Survivor Insights: When You Finally Stop Trying to Be Understood
When you let go of being heard, and come back to what you know
The Survivor Insights series brings you the voices of survivors themselves. These words come from many who have shared their experiences openly across my social media pages.
Abuse often brings a relentless effort to be heard, and it can feel exhausting, demoralising, and heartbreaking when you are not understood. You try to explain it to the person causing the harm, and to friends and family members who cannot quite grasp what they did not witness, or who try to make sense of it in ways that miss what you actually lived through.
A significant part of recovery is releasing that effort. Letting go of the search for the right words becomes its own kind of turning point. A tired, gradual recognition tends to settle in that the explanation will never land where you hoped and that the understanding you have been waiting for will have to come from somewhere inside yourself instead. This piece is for everyone who has lived in that waiting place, and for those who are finding their way out of it.
The Exhaustion of Trying to Explain
The need to be understood often arises in direct response to the abuser’s behaviour. When they repeatedly dismiss your feelings, reframe your memory as unreliable, and position your reactions as the real problem, you begin to try harder to explain yourself. You come back to the same conversations, adjusting your tone each time and choosing different words, hoping that this time something will land.
People describe years of presenting evidence to someone who had already decided not to hear them, continuing long after they sensed it would not work, because accepting that truth felt even more painful.
“I was afraid to share feelings because every time I did, he’d dismiss them, insult me, and insinuate that I was showing signs of mental instability.”
“Deep down I still wanted it to work out and for him to understand and take accountability.”
“I tried to tell him the ways his behaviour was harming me, but he wouldn’t hear it. He’d say I was exaggerating, or misreading things, or misunderstanding him. And if I ever referred to events that happened previously, he told me to stop living in the past.”
“I kept trying to make him understand why I was hurting. I thought if I explained it the right way, he would finally get it. He never did.”
“Every single time I tried to tell him how much he was hurting me and destroying our relationship, he said he was sick of me being nasty to him.”
“I could feel the conversation shifting away from what actually happened and turning into something where I was at fault again.”
“I started expecting that I would be corrected, even before anything was said.”
Why the Abuser Will Never Offer Understanding
