Thank you 🙏 and yes, on rare occasions there is a glimpse, a vulnerable open door of honesty and acknowledgment. Sometimes subtle, sometimes harsh and quite abusive in itself. It took a long time to get anything, from one mind bending ‘conversation’ (if you can call it that) to another – 90% utter nonsense and denial, but every now and then genuine truth. At first that’s hard to see as not manipulation or faking it, simply because you’ve had so much of the latter. But that was largely about me being so exhausted and frustrated, not being able to see. And often, post honesty, a massive rush of narc tendencies would follow undoing and taking back what had been said. It took a lot of patience and strength to withstand that. Went on for years, and is still present. But the more time passed the more honesty and accountable my partner has become. The more her guard has come down, the more she’s acknowledged her own trauma and it’s impacts. It’s still rare, but we both ‘know’ if that makes sense. As a result of all this I’ve suffered my own trauma, had to heal and understand abuse n all the rest of it. In doing so it seems to be helping her and opening her eyes. Because ultimately what she’s projecting is her own abuse experiences. There’s no excuse for that, but at the same time a have empathy and compassion for it. The goal is looking after me first, that enables me to be less affected by her stuff which further enables her own healing. It’s a life choice to stay, because some abuse takes years to heal. Where there’s love there’s a way but love and care for self always comes first. That’s where I fell short at the beginning in many ways, but I did so by choice, I knew ‘something’ was up, but no idea what. But that didn’t matter, I believed in my heart and that I was strong enough to endure the shit whilst giving this person the love they clearly never received or had for themselves.