Brazil study reveals subtle ways you lose yourself in toxic love

Emotional abuse is a pattern of behavior that undermines a person’s sense of self-worth and reality, according to author Beverly Engel. The changes often start small and go unnoticed by others.

In a toxic relationship, a person may stop wearing clothes they once liked because their partner said it did not look good. Friendships fade because the partner feels uncomfortable. A person laughs less at things the partner does not find funny. They check their own face to make sure their expression pleases the other person. They shrink in ways no one else would notice.

Over time, the changes grow. A person stops trusting their own judgment. The partner says they are too sensitive. The partner denies doing things they actually did. The partner says they do not remember saying something they said. This happens so many times that the person starts to believe the partner’s version of reality.

The person begins to second-guess every decision. They ask permission for things they used to do naturally. They draft and edit every thought before speaking, trying to get it right. They even edit their own thoughts before they are fully formed. They learn to read the partner the way a sailor reads the sky, watching for a slight shift in tone, a gesture, a certain look, or the way the partner sets down a phone. The person becomes exquisitely tuned to the partner’s moods, needs, and expectations.

Somewhere along the way, the person stops asking what they need, what they want, or what is true for them. Instead, they ask what the partner wants to hear, what the partner needs right now, and what would keep things calm. They stop listening to their own internal compass and replace it with the partner’s approval and acceptance. Everything is structured around the partner’s comfort, liking, and convenience. From home projects to outings, the person’s life becomes a reflection of the partner’s preferences.

Years in, the person looks in the mirror and does not know who they are anymore. They cannot remember the last time they did the things they loved. They are not sure what their own opinions are anymore. The person they were before the relationship feels like they have died, or maybe they were never real at all.

This is what toxic relationships do. They do not just take time, energy, or peace. They take a person’s identity. They drain a person slowly, quietly, one small surrender at a time. Until the person who entered the relationship and the person still standing in it barely recognize each other. It is not just that a person loses themselves. It is that they lose the ability to find themselves. The compass they used to navigate with, their gut and intuition, that quiet voice inside that tells them what is true, is gone.

Many people do not fully realize what they are under until they start doing research. They may hate the word “people-pleaser” and try to distance themselves from it. But research forces them to look at the root of their own patterns. They also have to accept that the partner’s behaviors are not situational or one-off incidents. They are patterns that cannot be denied.

Cognitively, a person may know that a partner’s rants and outbursts have to do with what the partner is going through or the trauma they carry. But because the person never sees the partner react that way with anyone else, they begin to believe there is something wrong with them. They believe they are provoking the partner and just have not found the right way to turn off the mistreatment. The partner’s behavior is such a stark contrast to the public image they present that the person thinks people would assume they are the cause.

When the person tries to speak up or advocate for themselves, no matter how gentle and careful they try to be, they are met with rage. In moments when they want to scream, defend themselves, or run, they smile or apologize to end the rage. They override their own reactions and focus only on calming the partner, saying whatever is needed to turn the anger off. When a person is told enough times that their perception is inaccurate, they eventually stop trusting their own eyes.

A person says yes to things they do not have the bandwidth for because saying no feels dangerous. They feel exhausted all the time, not just from the relationship, but from the constant mental load of second-guessing every thought, every feeling, every decision. They become so consumed with the partner’s voice that theirs goes silent, and they almost do not realize it is happening. That is what makes it so hard to recognize from the inside. A person does not wake up one day and think they have lost their ability to trust themselves. They just stop trusting themselves. They think maybe everyone feels this unsure, or everyone needs to check with someone before deciding. But their intuition is not gone. It has been buried under countless moments of invalidation, someone else’s reality, and the exhaustion of constantly adapting.

One might think that the more someone loses themselves, the easier it would be to walk away. That the pain would eventually outweigh the pull. But that is not how trauma bonds work. There are many reasons people stay for years, sometimes even decades, in relationships that are slowly destroying them. It is not because they are weak or do not know any better. One of the main reasons is something called the sunk cost fallacy. This is an economic term that means the more a person has invested in something, the harder it is to walk away.

A person may have invested so much time, energy, love, hope, and even their dreams. They may have defended the relationship to people who loved them and made excuses for the partner. They believed in the potential and stayed through things that would have quickly ended other people’s relationships. The few times they broke up, they were met with desperate pleas to come back, grand gestures, and promises that things would change. The partner had a way of making them feel guilty. One moment the partner would be steeped in sorrow, the next angry at them for leaving, telling them how they were yet another source of trauma in the partner’s life. So they would stay a little longer, thinking maybe it would get better if they just tried harder, became smaller, quieter, and more of what the partner needed.

The longer a person stays, the more they lose. Not just more time, but more of themselves. One day, they realize that the cost of staying feels unbearable because they have already paid for it with everything they had. Trauma bonds do not exploit a person’s weaknesses. They exploit the very qualities that make a person who they are, like their capacity to love deeply, their ability to see potential in someone, their willingness to believe someone’s words even when they do not match their actions, and their hope that the loving way the partner treats them around family and friends is who they really are. A person believes that if they could just understand the partner better, focus on their heart, love them harder, or communicate more carefully, the person the partner shows the world would finally show up for them too. These are not weaknesses. They are the best parts of a person, used against them. This is why intelligent, high-achieving, successful people get caught in these patterns, not because they were naive or weak, but because they believed in someone’s potential more than they trusted their own discomfort.