I miss the birds. The beautiful, elegant murmurations of jackdaws sweeping across dusky Swedish skies. How they would move in synchronicity, tie those complex invisible knots and release them, only to slide into another, even more complicated loop. How did they know what to do? Hundreds of them seething as one entity, as if they possessed one mind. Who led? Who followed? Or were they all followers and leaders at once? Were they aware what they were doing was utterly magical to witness, an otherworldly, haunting emulation of a living fractal? Probably not. They just did it. It was a wonder.

Being in a relationship with a narcissist is similar, in a twisted, ugly-beautiful way. You become one in a complex, endless dance that morphs and changes, yet never completes a cycle. Are you leading? Are you following? You don't know. You become an extension of them. Of their reality. Of their needs, wants, unhappiness, of their rules of engagement that shift and slide. You tumble after them, as the skies spin and the ground turns sideways, and the world becomes a blur—your only constant, the one who lifted you up to the skies and pulled you after them, driven by your desire to make it to stop, for it to end, to at last come to rest—and the brutal belief in the lie you have to power to do so.

And then they discard you, vanish as abruptly as they came into your life, their toxic wing beat eclipsed by the glare of a sunbeam. Lost, disoriented, purposeless, you continue your erratic flight through the sky, waiting for them to return, enslaved to their control. Neither leader nor follower, you struggle to maintain continuity in your solitary dance, but there is none.

Alone, you push on, the pointless, lonely twists and turns of your flight embedded into your behaviour, a siren call for help none can hear or see. You cannot cease what you have been trained to do, and so, unwanted, unloved, you plummet, an exhausted shell, locked in the silence of your vanquished soul, of a heart broken beyond repair.

And this is how it ends. This is what happens to those who stay, who do not escape—who cannot escape.

It is day twenty-one of my solitary month-long stay in Poland. I lost some writing days traveling, dealing with the ongoing court case, and on one particularly terrifying night and day, in a battle facing the depth of the consequences of having spent a decade in a narcissist's reality, and accepting just how much damage had been done—of just how much of my future had been taken from me, and what it would take to change that.

It is perhaps similar to when you decide to improve something in your home. Paint a wall, or replace a bathroom suite, and you think: I will just fix that and everything will be wonderful. But as soon as you fix that one thing, suddenly in its changed appearance, all the other things that were also in need of attention you couldn't see before become visible. And you can't unsee them. They bother you. Prey on your mind.

As you continue, go deeper, you see more things to fix, to improve, or to throw away and replace. It's overwhelming. If you had just left that wall alone, or the bathroom suite, you would not have revealed to yourself all these other things, some of them much worse than problem. When you replace the bathroom suite, you learn the floorboards are infested with woodworm. When you lift up the floor, you discover mice. You keep going until your house is nothing more than a skeleton, a frame, and still, there are things wrong. The ground your house is built on is subsiding.

That is what is to come. I want to warn you. Eventually you will muster the strength to fix that one thing inside of you to make your life better, to reclaim your power, to begin to live again—and just like that house renovation, you will open the door to a cascade of buried trauma that will stun you. Trauma you will have forgotten. Trauma you thought you were over, and absolutely are not. And perhaps the most painful of all: the awareness of the depth of your brokenness. Because now, alone, without them there to cause stress and drama 24/7, the adrenaline stops and the pieces tumble into place. The dust settles. You find yourself alone, and surrounded by utter carnage.

This is what is to come. And I want you to know this, because no one warned me. No one. I was left to fend for myself through this. I will not do the same to you.

I hoped—no expected—writing this book would not only help others avoid the predators who walk among us, but begin to heal the fracture deep within my soul, and provide the foundation to build the bridge back to the woman I once was. Instead, writing this has ripped open a thousand doors to a thousand worlds of suffering where I was traumatised every day, constantly, until trauma became 'normal' for me. People told me I was strong to have survived what I had survived. Strong?

No. There is strength. There is shock, and there is survival.

In this, there was no strength. There was survival. Years spent locked deep in shock, the psychological and emotional pain numbed to oblivion. But the body never forgets. For years, it can wait. Buried. Waiting. Silenced. For this. For when it is time to pull out the poisoned arrow. And then it comes. All of it. At once.

When you need to be strong isn't when you are under attack. It is after, when you rise to your feet in the wreckage of what is left of your life. That is when you need to be strong. When you discover exactly what you are made of and whether you can withstand the amount of loss you have sustained. When you take stock and see how much of your soul, of your self, has been ripped away. When you need to salvage the last scraps of your resources to fight, despite being certain you have none. For a time, you will simply exist as the shock dulls and reality takes you into its harsh grip. After all you have endured, existing is enough.

And now, the hardest thing you will face: You will miss your abuser, the one who destroyed you, sometimes for a long time afterwards. At times, it will be overwhelming. You will feel like you are dying without them. You will want to contact them—you probably will contact them, and things will only get worse. And yet, it will feel familiar, the pain, the sorrow, the anguish.

But this is your trauma bond that is dragging you back to them, not you. Not the you that you were before they ever hit you with their laser look and dragged you into their abyss. That you who had not been conditioned to their control would not have contacted them. Ever. We need to get her back. And we will. But many awful things must be faced first. But take heart. I am here with you, doing this with you, going through this with you. I am not just writing this to you, I am living this with you. And it hurts. Worse than anything. If tears were currency, we would be billionaires.

You will crave the cycle of abuse because it will be all you know, you will think the abuse is love. It will have become your purpose to suffer at their hands, and if the poison has gone deep enough, it will have become your identity. To be their thing they torment. To exist in a horrifying cycle of redemption, accusation, punishment, suffering and reward. That familiar rinse and repeat to which you learned to adapt, which became a part of you, which you honed to perfection, as vigilant as an elite soldier. You have to cut that away like a festering abscess, and it's going to hurt, more than you can imagine, because what's left afterwards for a time is . . . nothing.

To navigate the corridors of their vicious, toxic narrative based not on reality—not on all the things you are being told you are doing wrong but on their need to feed on the misery they cause—you have to permit their poisoned arrow to pierce the depths of your soul. This is how the process of annihilating your Self begins. Of day by day, under an exhausting siege of gaslighting, denial, and intimidation you eventually succumb to their narrative and betray the senses you trust. You allow the narcissist to define what you see, hear, and feel. You ignore reality, make excuses to yourself, give noble justifications to others, make yourself smaller, and carefully bury all of parts of you they dislike.

You do this for the sake of peace, for the hope of the life you had with them at the beginning to return. So, at first, though you resist, you realise in time it is less painful to accept their lies, their words—their definition of you. And they are relentless, the more you give up of yourself, the more they take. It is the most heinous of crimes. To be erased and remade, an automaton, a thing. And then, once you have been emptied of all, they leave. And the process begins again. With another. And they don't care if you know—if you see them giving another everything you spent years fighting to get back. It is the ultimate betrayal. It can destroy you. It is meant to destroy you.

The anguish of your aftermath will be unprecedented. It is a level of suffering for which you cannot prepare; where you will need to find the power within yourself to face each day like a warrior. You are in a battle against yourself, your thoughts and feelings treacherous, dangerous things, because they are their thoughts, buried in you, internalised by you. Lies. All of them. Lies you believe. Ugly words that defined you. Sometimes for years. This is the part that is going to hurt. So much. This is when, even though you are on your knees, you are weak, lost, broken and bloodied, you must rise and face this last, final battle to reclaim of what's left of your Self. And this can only be done by one person. You.

Strength. Now is when you need strength. You are done surviving. You are done being in shock. Now you are going to fight for your life. And I am going to help you.