A Caring Mother, a Loving Partner, and a Fair Game – Three Things I Never Had
Sandra Merula is a Mental Health & Life Coach, author of “ADHD and Autism: The ‘Together’ People,” working as a mentor with autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and co-occurring autism and ADHD (AuDHD), as well as trauma and narcissistic abuse recovery. She is known for her direct, unique approach with a cat-assisted philosophy.
Abuse can reshape our understanding of love, safety, identity, and even ourselves, making chaos feel familiar and peace feel foreign. This deeply personal journey explores the hidden patterns of trauma, coercion, addiction to familiar pain, and the slow, difficult process of reclaiming a life beyond abuse.
Part I: I couldn’t just leave, I was looking for a ‘why?’
Before an abuser can successfully cross your boundaries, someone else has to convince you that you do not deserve to have any. For those of us raised by a "Shadow Puppeteer," we grow up performing for a phantom audience. You spend your life feeling watched, criticized, and relentlessly measured against an impossible standard, scrubbing a museum-clean house to appease a ghost with a permanent cringe on her face.
When your identity is systematically dismantled before it can even bloom, it leaves a very specific kind of void. As Evan Rachel Wood, whose story I resonate with so profoundly, highlighted in her own survival story, “That piece of me that was stolen. I felt a piece of me disappear, a piece that has never returned.” But the tragedy of the original abuser is that they set the baseline for what feels like home. They wire your nervous system to equate anxiety with connection and danger with love.
When you are raised in a psychological warzone, silence feels like sensory deprivation, peace equals painful boredom, and being alone is like a punishment you once more did nothing to get. That is exactly how predators bypass the gates.
Part II: Filthy shades of red flags
Predators rarely announce themselves as a threat, they introduce themselves as a manufactured coincidence. “Do you know what they actually say A Miracle is? The Gods' Mistake.” After a lifetime of baseline chaos, I experienced genuine, unprompted peace. Yes, I was stupid enough to announce it. I still got it popping out each year on Facebook as a memory, “Happy With No Reason,” headline of a simple selfie, simple, that felt like a miracle. Two days later, he appeared.
He didn't overpower my threat-detection system, he disarmed it by playing the safe, sweet, slightly awkward confidant. What I didn't realize was that he was running a diagnostic on my vulnerabilities. He waited for the trauma bond to cement, waited until I was completely psychologically dependent on his presence, before he changed the rules of engagement.
I call him the “Aristocratic Abuser.” He never raised his voice. He never threw a punch in the living room. He didn’t have to. He found a socially acceptable, easily disguised arena–intimacy–to release his rage and his need for absolute domination. He weaponized my own history of trauma, recreating it under the guise of "upgraded exploration," and issued an ultimatum: Are you in, or are you out?
When you are deeply hooked to an abuser, 'out' feels like death. Because there were no accidental bruises to cover up, I lived in a paralyzing cognitive dissonance. “He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder.”
There will be a separate manifesto and a book dedicated to this story, my story, my side of it, as unfortunately it is the only real one, with witnesses and proof. So I will not get into it much this time, as this manifesto is about how we get into messes like this and what is fundamentally wrong from the very beginning.
When I finally left, I was–I wasn’t. There was no one there. No identity, no character, no color in my eyes–a robotic avatar that decided to run away into work and another addiction instead of dealing with that one. One day, I saw that Vilnius University was inviting women who had survived physical and psychological abuse for a clinical interview. I reached out. They initially rejected me. "You weren't physically beaten," they said. "It's not physical violence."
I asked them if they were out of their minds. I fought to make them understand that sexual coercion and hijacked trauma are even more than physical abuse. They finally agreed to sit down with me for a four-hour interview. On April 27, 2021, the Psychotraumatology Center handed me their official clinical conclusion: Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), severe depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. The scientific instruments (ITQ, PHQ-9, GAD-7) didn't care that I didn't have black eyes to photograph. The clinical data proved exactly what my body already knew: covert abuse shatters the nervous system way more violently than a fist, and the consequences–well, can you fix something so broken that not only are there scratches and bruises in places no one can reach, the parts are missing, and you can’t buy them anywhere as they're out of stock for a good while now, but even the best handyman said I need a miracle.
Part III: Something like Dolce L'Imperatore, Eau de Toilette
When you finally break the bond with profound abusers, the withdrawal is agonizing. You don't know how to exist in the quiet. You crave the pain, the familiar pinch of chaos even though you were praying for peace and safety. In my case, I thought I was already more than well. It’s been years since I left the aristocratic cell, which I now know isn't even enough time to start properly forgetting.
This summer, I was only months after I realized who my primary abuser was, the "Shadow Puppeteer." It felt like the wound had opened much wider than it ever had, so the addiction to pain was back. I started to feel cravings again. The worst part, I had no idea.
If my primary abuser was an exquisite, ruinous boutique perfume, and my second was an outdated, heavy classic you tolerate out of habit that reminds you of home, the third was something like Dolce Toilet Water: easy to find, plays by the regular book, so expect nothing special, a quick dopamine hit that fades away too fast. He was not a mastermind or a terrifying monster, he was a mix of a coward and a child, afraid of the dark, playing the villain to hide his own insecurities and weakness. Like a fishbone stuck in the throat, he wasn't lethal, just a constant, nagging “hot’n’cold.” I call him Puddin because Joker became like that at first, around Harley, after she turned into an unstoppable bad guy and a queen of the Joker himself.
Besides, and this is useful, we often look at the Harley Quinn dynamic and wonder why a brilliant, highly educated professional would knowingly run toward glaring red flags. The answer lies in the neurobiology of trauma. That was the first thing no one saw about Dr. Harleen Quinzel (Suicide Squad 2016).
A healthy nervous system would never allow someone to act or speak with such blatant toxicity, but I did. My nervous system allowed it because his brand of chaos reminded me of the cell. He was a substitute drug to take the edge off the withdrawal that was much stronger than I ever felt. I was a few months into No Contact with the primary abuser. But you cannot fix someone else's brokenness by using it to feed your own addiction. When I stopped needing the “dose,” the illusion of his power evaporated. But I do care for that wounded child, no one takes care of him, and that is closer to home.
P.S. While writing this part, I realized I must add something. There was one attempt to trust a Puddin after decoding my mother, but after leaving the Aristocratic circus and before the "Shadow Puppeteer," there were a few attempts too, and yes, all the endings were a copy-paste. That is how drawn I was to one more dose.
Part IV: “Look what you made me do!”
When your mind refuses to stop seeking validation from a void, your body has to intervene. For years, I tried to outwork my original abuser's erasure of my existence. I worked relentless hours, bought a house, traveled every weekend, wrote a book on neurodiversity, and built an entire psychological methodology, only to watch her use my unread book as a prop for her friends while simultaneously telling me my AuDHD was made up.
No matter what I did, it never was enough. Even when I managed to do well, she had one card to use on me to remind me I was far from perfect, using it each time she needed to shut me up or knew I would get upset over it, over and over again so she could get her pleasure if she mentioned my appearance.
The thing is, I was never happy with how I looked. I had her as a reminder of what could always be better. Right after I left the Aristocratic Funhouse, my body realized that my mind was going to starve it to death by all means, so it built literal physical armor, holding onto weight as a psychological shield. When I still wouldn't stop, my nervous system pulled the ultimate emergency brake, the chronic, underlying terror of never being enough accelerated into Type 1 Narcolepsy. I was passing out mid-bite and sleeping for seventeen hours straight in a hospital because my body was desperately trying to force me to do the one thing my abuser would guilt-trip and shame me for: rest.
If it wasn’t enough, I started to start healing, so I wanted to leave the house less and less, and after getting a Narcolepsy diagnosis, here I am. So far, I haven't left the house in almost a year. To the outside world, the aftermath of C-PTSD can look like Agoraphobia. But what looks like a prison is actually the body’s ultimate fortress. I didn't lock myself away, I shut the drawbridge. I provided my nervous system an airtight, biologically undeniable reason to keep the beasts outside the fences. But only these results of such self-sabotaging behaviour and actual fear for my own life made me realise something everybody saw for decades. I was told for years and years by, well, every person not fully affected by her poison, that our ‘relationship’ is something sick and impossible to understand. So now, proving its point of saving itself, my body started to relax. I’m losing weight, my health is getting better, learning to live with and control narcolepsy. But even so, without leaving the house, the ability to travel, working much less, I am again, in my own way, on my own level and speed, “Happy with no reason,” even though there is a reason that is very hard to explain.
“You wouldn't last a second in the asylum where they raised me”? So I might as well own it. Six years after the Aristocratic Predator, and nearly a year after deleting the “Shadow Puppeteer” from my life, the poison is finally draining out. Slowly, very resistantly, but I can feel the memories of happiness again.
There is the grief, of course. That one never leaves. There is a lot of frustration in the Narcolepsy: daytime exhaustion, mistakes at work, the missed appointments, the nighttime insomnia and hallucinations, robotic, pretty insane-looking behavior, and the attacks, the Cataplexy. But in the quiet of a house that no longer has to be a museum for a phantom audience, there is also absolute, undeniable liberation. I was so smashed all over the place at first, relieved, happy, sad, mad, angry, tired. I finally felt I could be tired, and then so many things hit at once I couldn’t separate them. I realized I not only was raised by the abuser, but she took away my mother. I would always say I never had a proper father. Now I understood it all: no man stays a man with someone like that, let alone being a father, grandfather, friend, or a human. Now, we talk, he visits, we even have an actual dialogue. I know it can be hard to understand, but we cherish these realizations deeply. Another thing that hit me was understanding that being a piece of shit forever, being reminded of how bad of an everything I am, all those emotions I was allowed and not allowed to feel, the persona I would become to please her–all of that was the reason for me being addicted to addictions. I would blame my AuDHD for that. Before the diagnosis, all the blame would go to me for being a fuck up and to my father for the genetics of addiction, even though she has them plenty too, but who would ever blame the queen. Even now, when most of the family members know the whole story, she still is that queen, holding the whole family by the balls of fear. But I don’t have to watch it anymore, and it is a sense of freedom impossible to describe. I can finally breathe with full lungs. I never knew air tasted so good!
“Then say they didn't do it to hurt me. But what if they did?”
I know I have a path to cross and so many more lessons to learn, but also knowledge to gain and pass along. The fact that I can help survivors or wanna-be-survivors now is extreme, it’s precious and priceless. To get a message from a client years later that they are doing great, healing, being in a loving and healthy relationship, a trauma that becomes a tool, an inspiration to find more tools, it puts sense into that suffering.
A note about monsters and labels
A diagnosis is not a prerequisite for recognising abuse. You do not need to know whether someone has NPD, antisocial personality disorder, childhood trauma, attachment issues, insecurity, abandonment wounds, or an impressive collection of psychological explanations to know that coercion is coercion, manipulation is manipulation, cruelty is cruelty, and abuse is abuse.
Yes, sometimes the person really is a monster. Not because they have been given the correct psychiatric label. Not because a DSM page says so. But because of what they repeatedly choose to do to another human being.
I am not interested in teaching people to diagnose strangers. I am interested in teaching them to recognise what happens when somebody repeatedly makes you smaller, quieter, frightened, confused, dependent, ashamed, or responsible for their behaviour. You can understand why somebody became what they became without volunteering to become their next victim.
That distinction matters. Because explanations can be useful. Excuses are not. I have rebuilt myself so many times from the ashes of other people's wars. I am going to do it again.
Let's see what version of the Phoenix we get out of this one! Love, S.
Read more from Sandra Merula
Sandra Merula, Mental Health Coach & Neurodiversity Mentor
Sandra Merula is a Mental Health & Life Coach, author of “ADHD and Autism. The ‘Together’ People,” working as a mentor at the intersection of autism, ADHD, trauma, and power dynamics. A neurodivergent thinker herself, she challenges rigid diagnostic narratives and explores identity beyond labels. Her work blends structure with intuition, psychology with depth, and clarity with unapologetic honesty. Through her writing and cat-assisted philosophy, she invites individuals to rebuild identity consciously, not obediently.
