I am not required to send letters.
I am not required to explain myself.
And I am not responsible for managing other people’s denial.

The adult children of my former partner have known me for over 30 years. They have not only known me — they have witnessed abuse long before I ever entered the picture, directed at their own mother. What they have seen did not begin with me, and it will not end because I left.

If they choose silence, erasure, or the comfort of pretending I never existed, that is not confusion — it is a coping strategy. And coping strategies, when they involve denial, are not my burden to carry.

Abuse Does Not Require a Press Release

Neuroscience is clear on this: prolonged exposure to abuse alters the nervous system.
It shifts the brain into survival mode — hypervigilance, appeasement, freezing, minimisation. Over time, the body learns that speaking truth increases danger, not safety.

Many families unconsciously organise themselves around this reality.

Silence becomes protection.
Denial becomes stability.
Naming abuse becomes “disruptive.”

When someone finally leaves, the system often responds not with curiosity or care, but with avoidance — because acknowledgment would require reckoning.

Witnessing Is Not the Same as Acknowledging

Witnessing abuse does not automatically lead to accountability.

In fact, neuroscience shows that when people have lived for years inside an unsafe relational system, the brain often chooses psychological numbing over truth. This is not strength. It is adaptation.

And adaptation can look like:

• Pretending nothing happened
• Cutting off the person who left
• Aligning with the abuser to preserve familiarity
• Rewriting history to avoid cognitive dissonance

This does not mean they don’t know.
It means they cannot afford to know — yet.

I Am Not Staying Available for the Next Cycle

Abuse is cyclical. Without intervention, it repeats — often with new partners, new witnesses, and the same patterns.

I am aware that others may go on to witness further years of abuse involving someone else. That is tragic. It is also not preventable by my self-sacrifice.

Staying silent in abuse does not stop it.
Explaining yourself does not stop it.
Absorbing harm does not stop it.

Leaving does.

Closure Is a Nervous System Event, Not a Conversation

Real closure does not come from being understood by everyone involved.
It comes from restoring regulation, dignity, and internal safety.

From a neuroscience perspective, healing begins when:

• The body exits chronic threat
• Boundaries replace over-explaining
• Self-trust is prioritised over approval
• The survivor stops auditioning their pain for validation

I am no longer negotiating my reality.

I Am Done with Abuse

This is not bitterness.
This is completion.

I do not need permission to be finished.
I do not need consensus to move on.
And I do not need to remain accessible to people who survive by not seeing.

Abuse thrives in silence — but so does denial.

I am choosing something else entirely.

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