Hearing him name it like that, I felt something both raw and relieved. Relief because someone finally called the pattern what it was. Raw because naming it made the timeline true, irreversible.
He kept going, clinical but warm. "Psychologically, this was consistent with learned helplessness and attachment wounding. Repeated exposure to unpredictable punishment—yelling, accusations, humiliation—created a state where you felt you had no effective response. That was learned helplessness. It was also attachment trauma: your early losses made you vulnerable to clinging when someone offered intense attachment, even when it was toxic. Those dynamics interacted. They lowered the threshold for tolerating harm."
He paused, then asked, "Tell me, Ryder—who raised you after your parents?"
"My aunt and her husband," I said quietly. "I never knew my biological parents. They died before I was old enough toremember them. And while my aunt and her husband were good to me, kind, stable, never cruel, I always felt like a guest in their home. Like I had to behave to earn my place. If I made noise, if I acted out, I feared I'd lose the spot they gave me. So I learned early how to stay contained, how to keep myself small."
Dr. Mason nodded, his eyes narrowing with recognition. "That's important. Even in a loving household, the absence of biological parents leaves a wound. And when you already carried that sense of conditional belonging, feeling like you had to perform good behavior to be kept, you were primed to tolerate situations where your worth felt conditional again. That's attachment trauma intersecting with later abuse. It's not that you were weak; it's that your nervous system had been trained for survival in environments where love felt earned, not freely given."
I could feel words likelearned helplessnessandattachment traumasettle in my ribs. They made what I did and didn't do look less like moral failure and more like a survival strategy gone bad.
He leaned forward. "There was another piece I wanted you to hear: shame. Shame is one of the most potent inhibitors of help-seeking, especially for men. In your case, societal scripts about masculinity, hegemonic expectations that men must be stoic, invulnerable, controllers of situations, created internalized stigma. When those expectations collided with being victimized, the cognitive dissonance led to toxic shame: an identity-level sense of 'I am broken' rather than 'I was harmed.' That shame silenced people. It drove secrecy and self-blame. Many male survivors experienced profound self-stigmatization, which maintained the cycle of abuse because disclosure threatened identity and status."
My throat tightened. "So the reason I felt... less than, like a coward—that was shame?"
"That was shame," he said. "And it wasn't evidence of weakness. It was a predictable, adaptive response to being devalued repeatedly. Your nervous system learned to anticipate threat; your self-schema absorbed blame. Neurobiologically, chronic interpersonal threat dysregulated the HPA axis and increased hypervigilance and shame-based cognitions. Psychologically, it produced avoidance—both behavioral like covering bruises, staying silent and cognitive like minimization, rationalization."
I swallowed. The jargon landed but it also felt like a map. For the first time, the chaos had coordinates.
He named another thing I had been carrying like a secret: "Men who are socialized to protect are uniquely vulnerable to self-condemnation when they become victims. You taught others to be strong; you internalized a performance standard. When you couldn't 'perform,' your identity fractured. That fracture fueled the intense shame you described—the shame of being 'a man who gets hit'—and shame was what made people stay. It was easier to minimize and endure than to expose the vulnerability to others who might react with disbelief or ridicule."
I felt heat creep up my neck, embarrassment and a little fury. "People would never have believed me. They would have told me to fight back, to leave, to 'be a man.'"
"Exactly," he said. "Anticipated invalidation silenced disclosure. That anticipation was part of the learned helplessness circuit. And the abuser often weaponized these gender norms, explicitly or implicitly, knowing you would be less likely to cry for help."
He took a breath and then, softer, practical: "This is why psychoeducation is critical. Naming the chain of coercion, gaslighting, coercive control, operant reinforcement, escalation—reduces self-blame. It externalizes responsibility. You weren't 'weak'; you were subjected to a controlled, escalating pattern designed to erode your resistance. And shame, while powerful, is not truth. It's an affective response you were taught to own, but it belonged to the abuse, not to you."
Something inside me loosened. Tears stung at the corners of my eyes—not for the first time, but this time carried by something sharper: anger, finally turned outward. "So how do I stop... feeling ashamed of it? How do I stop believing it was my fault?"
He leaned forward, voice steady. "We do that through cognitive restructuring—challenging those shame-rooted beliefs until they lose their hold. We'll reframe the story. Instead of 'I was a coward,' it becomes, 'I survived calculated, escalating abuse.' That shift isn't just language—it's truth and it's the foundation of healing."
I liked the phrase survive more than coward. It was a better fit in my chest.
He added one last clinical truth, slow and steady: "From a diagnostic lens, what you described—chronic interpersonal trauma with ongoing threat—could lead to complex PTSD: problems with affect regulation, self-perception, and relational capacity. But diagnosis is a map, not a sentence. Treatment and community can repair those domains. Importantly for you as a man, group work with other male survivors can normalize experience, reduce shame, and create corrective relational experiences that counter the internalized stigma."
He held my gaze, words anchoring me when I felt untethered. "You weren't alone in this, Ryder. The path you walked, from words that cut to hands that struck, wasn't random. It was a pattern, rehearsed and repeated across time. Naming it doesn't just tell the truth; it breaks the spell. It returns the story to you."
I inhaled, slow and trembling, as though learning breath for the first time. And in that pause, I allowed myself to imagine a different version of my life. One not stained by shattered glass or the weight of her voice filling every room. Not the kitchen floor, not the blade, not the endless eyes watching me crumble.
Instead, I pictured a story rewritten. A page where the cycle was interrupted, where my body was not a battlefield but a home. Where leaving wasn't surrender but survival, and survival wasn't just scraping by, but the beginning of something tender, something whole.
The heaviness didn't dissolve; it lingered, but it no longer defined the entire landscape. A crack split through it, a seam of possibility, and through that break, light streamed in, hesitant, fragile, but enough to trace the outline of tomorrow.
Survival, I realized, was not only what I endured. It was what I chose next. It was the act of lifting the pen back into my hand, crossing out the violence, and writing myself forward—toward healing, toward breath, toward the simple miracle of still being here.
Chapter 19: The Trial
Several months later...
(Ryder)
I sat there with my palms pressed flat against the polished wood of the defense table, willing myself not to shake. January sat on one side, her presence like a lifeline, while across the aisle Mira lounged in her seat as if this was all beneath her. The Senator looked untouchable in his tailored suit, his jaw carved from stone, his eyes scanning the room with that politician's confidence.
When the judge entered, the bailiff called the room to order. My breath caught in my chest. This was it; the day everything came into the light. The prosecutor called the first witness:Sebastian Clarke.
He glanced at Mira once, then looked away so fast it was like his body recoiled, "Mr. Clarke," the prosecutor began, "can you describe your relationship with the defendant, Mira Golding?"
He tightened my jaw and licked my lips, his voice catching on the first words. "We dated. Briefly. It started when I was twenty. She was intense—magnetic in a way that pulled everyone in. But it turned dark fast. She tracked my movements, showed up at places I'd only mentioned once. If I didn't answer her calls within five minutes, she'd appear out of nowhere—screaming, throwing things, making a scene until people stared."
