he never hit you, and something is still happening.
six checks, free, on one page.

what you’ll work through

1. the small no. say no to something that does not matter. a tuesday, a plan you are tired for, a thing you would rather skip. a small no costs the other person nothing, which is exactly why it works as a test: there is no reasonable case for being upset about a tuesday, so whatever happens next is not about the tuesday.
2. the rehearsal. notice whether you draft sentences in your head before you say them out loud. not at work, where everybody does. at home, in the room you are supposed to be able to relax in. rehearsing is what you do when a sentence has a cost and you are trying to bring the cost down.
3. the weather check. in the morning, whose mood do you read first? there is a version of this that is just love, where you notice somebody is off and you care. and there is a version where their mood decides what kind of day you are allowed to have, and you find that out before you find out what you wanted.
4. the shrinking calendar. look for who you have stopped mentioning, not who you have stopped seeing. the mentioning goes first, and it goes long before anybody tells you not to see someone, because it starts as you deciding it is easier not to bring them up. isolation almost never arrives as a rule. it arrives as a series of small efficiencies.
5. the reversal. think about your last five difficult conversations and ask who ended up being comforted. deny, attack, reverse victim and offender is a named three-step sequence with thirty years of research behind it, and the end of it is that the person who was hurt is the one apologising. it is not a fact about your character.
6. the missing word. try to describe the worst of it out loud and see whether it sounds bad. if every sentence needs "i know this sounds like nothing, but", that is not proof you are exaggerating. it is the sound of harm that was built too small to report, which is the method rather than an accident.