He only had to make me the unreliable one, to poison the well of my credibility so thoroughly that nothing I said afterward could be trusted.

And he had the perfect poison ready to hand: my own honest history of grief.

This is the thing I most want people to understand about what he did in that living room, because it is done to so many people, usually women, in quieter forms every day.

He took the fact that I had once needed help, and had been brave enough to seek it, and he held it up as proof that my mind could not be trusted.

He turned my healing into my supposed sickness.