It is usually the third or fourth thing someone says to me, and it almost always arrives quietly, as though it were an admission.
They have described a situation. They have said the confusion out loud, possibly for the first time. And then, before I have offered any view at all, they say the thing they have been carrying underneath the whole account: what if it’s me? What if I’m the difficult one, and I’ve spent two years constructing a version of events where I’m hard done by, and everyone can see it except me?
If you have asked yourself that, I want to start by saying that the question is not a symptom of anything shameful. It is one of the most common questions in this whole territory, and it is being asked by thousands of people tonight who cannot say it to anyone. It also happens to be a good question. That is the part I want to spend some time on, because most of what gets written in response to it is not honest.
WHY YOU CANNOT ANSWER IT FROM WHERE YOU ARE STANDING
The ordinary advice is to trust your gut, and in most areas of life that advice is sound. Here it is close to useless, and it is worth understanding exactly why rather than just being told to ignore it.
Your gut is not a fixed instrument. It is calibrated by feedback, continuously, mostly without your noticing. Ordinarily that calibration is roughly accurate, because the feedback you get from the world is roughly accurate. But if you have spent a long period in an environment where your readings are consistently contradicted, where being upset is reliably followed by being told you are too sensitive and being calm is followed by being told you do not care, then the calibration has been running on distorted input for a long time.
So when you consult it now, it gives you a different answer every few hours. In the morning you are certain. By the evening you are certain of the opposite. And here is the cruel part: you interpret that instability as evidence about your character rather than evidence about your instrument. A person whose internal compass swings wildly concludes that she is unreliable, unstable, probably the problem. The swinging is the injury. It is not the diagnosis.
Which means the question you are asking is genuinely unanswerable using the method you keep trying to answer it with. It is not that you have not thought hard enough. You have thought about almost nothing else for months.
CERI
COMPOSITE NOTE: Ceri is not a real person. She is a composite, put together from patterns that come up again and again, and nothing here is anyone’s actual story.
Ceri had been keeping notes on her phone for about a year. Not deliberately, at first. She had started writing down what was said in arguments because she kept losing track of it, and because she wanted to be fair, and being fair felt impossible when she could not remember the words.
What she wanted from those notes, when she finally looked at them properly, was to find out whether she had been unreasonable. She fully expected to. She had been braced for it for months and had half decided that she deserved it. She told me later that she read the whole thing waiting to find the evidence that she was the difficult one.
What she found was not straightforward. Some of it was exactly what she feared. There were three or four exchanges where she had been sharp in a way she did not like seeing written down, and she sat with that. But that was not the main thing the record showed. The main thing was structural, and she had never noticed it while living through it: in almost every exchange, she was the one explaining. Pre-emptively, at length, before anyone had asked. She had written a four-paragraph message accounting for being twenty minutes late to a thing that did not matter, and attached a photograph of the road.
She had done that dozens of times. She had never once thought about it.
WHY OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IT TOO
There is a piece of research worth knowing about here, because it explains something that otherwise feels like a personal failing.
Harsey and Freyd ran an experiment with 316 participants, testing what happens when someone accused of causing harm responds by denying it, attacking the person raising it, and reversing the roles so that they appear to be the injured party. The finding was that participants exposed to that response perceived the person who had actually been harmed as less believable, more responsible for what happened, and more abusive.
Read that again, because of what it means for you. It is not that your friends and family are disloyal, or that you have failed to explain yourself well enough. That particular sequence, deployed on ordinary listeners, reliably shifts their perception. It worked on strangers in a controlled study who had no relationship with anyone involved. It is going to work on your sister.
And it works on you. You are also a listener. When the reversal is performed on you often enough, you begin to hold the position it assigns you, which is the position of the person who is probably the problem. That is not gullibility. It is what the mechanism does, and it does it to almost everyone.
THE HONEST ANSWER NOBODY GIVES YOU
Here is the part that most writing on this subject will not say, and the part that I think actually matters.
Sometimes the person asking is the one causing harm. Not often, but it happens, and it is not a hypothetical: there are people who go looking for confirmation that they are being mistreated, find some, and use it. Any account of this that pretends otherwise is not being kind to you. It is being useless to you.
Because if the only available answer was ever going to be “no, it isn’t you”, then that answer is worth nothing. Reassurance that could not have gone the other way is not reassurance, it is a script. And you would know that, somewhere underneath, which is precisely why the reassurance you have already been given by friends has not settled anything.
What you need is not comfort. It is a reading that could genuinely have come out differently. That is the only kind whose result means anything, in either direction.
WHAT CHANGES WHEN YOU LOOK THIS WAY
A reassuring answer starts to be worth something.
If a look at the actual record can find that you were sharp, unfair, or the one escalating, and it does not find that, then the finding carries real weight. You can lean on it. That is a completely different experience from being told you are being silly to worry.
You stop needing him to agree.
Most people in this position are, without realising it, waiting for the other person to concede that something is wrong, because that concession feels like the only thing that would make it real. It will not come, and the waiting is what keeps you in place. The record does not require anyone’s agreement to say what it says.
Being wrong stops being catastrophic.
If you look and find that a good portion of it was you, that is not the end of your life. It is information, and it is actionable in a way that not knowing never was. The thing that has been eating you is the not knowing, not the answer.
You can look without deciding anything.
Nothing about understanding your own life commits you to a course of action. You are not required to conclude anything, tell anyone, or make a change. Understanding is allowed to be the whole of it.
WHERE TO LOOK INSTEAD
Stop interrogating your feelings and start looking at the record.
Your feelings have been in that environment as long as you have and have been shaped by it. The messages on your phone have not. They said what they said, at 2am, on the fourteenth, and they say the same thing every time you open them. That is the one thing in this situation that does not move when you do.
When you look, look at shape rather than content. Not who was right in a particular argument, which is where you always end up, but the structure of the exchanges. Who explains. Who apologises first, and how often. Who accounts for their movements without being asked. Whether the arguments resolve or simply stop and restart. Whether there is a pattern in what happens in the days after you have said something true.
You do not have to do this quickly, and there is nothing to decide today.
If reading this has raised something urgent, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline in the UK is 0808 2000 247, free and open around the clock.
THE LAST THING
There is a line I use often, which is that it is not you, it is the fog. I mean it, but I want to be careful about how it lands, because a promise like that is only worth anything if it could have gone the other way.
The question you have been asking yourself deserves a real answer, and a real answer is one that had a genuine alternative available. What you have been given so far, mostly, is either reassurance that was never going to say anything else, or an accusation you have had no way to test. Neither of those is an answer. They are just two more voices in a situation that already has too many.
The record on your phone is not one more voice. It is the only thing in this that has not been getting quietly recalibrated, month after month, without your consent. Whatever it turns out to say, it will be the first thing in a long time that says the same thing twice.
