with fear, anxiety, self-doubt and emotional exhaustion.
What people often fail to understand is that by the time many survivors begin thinking seriously about leaving, they are no longer making that decision from the same place they were in when they entered the relationship.
The person who walked through the door at the beginning is not the same person standing there years later trying to find a way out.
Confidence has been eroded.
Independence has been undermined.
Self-belief has been chipped away.
Fear has become their reality.
Uncertainty has become normal.
And somewhere along the way, the impossible begins to feel inevitable.
I didn't stay because I chose abuse.
I stayed because I couldn't see a clear path beyond it.
I stayed because I was frightened.
I stayed because I didn't know how I would manage financially.
I stayed because I no longer trusted my own judgement.
I stayed because part of me still hoped things would change.
I stayed because I had been conditioned to believe that perhaps I was the problem.
Most importantly, I stayed because I genuinely believed I couldn't do it alone.
Looking back now, I can see that many of those beliefs were not facts. They were fears.
But when you are living inside an abusive environment, fear often disguises itself as truth. And that is another contradictory truth.
Part of me knew I needed to leave.
Part of me believed I couldn't survive if I did.
Both things existed at the same time.
Both things felt true.
The difference between choosing abuse and not knowing how to leave may seem small to someone standing outside the situation.
To a survivor, it can be the difference between carrying shame and finding compassion.
One says:
"You wanted this."
The other says:
"You were trying to survive it."
Those are not the same story.
When You Stop Trusting Yourself
One of the most difficult consequences of living with contradictory truths is that eventually you stop trusting yourself. When every decision feels uncertain, every emotion feels conflicted and every belief seems to have an opposing argument attached to it, it becomes incredibly difficult to know what is real.
You begin to question your instincts.
You question your judgement.
You question your memories.
You question your feelings.
You question yourself.
For many survivors, this doesn't happen overnight.
The doubt starts with something small or relatively insignificant and slowly begins to grow.
A comment dismissed here.
A concern minimised there.
An argument that somehow becomes your fault.
An apology that leaves you feeling guilty.
A promise that gives you hope.
A betrayal that destroys it again.
Over time, certainty is replaced by confusion, and confusion is fertile ground for self-doubt. Once self-doubt takes hold, it rarely stays in one area of your life. It begins to colour everything.
I would find myself questioning constantly whether I was overreacting.
Whether I was being too sensitive.
Whether I was expecting too much.
Whether I was remembering things correctly.
Whether the problem was me.
Whether he was right and there was something fundamentally wrong with me that I couldn't see.
When his criticism turned towards the people I loved, I found myself searching my own past for explanations.
If he blamed my family, my childhood or my experiences for my reactions, I would desperately look for evidence that might explain what was happening.
Not because I believed he was right, but because it felt easier to question myself than to accept that he was attacking people who had done nothing wrong.
Over time, I became so used to searching for fault within myself that I stopped recognising how often the blame had been placed there in the first place.
The more I questioned myself, the easier it became to believe someone else's version of reality and take the blame for everything that was wrong. Even if part of me knew it wasn't true.
That is the danger of contradictory truths. Not that they exist.
But that eventually you begin to believe the contradiction is evidence that you cannot trust yourself.
The reality is very different. The contradiction is not proof that you are broken.
It is proof that you have been trying to make sense of something that does not make sense.
Trying to find clarity inside confusion.
Trying to find certainty inside uncertainty.
Trying to find yourself whilst being told, directly or indirectly, that the person you are cannot be trusted.
That is not weakness.
That is survival.
Accepting the Contradiction
For a long time, I believed healing would come when I finally found the answer to the question, "Why didn't you leave?"
When I could explain why I stayed.
When I could justify every decision.
When I could untangle every contradiction and make sense of every choice I had made. But that day never came, and not because I wasn't healing.
I was healing, but healing has never been a linear process, and as any survivor of abuse will tell you, the healing never ends.
It never came but not because I wasn't trying.
I tried everything I could to move forward and put it behind me and after several fruitless years, I realised one very important thing.
I was asking the wrong thing of myself.
My experiences were a puzzle I was attempting to solve rather than a dual reality that needed understanding, gentleness and self love.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to decide which truth was the real one.
The truth was that I loved him but the truth was also that he hurt me.
The truth was that I wanted to leave, but the truth also was that I genuinely believed I couldn't.
The truth was that I knew something was wrong, but the truth also was that I blamed myself anyway.
None of those truths cancelled one another out. They existed together - all part of the same story.
Healing did not begin when I chose one truth over the other.
Healing began when I accepted that both truths had existed all along.
For years I asked myself: "Why didn't I leave?"
Today, I ask a different question.
How much was I carrying while I was trying to work out whether I could?
The answer changed everything. I finally realised something important.
I wasn't weak.
I wasn't choosing abuse.
I wasn't broken.
I was living inside contradictory truths and all of them were real.
Perhaps that is the most important thing survivors can learn.
You do not have to resolve every contradiction to heal.
You do not have to justify every decision you made.
You do not have to explain why you stayed.
Sometimes healing begins when you stop fighting your own reality and finally allow yourself to say:
I loved them.
They hurt me.
Both things are true.
Until next time.
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