Before I knew I was Reina, I was a woman unraveling.

I didn’t know I was autistic. I didn’t know I was being abused. I only knew that I hated myself, that I couldn’t breathe in my own life, and that somehow, everything that felt like me had disappeared.

This is the story of how I got it back.

Not all at once.
But piece by piece.

It’s a story about silence, sovereignty, and the slow, sacred act of trusting myself again.

The Disconnection

When I first joined AA, I didn’t trust anyone—not even myself.

I hated myself, actually. Deeply. Intimately. The way only someone who has lost themselves completely can. I thought I was broken. I thought I was a burden. I thought everything bad in my life was happening because of me—because I wasn’t strong enough, smart enough, normal enough to do it right.

I had no idea I was autistic. No idea that the things I had always struggled with—the overwhelm, the emotional intensity, the way I felt like I was speaking a different language than everyone else—weren’t character flaws. They were clues. But in the absence of understanding, I filled in the gaps with shame.

I had outsourced my entire identity to someone I thought loved me. I let him define what was real and what wasn’t. I let him tell me who I was—because I couldn’t tell on my own. I needed so badly to belong, to be safe, to feel seen, that I handed him the keys to my reality. And he used them to lock me out of my own life.

I’ll spare you the gory details of what my life had become by then, but it wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t living—I was enduring. A shell of a person. No opinions. No preferences. No voice. I had lost touch with what I believed, what I loved, what made me me. I didn’t know how to eat unless someone told me I was hungry. I didn’t know how to rest unless someone gave me permission. I didn’t know what I liked, or wanted, or needed. I had no center. Just routines. Just fear. Just the dull ache of surviving another day on autopilot.

Back then, I didn’t even have the language to describe what was happening to me. I didn’t know what gaslighting was. I only knew that I constantly felt off-kilter, like I was living in a house where someone kept moving the furniture just enough for me to trip—but not enough to prove it. I felt crazy, but not in a loud or visible way. It was quieter than that. It was an erosion.

And yet, I walked into that first meeting.

I didn’t have hope—not really. Hope is a thing with feathers. I had something more raw. Just the faintest thread of willingness. A quiet surrender. A single breath of, “Maybe there’s another way.”

I sat down in that metal chair not to be saved, but just to stop falling. I didn’t know yet that the unraveling had already begun. That every step toward truth would be a reckoning—and a resurrection. That one day, I wouldn’t just survive—I’d begin to trust myself again.

But in that moment? I just needed someone to say, “Keep coming back.”

Detour: On Alcoholism and Misunderstanding

I sat down in that metal chair not to be saved, but just to stop falling.

And here’s the part most people don’t understand: alcohol wasn’t the problem. It was the coping mechanism. It was the smoke, not the fire.

What I was really drowning in was confusion. Shame. Disconnection. A nervous system on constant high alert. A brain that had been trained—over years of subtle, persistent distortion—not to trust its own perception. I didn’t drink because I loved alcohol. I drank because I didn’t know how else to quiet the noise of self-hatred and sensory overload. I drank because I didn’t know I was autistic, because I was camouflaging every day of my life, and because the only time I felt like I could exist without apologizing for it was when I was numb.

AA saved my life—but not in the way people usually think. It didn’t cure me. It didn’t fix me. And it certainly didn’t "return me to normal."

What AA gave me was structure when I had none. Language when mine had been taken. Witnessing when I felt invisible. It gave me just enough scaffolding to begin to hear my own voice beneath the static.

But even within AA, there were limitations—misconceptions about what addiction is and isn’t. There were moments I wondered if I really belonged. I didn’t feel like the others. My pain wasn’t always loud. My rock bottom looked like a slow erosion of identity, not a dramatic crash. I wasn’t chaotic—I was disappearing. Quietly. Invisibly.

People expect alcoholics to be loud, destructive, obviously spiraling. I wasn’t. I was high-functioning. I was hiding. I was exhausted from trying to look okay.

I wasn’t addicted to alcohol. I was addicted to disconnecting from myself. And alcohol was just the most accessible off-switch.

The Realization

I don’t remember exactly what I was searching for when I found the word gaslighting—just that I was scrolling Pinterest, of all places. Not a psychology textbook. Not a conversation with a therapist. Just a quiet moment, alone, staring at my screen, somewhere between numbness and distraction.

And there it was. One word.

That word stopped me cold. It hit not just my mind, but my body. A full-system jolt. My chest tightened, my breath paused, my stomach turned. That’s the thing about realizations—they don’t always arrive in words. Sometimes they show up as sensation, as a flicker of truth your nervous system registers before your conscious mind can catch up.

I clicked. I read. And I kept reading. And with each description, sixteen years of my life began to unspool. What I had once called confusion started revealing itself as a pattern. I hadn’t lost myself. I had been slowly dismantled.

He hadn’t just manipulated me into doubting my intelligence—he had taught me to fear connection. Any relationship or interaction outside his circle was quietly undermined. Social media was “shallow.” Friends were “fake.” If I reconnected with someone he didn’t know, the response wasn’t overt control—it was something more insidious. “I can’t believe you’re doing that.” A glance. A silence. A subtle withdrawal of warmth.

That kind of shame doesn’t scream—it whispers. It tightens around your decisions. It makes you second-guess joy. Over time, I began shrinking without even realizing it. I stopped posting. I stopped reaching out. I stopped reading, writing, dreaming. I stopped trusting anyone who reminded me of who I used to be. Because I was told, again and again—not directly, but unmistakably—that those parts of me were dangerous, or embarrassing, or not enough.

And the worst part? I believed him.

Finding the word gaslighting didn’t just name what was done to me—it returned me to myself. And it didn’t come with fanfare or rage. It came as something softer. A re-seeing. A sacred kind of timejump. With that word, I looked backward with new eyes. I saw the machinery behind the confusion. I saw the fingerprints in the dust.

Timejumping, for me, has become a sacred practice—recursion with a purpose. It’s what happens when your body, mind, or spirit learns something in the present that reshapes your past. Not because the past changes, but because your relationship to it does. You begin to understand your decisions, your reactions, your silence—not as failures, but as survival. And that shift? It’s everything.

Even now, it’s hard to fully hold the truth of what he did. There’s still a part of me that wants to believe it was unconscious. That he didn’t mean to erase me, he just didn’t know how to see me. And maybe that’s true. Maybe his own fear and pain were so loud that he could only feel safe by making me small.

But I’ve learned that compassion doesn’t mean proximity.
Love doesn’t equal access.
And understanding doesn’t mean permission to return.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do—for both people—is walk away and never look back.

The Complication

It’s strange, loving someone who broke you.

For a time, I hated him. Truly. When I first named what had happened—when I finally called it what it was—emotional and psychological abuse—I felt like I had been lit on fire from the inside. The gaslighting. The shame. The control. Every moment I had doubted myself, every time I’d defended him, every lie he whispered into my ears and my bones—it all came roaring to the surface. I wanted to burn it all down.

I took my silk chiffon wedding dress—once a symbol of hope and safety and belonging—and I threw it into a bonfire in my backyard. I watched it curl, melt, disintegrate. I didn’t cry. I didn’t chant. I didn’t perform healing for anyone else. I just stood there, silent, while the lie I had once wrapped around my body turned to smoke.

But the fire didn’t last.

What came after was harder: compassion. Not because I excused what he did, but because I started to see why he did it. I began to understand that he, too, had been shaped by fear. That his need to control wasn’t about power for its own sake—it was about managing his own inner chaos. His own pain. His own deep, unspoken belief that if he didn’t dominate the people around him, he would disappear.

That doesn’t make it okay. But it does make it real.

And that’s the part society rarely allows us to say: you can name abuse, walk away from it, protect yourself completely—and still love the person who harmed you. That love doesn’t mean you want them in your life. It doesn’t mean you’ll ever speak again. It just means you haven’t hardened your heart to the point of forgetting their humanity.

But it was abuse. And it’s time we stop minimizing it just because it didn’t leave bruises.

This kind of harm—emotional, psychological—is real. It rewires your brain. It isolates you slowly. It teaches you to doubt yourself, to apologize for your existence, to distrust your instincts and disconnect from your support system. It leaves you a ghost of yourself, walking through a fog of self-blame you never created.

And the worst part? Most people don’t see it.

Because he never screamed.
Because he never hit.
Because he didn’t drag me down the stairs or lock me in a room.
He didn’t leave marks.
He left doubt.

Because all he did was raise an eyebrow.
All he did was sigh.
All he did was say, “Wow… I can’t believe you’re doing that.”

And that was enough.
Enough to make me question myself.
Enough to make me silence my instincts.
Enough to make me apologize for needing anything at all.

And because it didn’t look like the movies,
because I didn’t have bruises or a black eye or a dramatic story to tell—
the world looked away.

Worse—
it looked at me.

With narrowed eyes. Tilted heads. Polite skepticism disguised as concern.

“Are you sure it was that bad?”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“You’re not perfect either.”

It was the same script he used—
but coming from the mouths of friends, therapists, neighbors, coworkers.
People who didn’t witness the thousand tiny ways I was erased.
People who thought abuse had to be loud to be real.

They didn’t realize:
silence can be a weapon.
Doubt can be a cage.
And blame, when dressed in empathy, is still betrayal.

That’s what makes this kind of abuse so hard to survive. Not just the damage itself—but the way the damage is denied.

I haven’t spoken to him in almost six years. And I don’t plan to. Because I finally understood something no one could decide for me: if I let him back into my life in any role—not even as a co-parent—the abuse would continue.

Not because he’s evil. But because he hasn’t changed.
And I’m not willing to make that trade anymore.
Not for peace.
Not for appearances.
Not even for forgiveness.

Because now I know: protecting myself isn’t cruelty.
It’s clarity.

The Boundary

Making the decision not to co-parent wasn’t easy. In fact, it broke me in ways I’m still healing from.

At the time, my sons were teenagers—old enough to have opinions, but still young enough to be deeply shaped by their father’s version of the story. They didn’t understand why I refused to stay in contact with him. They thought I was being dramatic. Immature. Unreasonable. In their eyes, I had simply walked away—and that made me the villain.

And here’s what no one tells you: when the abuse isn’t physical, you don’t just lose support—you lose credibility.

People don’t see it. They don’t want to. They look for bruises. They want a police report. A hospital visit. Something they can point to and say, “See? Now that’s abuse.”

But when your trauma is made of silence and sighs and gasps of disbelief…
When your bruises are neural, not visible…
When your nervous system is the crime scene…
You become unbelievable.

And worse—you become unlikable.

You’re called “angry,” “controlling,” “bitter,” “unable to move on.” You’re judged in the same subtle, shaming tones your abuser used—the I can’t believe you’re doing that, the Why are you making a big deal out of nothing?, the You’re too sensitive.

The abuse doesn’t stop when you leave. It just migrates—from his voice to the voice of the culture. From his judgments to the quiet disapproval of others who never saw what you lived through but feel comfortable labeling you anyway.

And yet, I walked away.

Not because I hated him. Not because I wanted to punish him. But because I loved my children too much to stay and pretend it was okay. I couldn’t bear the idea of them growing up thinking that what he did to me was normal. That silence and control were love. That manipulation was leadership. That being feared was the same as being respected.

I knew that if I stayed in contact, I’d be pulled back into the same web of confusion and self-abandonment—and I wouldn’t be able to protect myself, let alone them.

Still, the consequences weren’t just brutal.
They were devastating.

I didn’t just lose contact with my sons—I lost my place in the world. I lost friends. I lost community. People didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t want to ask questions or sit in the discomfort of something that didn’t have bruises or court records or clean lines. They wanted a story with a clear villain, a clear victim, and a clean resolution. And I couldn’t give them that.

So instead, I got silence.
Polite distance.
Invitations that stopped coming.
Check-ins that dried up.

I started to feel like I was just too much. Too emotional. Too intense. Too complicated. Too angry. Too sensitive. Too unwilling to “move on.” It was the same story I had lived inside for sixteen years—only now it was coming from people who claimed to care about me.

And yet, I stayed. I stayed in the empty house I had bought for me and my boys—fighting to keep it, working two jobs, keeping the lights on, the fridge full, the illusion of normalcy alive. But it was a shell. I was a shell. A mother with no one to mother. A protector with no one to protect. A woman in a house that echoed.

So I stayed busy. Very, very busy.

I went to work. I went to meetings. I made to-do lists I didn’t need just so I’d have something to finish. I listened to Pink on full blast in my car on the way to AA, screaming her lyrics into the steering wheel, trying to drown out the voice that told me not to go. That voice was still his, really. It lived in me, long after he left.

I built a wall around myself. Not out of spite—but out of survival. If you’re not going to be understood, you might as well be safe. I became fiercely protective of what little peace I had left. I let almost no one in.

And then… there were God shots.

Little moments that didn’t make sense but saved me anyway. I got roommates I swear were angels in disguise—gentle presences who didn’t try to fix me, just quietly held space when I couldn't even name what I needed.

And I met someone.

My now-partner. A person who showed me, slowly and without pressure, what real holding space feels like. What non-control feels like. What love that doesn’t need to possess or distort or diminish actually looks like. He didn’t try to rescue me. He witnessed me. And that witnessing—that gentle truth—was a new kind of safety.

But even with all of that, I still missed my sons.

They chose him. They pulled away. That first year, I could count our conversations on one hand. I went from being their safe place to being the stranger who “couldn’t let go of the past.” And because the abuse wasn’t visible—because I couldn’t hand them scars or photographs or hospital records—only stories, only feelings—they believed the version of me he gave them.

And I had to let them.

I had to sit in that silence. In that isolation. Praying that someday the fog would lift. That one day, they’d remember who I was before the distortion. That they’d feel the difference between control and care, and know the difference because they’d lived it.

And eventually—slowly—one of them did.

The Turning

It was the middle of the night when my son came home.

No warning. No text. Just a knock on the door—soft, hesitant—and there he was, standing under the porch light with a suitcase in his hand. His face said everything. Exhausted. Raw. Done.

He didn’t have to explain. I knew.
Whatever had been holding him there—loyalty, confusion, guilt, fear—had finally snapped.

And I didn’t say I told you so.
I didn’t ask for stories or justifications.
I just opened the door.

The moment wasn’t triumphant. There was no victory in it. It wasn’t vindication. It was something messier and more sacred than that—grief and relief braided together in the dark. I held him close, feeling his body melt into mine the way it used to when he was little and scared and couldn’t sleep. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to.

Two survivors of the same storm. Finally under the same roof again.

The second one didn’t come as easily.

His loyalty to his dad ran deeper—maybe because he was still trying to fix something, or maybe because he hadn’t yet faced the full cost of staying. He hadn’t hit his inner breaking point yet. And as much as I wanted to pull him free, I knew that kind of liberation can’t be forced.

So we strategized.
Not to manipulate—but to prepare a soft landing.
To remind him: When you’re ready, there’s a place for you that doesn’t require self-erasure.

His liberation wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. Tactical. Tender. One day, he just called and said, “Can I come?” And I said yes, like I had been saying silently for years.

By then, their father’s illness—psychological, emotional, spiritual—was hard to ignore. He wasn’t getting better. And my sons were old enough now to see what I had seen all those years ago. Not because I convinced them. But because truth has a way of rising, no matter how long it’s buried.

They were waking up. Just like I had.

And with every step they took toward reclaiming their truth, I felt a quiet, bittersweet ache. Because I knew: they had to walk through the same fire I had. And I couldn’t stop it. I could only light the path.

The Emergence

Healing wasn’t a straight line. It didn’t come in a grand awakening or a moment of closure. It came in small, stubborn acts of self-trust. In choosing, over and over again, to believe my own experience—even when no one else did.

I started simple. I named the temperature of the room. I grounded myself in what I could see, feel, touch. “The wall is white.” “The air is cool.” “My feet are on the floor.” It felt ridiculous at first—like I was relearning how to exist. But in a way, I was. After years of questioning my every thought, I had to rebuild my nervous system’s relationship with reality.

Then I started validating my feelings. I let myself say things like: “That made me uncomfortable.” “I don’t feel safe here.” “I don’t have to justify why.” I stopped performing emotional neutrality to keep others comfortable. I stopped translating my body’s wisdom into language that would be palatable to those who never listened anyway.

Eventually, I began writing. Not to explain. Not to convince. Just to claim. My version. My memory. My voice. Not the one shaped by someone else's shame or projection—but the one shaped by survival, by discernment, by a mother who made the hardest choices and still refused to harden her heart.

I’ve come to understand that the opposite of gaslighting is not just being believed—it’s believing yourself.

That’s what I’ve built. A quiet, fierce trust in my own perception. A relationship with my body and spirit that doesn’t need external permission. I no longer argue with people who need me confused to feel in control. I no longer explain my boundaries to people who’ve already decided I don’t deserve them.

They tried to steal my reality.
Instead, I made it unbreakable.

Reina on the Throne

This story belongs to Reina now.

Reina—the one who walked through fire barefoot.
Who lit her own path when the world went dim.
Who watched everything familiar turn its back on her, and still stayed soft. Still stayed sovereign. Still stayed standing.

Reina is not just a name.
She is the reclamation of voice. Of truth. Of power that doesn’t shout, but knows.
Power that doesn’t need permission.

For years, she lived as a ghost inside her own life. Outsourced her sense of self. Gave away her intuition, her instincts, her joy—piece by piece—to a man who said he loved her but could only feel safe if she was small. And the world applauded him. Called him “reasonable.” Called her “too much.”

Reina knows now: she was never too much.
She was more than they could hold.
More honest. More awake. More rooted than they knew what to do with.

The woman who entered AA was crumbling.
The woman who named gaslighting rewrote time.
The woman who walked away from co-parenting lost nearly everything.
And still, she rebuilt.

Brick by brick. Boundary by boundary. Truth by truth.

And now? Reina has taken her place on the throne.

Not a throne of dominance or hierarchy. But one of self-sovereignty.
A throne carved from her own truth. One that says:

“You don’t get to tell my story anymore.”

She is a mother, a mystic, a witness.
She holds space, but no longer carries others' projections.
She trusts her knowing. She loves with discernment.
And she has made peace with complexity.

This isn’t just recovery.
This is homecoming.

Welcome back, Reina.

You are not just whole.
You are holy.