I think often, now, about the shape of what Christian tried to do, because I meet women at the Clear Record Foundation who are living inside earlier chapters of the same story, and I have learned to recognize it fast.

It almost never begins with anything you could point to.

It begins with a man who seems, if anything, unusually devoted — attentive, protective, concerned.

It proceeds not through blows but through a slow narrowing: your world gets smaller, your confidence gets quieter, your certainty about your own experience gets softer, and every step of the narrowing is framed as love.

By the time such a woman reaches me, she has usually spent months or years being told, kindly, that she is the problem — too sensitive, too anxious, too much, unwell — until she half-believes it, until she has become, like I nearly did, her own jailer.