If a man tells everyone, in advance, that his wife is becoming irrational and unstable, and then does something so cruel that any sane person would react with fury — brings his mistress to the family dinner table and announces she is moving in — then whatever the wife does next becomes evidence for his story.

If I screamed, I was the hysterical woman he had warned them about.

If I wept, I was emotionally unstable, just as he had said.

If I threw something, or said something unforgivable, every witness in that room would remember it, and it would appear, cleaned up and notarized, in a custody filing.

He had engineered a situation in which my human response to being profoundly wronged would be converted, in real time, into proof that I was the problem.

That is the genius and the evil of that particular kind of abuse: it does not just hurt you, it steals your right to react to being hurt, because it has arranged in advance for your reaction to be used against you.