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Invisible Illness

Medium’s biggest mental health publication

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The Internal Message From Abuse That Welcomes More Abuse

Brainwashing led to one core concept

7 min readFeb 26, 2022

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Photo by Andrew Measham on Unsplash

After extensive research and therapy, I finally lost interest in the psychological labeling of all the types of abuse I survived.

Whether the man that possessed my mind and controlled my life for nearly a decade was suffering from narcissism, schizophrenia, bipolar, only drug addictions, or all of the above, makes little difference now in my healing process.

Sure, I wanted to identify all the labels to make sense of it, sorting through every applicable term to understand my painful past.

I dug deep with a mix and match game to link behaviors he exhibited to a diagnostic explanation. But every curiosity and every agonizing question I had were all attempts to simply answer the question of “Why?”

Why did this happen to me? Why didn’t I see the truth, the abuse? Why didn’t I escape sooner? Why did I agree to a relationship that did not look like a relationship from the start? Why did I agree with the demeaning and shaming?

By investigating his characteristics and abusive patterns, explaining them by a variety of disorders, at first I was able to better understand what I survived. I was able to accept that this chronic trauma was not my fault nor a reflection of my…

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Invisible Illness
Invisible Illness

Published in Invisible Illness

Medium’s biggest mental health publication

Scarlett Jess Perrodin
Scarlett Jess Perrodin

Written by Scarlett Jess Perrodin

Mental health advocate, abuse escape artist, maternal aura, and comic. Personal stories. Some hints of humor. A diamond in the rough is still a diamond.

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