She was twenty-six years old.

I didn’t know her. I came across her comment while I was doom scrolling through narcissistic abuse content on social media one evening.

And yes, that’s what I do for fun.

Somewhere in the conversation, she said she was afraid to leave the relationship she was in, because it was too late for her. Too late to find someone else. It would soon be too late for her to have children, she explained. And get this, “people” told her she wasn’t going to be able to find a good man.

My God, I thought, she’s twenty-six! Whose voice is that?

I had a hard time believing it was hers. Why? Because I know what it’s like to hear someone else’s voice in your head and mistakenly think it’s your own.

This brings me to a question many people ask.

Why Don’t You Just Leave?

It’s not a fair question, and here’s an example unfolding in real time.

Maybe no one ever literally said, no one else will ever want you. Maybe the message arrived in smaller pieces.

Fifteen years ago, when I was in my early forties, I used to work out three to four days a week. I ran in half-marathons. I counted calories and meal-prepped weekly. I ate things like chia seed pudding, brownies made from black beans, and chickpea everything. Yet my husband at the time would jokingly tell me that if I ever gained weight, “we would still be friends.” The implication was clear. If I slipped, even a little, he wouldn’t love me anymore. He would leave me, with no career, no education, and no prospects.

When you hear these things repeated over and over, the voice becomes so familiar, you mistake it for your own.

You don’t just wake up one Tuesday and think, I’ve decided to surrender my confidence. It happens little by little. Like air leaking from a tire that just doesn’t get noticed until one day it’s flat.

So back to that question. Why don’t you just leave? Let me try to explain.

You don’t leave because he criticized dinner.

You don’t leave because he called you too sensitive.

You don’t leave because he didn’t like the hotel you picked for a vacation.

Each of those can be explained away individually, like this:

He’s stressed.
Maybe I overreacted.
Maybe I’m just not good at this kind of thing.

You don’t hear your own voice saying, something isn’t right here. You hear his voice saying, everything is just fine, you’re the problem.

The very skill you need to recognize the pattern — your own logical voice — is the skill the pattern has been eroding.

Even smart, strong women fall for it, because it’s a slow leak. Even a good mechanic will miss the signs and end up with a flat tire from time to time.

There’s a scene from a movie where Hugh Jackman’s character says he broke up with his former girlfriend, a model, because she was eating ice cream out of the carton in her underwear and it grossed him out. Ashley Judd’s character posed an incredibly insightful question: “What part of a young, healthy woman eating ice cream in her underwear is repulsive to you?”

The question put a spotlight on the fact that the problem wasn’t with the woman. It was with the attitude of the man watching her. There was something broken in him.

Telling someone in a situation like this to trust themselves or believe in themselves just isn’t helpful. They believe the voice they’re hearing is their own. They trust the voice telling them it’s too late for you.

So What Can You Do?

Step One: Ask, “Whose Voice Is That?”

No one else will want me.
I can’t make it on my own.
I’m too old to start over.
Maybe I really am the problem.

When you hear yourself thinking these thoughts, ask yourself: where did I learn that?

That’s a much more interesting exercise than trying to immediately replace the thought with a positive affirmation. Once you identify the real source of the thought, you can discredit the sender.

Step Two: Stop Asking Whether It Was “Bad Enough”

He didn’t hit me.
He only said it once.
Maybe I misunderstood.
Other women have it much worse.

Women can get trapped trying to prove each incident qualifies as abuse. But you don’t necessarily need to put every incident on trial. Instead, ask yourself what the pattern is doing to you.

Am I confused? Am I afraid to make decisions? Do I need his approval before trusting my own perception?

Now you’re looking at the forest instead of conducting background checks on every tree.

Step Three: Understand the Goal

When someone has been taught to stop listening to themselves and to stop trusting their own perceptions, the goal, on the part of the abuser, is usually to create dependency.

They need you to need them for everything, creating a false sense of security that you won’t leave them. Your best line of defense is to start learning that you can do things for yourself. Your ability to trust yourself needs to be rebuilt as carefully as it was eroded. One tiny decision at a time.

Write down what happened before someone can convince you it happened differently. Then you can trust your own memory.

Make one decision without asking the abusive person’s opinion. Make that decision based on what you like, not what you think the abusive person will like. Then you can trust that you can make a decision for yourself.

I don’t know what will happen to that twenty-six-year-old woman. I don’t know if she’ll stay for another minute or another twenty years. But her words haunt me.

It’s too late for me.

I wish I could take her into my arms and tell her how capable she is. How young she is.

But it doesn’t matter what I say to her if she’s still listening to the voice in her head that she thinks is her own.

That’s why she doesn’t leave, no matter how much her family members or friends may cheer her on or reassure her. She won’t leave until she can change the voice in her own head.

If you recognize yourself in this and you’re in immediate danger, please reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or visit thehotline.org. You don’t have to have all the answers to deserve support.

If this is the question you keep circling back to — why you can’t just trust yourself, why the doubt won’t quiet down — How Emotional Abuse Damages Self-Trust goes further into where that doubt comes from and how to start rebuilding it. And if what you’re hearing in your head sounds less like your own thoughts and more like someone rewriting what actually happened, the Recovering From Gaslighting series picks up right where this leaves off.