The Question we keep asking is Wrong

Originally shared in Tuesday Notes on August 10, 2026

Last week, during a routine appointment, my colorist told me about her husband. The father of her children. The abuse she's been living inside while she works out whether, and how, to leave.

Neither of us planned to talk about it. It just happened, the way it does when one person says enough for the other to recognize the shape of it.

Something happens between two people who've lived through this that doesn't happen with people who haven't. There's a name for it in psychology: shared reality. When someone else's experience genuinely matches your own, you don't need to explain, translate or convince. Your internal experience gets confirmed from the outside, in real time, and that kind of confirmation settles the nervous system in a way words alone rarely do. We clicked immediately.

That's the opposite of what happens when I've told my story to people who haven't been through anything similar. The responses tend to cluster: why did you stay, you don't seem like the type, this would never happen to me.

That last one hits differently. It's not really about fairness, it's about intelligence. The unspoken belief is that falling for something like this requires a kind of weakness the listener is certain they don't have. Psychologists sometimes group this under "just world bias," the idea that people who end up in bad situations must have done something to get there. Here it shows up as a belief about intelligence: if she were smart, surely she would have seen it coming. If someone believes they're too smart, too self-aware, too good at reading people to ever be fooled like that, then they get to feel safe by comparison. The quiet cost is that the woman across the table, who just told them something true and difficult, gets mentally filed as someone who missed what they're certain they'd have caught, and the story becomes about her judgment instead of the abuser's tactics.

So why do people actually stay? There is obviously not just one single and simple answer, but a few things that are almost always true at once. Coercive control isn't one bad incident, it's a system, and it works by slowly cutting someone off from money, from friends, from the people who'd help them leave, until leaving stops being an emotional decision and becomes a logistical one. The good moments mixed unpredictably with the bad create some of the strongest attachment bonds documented in psychology, stronger than consistent reward ever produces. And leaving is, statistically, the most dangerous point in an abusive relationship. That fear is not weakness. It's accurate.

"Why did you stay" assumes leaving was one decision, made once, that a person simply failed to make. It wasn't, and it isn't. The better question is what it would have taken to leave safely, and who was still there when it mattered.

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Tuesday Brain Snack 🧠

Psychologist Lenore Walker mapped something called the cycle of abuse back in the 1970s: tension building, an incident, reconciliation, calm, then tension building again. The "calm" phase isn't fake. It's often genuinely loving, which is exactly why it's so disorienting and so hard to explain to someone who's never lived inside the cycle. Has anyone ever said "this would never happen to me" to you, about anything, and how did it land?

Much love, Claudia ✨

If you or someone you know is navigating an abusive relationship: findahelpline.com, befrienders.org. Switzerland: 143. US: 988. UK/Ireland: 116 123.