I Googled What Counts as Domestic Violence

You typed the search into a private browser window. Or you typed it into a regular one and then deleted the history. Or you kept it open on your phone for days before you closed it without fully reading it, and then opened it again. The fact that you are searching, and the way you are searching, tells you something. People who are not in fog do not search this way.

The confusion you feel is not evidence that nothing happened. It is evidence that something very specific happened: you were in a relationship where your perception of reality was systematically undermined. Coercive relationships do not only control behavior. They control the interpretation of events. A person who is hit once knows she was hit. A person who is told, over months or years, that her reaction to a thing was the problem rather than the thing itself — that she is too sensitive, too dramatic, that she misunderstood, that she caused it — begins to lose access to her own clear knowing. The confusion is the outcome of the method. It was manufactured.

The googling is not the mark of someone who has not yet done the work. It is the beginning of the work. It is the part of you that knows something was wrong, reaching past the trained confusion to find a language for what your body has been carrying. That part of you is not confused. It is the part that remembered, even when the relationship worked very hard to make you forget. You do not search for definitions of things you are certain about. You search when something in you knows, and something else in you has been taught to doubt the knowing.

What counts as abuse is a broader category than most people are taught. It includes the pattern of small corrections that add up to a person who is afraid to have opinions. It includes the financial arrangement that makes leaving feel impossible. It includes the way the story of every conflict gets told so that you are always the one who started it, escalated it, or failed to recover from it properly. It includes the isolation that happened so gradually you did not notice until you looked up and your people were gone. It includes the feeling of walking on glass in a place that is supposed to be home.

The absence of physical violence does not mean the absence of harm. This is the piece that is hardest to hold when you have been taught, implicitly or explicitly, that real abuse looks a specific way. Coercive control without physical contact is abuse. The erosion of a person's sense of reality is abuse. The sustained project of making someone doubt their own perception is a form of harm, and it is a form that leaves deep marks precisely because it takes away the tools you would normally use to identify it as harm.

You are not confused because you are not smart. You are in a fog that was built for you. The searching is how you begin to find your way out. You do not need to have it perfectly categorized before you are allowed to take it seriously. You are allowed to treat your experience as real before you have located the exact term for it. The part of you that opened that search window was already doing something true.